Is this just an interesting gimmick or does the approach accomplish some viable objectives? The June-July issue of The Teaching Professor newsletter highlights a study in which MBA students were given weighting choices and doing so increased their interest in the course and in taking subsequent courses, as compared with MBA students not given a choice. It would seem sensible to assume that “interest” in a course means more time devoted to study and that should result in more learning. However, in this particular study, the grades of students with choice about assignment weights were virtually identical to the grades of those students without the choice.

Giving students choices about assignment weights does confront them with who they are as learners. Ostensibly they would chose to put more weight on those assignments that build on their strengths or their preferences for how they like to learn. I routinely let students in my beginning communication course select which assignments they would complete (not how much those assignments counted). When I asked students to explain what their choices said about them as learners, the answers were not terribly encouraging. Mostly they reported picking the assignments that looked the easiest.

Researchers in the study found that on average students weighted assignments very close to the default amount; 25% for each of the three assignments, which is how much the assignments counted for students who were not given any weighting choice. I was surprised by how many students in my graduate course on college teaching did the same thing. That course had five assignments. Each assignment counted for 10% of their total grade. I gave them the other 50% and let them distribute it across the assignments. Regularly around half the students would simply add another 10% to each of the assignments, in essence making a minimalist choice.

I’m wondering if these outcomes don’t indicate that giving students a choice about assignment weights doesn’t automatically produce benefits. Most students continue to be very unaware of themselves as learners. They look at assignments and think about grades. They know that assignments require different things but they don’t translate that into assignments depending on or developing different learning skills. They just know they don’t “like” to participate or be in groups or write essays and so make choices that decrease the value of those assignments.

If students are given this weighting option, it seems essential that teachers explain the reason why. The practice gives students some control over how they learn. Students should see that as a plus. The practice enables students to use and further develop their strengths as learners or if they’re brave and value learning more than grades, it allows them to select experiences that will develop their learning skills that aren’t as strong. However they decide to weight the assignments, the decision contains hints about their identity as learners.

These seem to me good reasons to give students this option, provided students are prompted to explore, analyze and explain the reasons why they’ve decided on a particular weighting scheme. Do some of you let students set assignment weights? If so, please share why you do it, how it works, what you’ve learned and what advice you’d offer others interested in the option.

Reference: Dobrow, S. R., Smith, W. K., and Posner, M. A. (2011). Managing the grading paradox: Leveraging the power of choice in the classroom. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10 (2), 261-276.

In the exploration phase, students usually start with a model and the questions help them see patterns within the model. “Often, the questions lead students to test hypotheses or explain the patterns and relationships found in the model.” (p. 263) The invention phase involves introduction of a concept or relationship. In the application phase, students are challenged to extend and apply the concept to new situations. “The sequence of questions in POGIL materials are carefully devised to help students progress properly through the phases, to guide them toward appropriate conclusions, and to develop desired process skills, such as problem solving, deductive reasoning, communication and self-assessment.” (p. 236)

The POGIL model was developed for use in the sciences and has been used successfully in a variety of chemistry courses; in biology, anatomy and physiology, physics, math, computer science, and environmental science; and now in other fields such as education and marketing. The website (http://pogil.org) shows sample materials. For those interested in the model, the website contains much useful information, including a detailed instructor’s guide that can be downloaded for free.

In this model, the instructor functions as a facilitator who’s available to assist the groups. However, instructors do not answer questions that students should be able to figure out for themselves. Rather than answering student questions, instructors opt to ask the group questions that lead them to the answer. Students are assigned roles in this model. There is some variation in the roles, but there might be a manager who keeps the group on task, a scribe who is the group’s official record keeper, a spokesperson who may be called upon to share the group’s solution, and a librarian who may be the only person in the group permitted to have the textbook open.

The POGIL model has been studied empirically in a number of courses. Here’s a sample of the findings. In organic chemistry, less than 8 percent of more than 1,000 students were negative about the method. The same cohort had 30 percent registering negative attitudes about traditional lectures. In an anatomy and physiology course (see reference at the end of this article), grades improved at statistically significant levels. In a medicinal chemistry course taken by pharmacy students, exam scores for students in the POGIL section were higher, as was the final grade distribution (see reference at the end of this article).

This not a method that can be undertaken without significant planning and preparation. The anatomy and physiology professor writes, “Although POGIL requires a great deal of effort and a careful introduction to students who might be skeptical of a novel and unfamiliar classroom experience, its benefits cannot be easily disputed.”

References:
Eberlein, T., Kampmeier, J., Minderhout, V., Moog, R. S., Platt, T., Varma-Nelson, P., and White, H. B. (2008). Pedagogies of engagement in science: A comparison on PBL, POGIL, and PLTL. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, 36 (4), 262-273.

(Note: This excellent article contains information on problem-based learning, POGIL, and peer-led team learning (PLTL), which was the subject of an article in our March issue.)

Brown, P. J. P. (2010). Process-oriented guided-inquiry learning in an introductory anatomy and physiology course with a diverse student population. Advances in Physiology Education, 34, 150-155.

Brown, S. D. (2010). A process-oriented guided inquiry approach to teaching medicinal chemistry. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 74 (4), article 121.

Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, 25.4 (2011): 4.

My current quest is cables—a technique that involves putting a small group of stitches in front of or behind another group of stitches, with the result looking, not surprisingly, like a cable. It’s not a difficult technique, except when you tackle a project that involves a variety of different kinds of cables. I’m not very visual, and so often rather than looking at the pattern that is emerging as I knit, I’m reading the instructions. The written instructions tell you when to put the stitches in the back or front, but they don’t help you see what you should be doing. If you put the stitches behind when they should be in front, the error isn’t immediately obvious. In my case, it was five rows later on a vest project that is knit in one piece—that means lots of stitches on the needle and lots of time involved in correcting the mistake. I was angry with myself, but all that ripping and reknitting was what it took to finally get me looking at the cable and figuring out once and for all when the stitches needed to go in back or in front. Now I know.

I thought about all that this morning when I was refiling some article resources and ran across a very old piece by John Chiodo, titled “Professors Who Fail May Be Our Best Teachers.” Chiodo wrote that he was in the process of developing a “philosophy of failure to help ensure the improvement of my teaching.” (p. 79) His piece is really about teachers needing to take risks, as in the need to try new and different approaches even though there is a risk they might not work. Teachers avoid failure by not taking risks and always doing what they know works. Ironically, this approach usually fails over time, but it’s not the kind of failure that is as easily noticed by the teacher.

Failure in the classroom is frequently a very private affair. The norm in collegial conversation and in published pedagogical scholarship is to share success stories. We do need to learn about what does work, but often there is more learning potential when we try something and it doesn’t work. The problem, of course, is that learning from failure is rarely a pleasant experience. It doesn’t make us feel good about ourselves.

In addition to not talking about the failure, teachers frequently rely on Freud’s pain/pleasure principle and ignore the failure. Lest you think I write not knowing whereof I speak, I had a dismal failure in an upper-division business course on conflict resolution and negotiation. It was the first time I had taught the course, and the students balked at everything I asked them to do. We got to study conflict up close and personal. The problem was, I couldn’t get any of the theories and research that we were studying to successfully resolve the conflict we were experiencing. My failure was made worse by the fact that I won a prestigious teaching award that semester. I lived in fear that students in this class would find out and either laugh or protest. When the semester ended, I walked away from that course. I never taught it again, and I never faced the lessons that were there to be learned. Thinking about my failure to confront this failure is now a source of regret and embarrassment.

We also deal with failure a bit like our students do. We respond personally, with lots of emotion and grand generalizations. The failure becomes a measure of our inherent worth as human beings, not the case of one activity, class session, or course poorly executed. To learn from failure, you have to be able to put it in perspective. That may be difficult at the moment, but a bit of distance and a good colleague can put a context around what happened and enable us to start thinking about what we might learn from the experience.

Most of us regularly work with students who experience failure—on an exam, a paper, maybe even in the course. We sit across from them, and I hear us giving them a whole variety of strategies they can use to deal with and learn from the failure. It is good and compassionate advice. Maybe the place to begin dealing with our own instructional failures is by listening to how we discuss failure with our students.

As for my knitting, now I’m trying to knit an I-cord (something that looks sort of like a rope) to go around the brim of a hat I’ve just finished. I read and reread the instructions, but I still don’t understand how to do it. At this point, I’ve spent more time criticizing the way the instructions are written than I’ve spent trying to figure out how this technique works. It’s a failure in progress and, so far, one with scant learning.

Reference:
Chiodo, John. J. (1989). Professors who fail may be out best teachers. Teacher Education Quarterly, (Winter), 79-83.

Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, 25.4 (2011): 6.

Most students are in our lives for such a short period of time. I once figured it out. If the student lives to be 80. That’s 4,160 weeks and the student is in your class for 15 of those weeks. That’s .36 (less than four-tenths) of one percent of his time on earth. If the student’s attendance is perfect and you’re seeing her face to face, that’s 45 hours out of the 2,520 hours in those 15 weeks or 1.78% the total time.

Given those numbers it is hard to imagine a teacher having any influence on what a student knows, thinks or comes to believe. And if we take a look at our college transcripts, I’m guessing most of us will see the names of teachers who had little influence on us. Can you see their faces or remember one thing they said during those 15 weeks?

But there are other teachers who grab hold and never let go. The best writing teacher I ever had, a crazy science fiction writer, perches on my shoulder every time I write. “Show it–don’t tell it,” he yells, among other admonitions. He took one of my sentences apart in class, concluding, “We have floated through this cloud of words and not bumped into one bit of substance.” There was my advisor who wondered if I’d ever considered being a college teacher. The thought had never crossed my mind. Would it, if he hadn’t introduced the idea? There was a much admired professor on my dissertation committee who took me aside and said, “You are a really good writer, do you know that?” At the time, I didn’t know and didn’t believe him. It wasn’t something I had ever been told by an English teacher.

On the other side are students; those we remember and the many more we forget. How many do we encounter over a career? And how soon after the course ends have they faded from our conscious awareness? “You don’t know me, do you?” the checkout person at Costco said. I looked closely, “No I don’t.” “I’m Cathy Upton and I took your speech class in 1995.” “Really?” I looked again and then checked my gradebook when I got home. She was right, but I can’t conjure up one thing about her.

Given the many we teach, we do remember a few. Some we remember because they told us we made a difference in their lives. A gift card that accompanied a rose has been pinned on my bulletin board for almost 30 years. The unsigned message says, “You have helped me become a better person.” Others are memorable for what they didn’t know—the student who gave an excellent speech on “Old Timers Disease.” “Clever name,” I said to him afterwards. “Calling Alzheimer’s ‘Old Timers’ Disease.” He looked confused, “No, that’s what it’s called. Everybody in my family calls it that.” Then there was the first student who was smarter than me—why had it never crossed my mind I might have a student with a better brain than mine? Email enables some students to say thank you years later. Like this message I received: “Do you remember me? I was having lots of family problems when I was in your class. We were very poor and you gave me $60 just before Christmas. We call it our 7-Eleven Christmas because I went there the next day and bought things for my brothers and sisters.” And I spent that Christmas wondering if I’d been conned by a student with a good story.

The encounters are brief but full of possibility. We can’t make a difference in every student’s life, and we won’t remember most of them. But we should be prepared, ready to seize the moment, willing to put forth in faith, believing that we have enough time to make a difference and improve a life.

My students were creating concept maps, or probably more accurately mind maps. Concept maps, according to those who study them, are created according to certain rules. Mind maps are more free form. Both offer visual learners (and those of us who aren’t) a way of understanding structure, and seeing how things relate and fit together.

While editing a manuscript chapter I ran across a related idea attributed to Linda Nilson. To encourage student thinking about the overall structure of a course right from the start, why not include a concept map or mind map in the syllabus? When I looked at Linda’s work (in the two references listed below) she actually advocates what she calls a “graphic syllabus,” described as a “flowchart, graphic organizer, or diagram of the schedule and organization of course topics, sometimes with tests, assignments, and major activities included.” (2003, p. 31). Her book on the topic contains all sorts of amazing examples which aren’t designed to replace traditional syllabi text but to supplement it. If you are a visual learner and good with graphics, there’s a real opportunity to get creative here.

I can’t see myself designing something as imaginative as most of the examples in the book, but the idea of putting some sort of graphic representation of content in the syllabus is a good one. How the various topics that make up a course relate to one another is obvious to teachers—at least it should be—but I don’t think we devote much, if any, time explaining those content relationships to students. We finish up one topic or unit, summarize it, maybe there’s an exam at this point and then we start on the next content chunk. If there was one of these graphic representations in the syllabus, on the course website or in a PowerPoint, it would be so easy to haul it out at every major juncture in the course to give some context to where we’re going and how it relates to where we’ve been. It could be used in a very literal sense to help students see the “big picture” rather than experiencing the course as a collection of seemingly separate topics.

Students aren’t the only ones who would benefit from a graphic course organizer. I can see great value in faculty having to go through the process of creating one. Those of us who are “spatially impaired” (how my husband describes my condition) would struggle because we don’t see relationships visually. Still other some faculty may be challenged because they haven’t really thought through how the content in a course is related and would be surprised at what their “big picture” ends up looking like.

I know it’s the end of the semester and who wants to be thinking about next Fall’s syllabi, but preparing a course concept map could definitely be an interesting course planning activity. In fact, this exercise need not be about just one course. Say there are two courses in a sequence or that one course is a pre-requisite to another. Rather than just saying that the courses are related, those relationships could be shown. It’s a way of getting students to understand that courses make artificial boundaries between content areas that are inextricably linked. It might also be a way of increasing the number of connections faculty could build between what students learned in one course and what they are studying in the next one. The possibilities are quite intriguing.

References:
Nilson, L. B. Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors. 2nd ed. Originally published by Anker, now available from Jossey-Bass, 2003.

Nilson, L. B. The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map: Communicating Your Course. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

When ideas are exchanged orally, they don’t always retain the same form. We don’t repeat what we hear word for word. Some years ago a faculty member asked me if I’d ever heard of that dirty point idea used at the end of a lecture. I was confused. He tried to help, “it was proposed by that Italian guy.” I took a wild guess, “Do you mean Angelo and Cross’ muddiest point feedback strategy?” Maybe students are more motivated to ask questions about dirty points than muddy ones—was that the origin of this change?

Instructional ideas passed orally also change in transmission because people decide to make them their own once they’re implemented. That can be a good thing and the muddiest point strategy is a great example. It has been widely used by faculty in many different fields, and with all kinds of students. Numerous article have been written describing these different ways of soliciting and responding to feedback from students after they been introduced to new material, some parts of which they may not understand.

One of the big problems with the oral transmission mode for pedagogical knowledge is that it’s largely hit and miss. You may hear one or two good ideas but miss four or five that are better. The ideas you get depend on the colleagues you talk to and who they talk to and hear from. A few, and I do think it’s very few, good ideas pretty much make it around to everybody interested in teaching—the muddiest point strategy can be the example here, too, as well as Chickering and Gamson’s Severn Principles of Good Practice. I wish I understood how and why some ideas get around and others that are equally good, equally well substantiated by research and equally applicable to lots of different teaching situations aren’t as well known.

Another worry I have about this oral transmission of knowledge is that sharing good ideas this way doesn’t really establish the value or permanence of pedagogical knowledge. I cannot tell you how many times faculty have described for me a really innovative, unique, intellectually challenging activity and assignment—one that is a really good idea—and I will exclaim over its greatness, potential utility and end with, “you need to write that up! A lot of faculty could use that idea.” And almost invariably the response is a diminution of what’s been described. “Naw, it’s really just a simple idea. Most of it came from a colleague.” Or, “Other faculty are doing things like this. It’s not a new idea.”

Finally not all information passed along orally is equally good. In fact some of it is just plain bad. Anybody who’s taught has opinions about it and most willingly share what they think. I know, some published material isn’t all that high quality either, but at least there are some controls in place. It’s also true that wise teachers can separate the wheat from the chaff. Unfortunately, not all teachers are wise, especially those new to college teaching. But when pedagogical knowledge is shared orally, there are no quality controls.

Much of what we learn about teaching, we learn through conversations with colleagues. Our free and easy exchange of ideas and information has much to commend and just as much that should give us pause.

The author proposing this idea points out how rubrics have expedited the grading process for many faculty and also clarified expectations for students, but when the paper is returned, the student gets the rubric with a check next to quality level attained and maybe a few brief remarks squeezed into a small space provided for comments. What this assumes is that students will look at their paper and see why it merited that particular quality rating. That assumption is questionable, based on student levels of skill and their motivation to attend to feedback.

What the author has done is create a large collection of detailed comments that he imports into the grading rubric. He doesn’t show students all the levels—they see those when the rubric is distributed at the time the assignment is made. They see the level their assignment has been given and then a detailed set of comments that explain why that level was earned and how the student can improve for a higher level on the next assignment.

It may take a while to develop the collection of comments, but you can start using them before the collection is complete. The quality of these comments can be significantly higher than those we dash off after a full day of teaching, cleaning up the kitchen, and helping the kids with homework. They can be prepared and revised when we aren’t tired. Once the collection gets large enough, comments can be categorized, and any given comment may exist in several different versions. The author categorizes according the levels that appear on the rubric. So, if the assignment meets the top criteria, he has a collection of top-criteria comments he can make. The author recommends storing comments in an Excel spreadsheet.

What if students figure out they are getting “canned” feedback? Many are already inclined not to pay much attention to our careful comments. Wouldn’t the fact the comments aren’t written exclusively for them give them an excuse to ignore the feedback even more thoroughly? Technology makes it easy to personalize any comment. You can use the student’s name, insert an example pulled from their assignment, or think of the comment as a canned shell that you can slightly revise as you use it. All of a sudden, the feedback is personal. The author maintains his students never figured out they were getting “canned” comments.

This approach may not be for everyone, but with so much on our plates, we need to be open to time-saving possibilities. The author of the article referenced below was able to document some positive impacts on student work and attitudes with the system of automated comments he developed.

Reference: Czaplewski, A. J. (2009). Computer-assisted grading rubrics: Automating the process of providing comments and student feedback. Marketing Education Review, 19 (1), 29-36.

Reprinted from Expediting Feedback to Students. The Teaching Professor, 25.4 (2011): 4.

The type of confidence Jim outlined in the article is not to be confused with arrogance—that overbearing pride that finds expression in classrooms where how much the teacher knows is regularly displayed and compared with how little the students know. Those overbearing types are not likely to be reading a blog like this so that’s not what’s on tap today.

We all know that effective teachers teach with confidence, but what makes Jim’s article so great is that he identifies the sources of that confidence. It starts with a clear-eyed examination of why you teach. For the money? Not likely, and not a sustaining reason. For the glory? Not likely. How many rich and famous college teachers do you know? For the students? Now there’s a more promising possibility. Because the future depends on people knowing what you teach? Another possibility with potential. There will be different reasons but they must be ones that energize the intellectual, emotional and physical demands of teaching. Teachers of any age will enter the class with confidence and poise if they are there for important reasons. It’s good to regularly revisit yours.

You teach with confidence when you know the ingredients and components of effective instruction—when you know what good teachers do. Good teaching is not a mystery; it isn’t a gift. It’s compromised of acquirable skills—meaning you can learn what the skills are and work to develop them. Research starting in the 30s has identified the ingredients or components of effective instruction with remarkable consistency. Jim’s article offers a neat summary of three: speak actively (be expressive and enthusiastic), teach actively (engage students, let your teaching be about their learning), and care actively (be concerned about your students; their lives and learning).

You teach with confidence when you are prepared—when you go to a course or a specific class with explicit goals in mind. You know what you want to accomplish and you’ve planned how that will happen. That doesn’t mean that you’re inflexibly married to the plan for the day. There should be digressions and unplanned opportunities for learning, but after they happen they can be folded into your larger course plan. Being prepared isn’t about perfection. Good teachers hold themselves to high, but achievable standards. You teach with confidence when you know you’ve done your homework, when you’ve prepared as intensely as you hope your students have. But you teach realistically; teachers tend to prepare more intensely than students.

You teach with confidence when you listen to what students have to say about your teaching and their learning. You aren’t making assumptions about what they know, you aren’t pontificating about what they should know, you are dealing with what they do know and building onto that what they need to know. Listening to students is not more important than listening to yourself. Confidence grows when you understand what’s happening in class. You and students both have a legitimate perspective on that. They can recommend changes; you decide whether they should be made. They can observe things about your teaching you may not see; you decide whether changing would make it easier for them to learn.

Teaching without confidence isn’t much fun. Things you don’t expect happen and you can’t explain why. That erodes your confidence further. Jim’s first maxim offers an old but effective remedy. If you want to feel confident, act confident. Yes, it’s an act. Yes, you aren’t really confident, but when you look and act like you are, guess what? Students start treating you as if you were and once that happens, guess what? You start feeling confident, start believing that you have reasons to be. Before you decide that couldn’t possibly work, give it a try.

Reference: Eison, J (1990). Confidence in the classroom: Ten maxims for new teachers. College Teaching, 38 (1), 21-25.

The importance of effort in their grade calculations was also demonstrated by how they graded hypothetical scenarios that depicted various levels of effort and performance. These results are consistent with previous findings which also identified faculty views on the contribution of effort in the calculation of grades. In one study (cited in this 2012 research), students thought 38% of the grade ought to be based on effort, whereas faculty thought effort merited just over 17%.

Historically, grades have been thought of as measures of performance. If students cannot demonstrate their mastery via an exam, paper, project or performance, then they have not mastered the material or skill. “Unless you can explain it or do it, you don’t understand it,” I remember one professor telling us repeatedly.

The problem, of course, is that most of the time it’s very difficult for professors to objectively assess effort, and students can make the case for effort with great passion and no small amount of pleading. “I studied hours for this exam.” “I have never worked as hard on a paper.” But the “I-tried-so-hard” claim cannot be independently verified. And for many of us it’s hard to imagine trying that hard and not mastering the material or producing a quality product.

I’m rather mystified by faculty thinking that effort should account for 17% of the grade. I suppose if it’s the course grade, and effort is equated with things like regular attendance, completion of the homework, asking and answering questions that, by the end of the course, faculty might have a sense of who’s trying hard and can be rewarded for doing so. But it still doesn’t make much sense. How could you be in class, do the homework, regularly participate and not master the material? What about the students who aren’t in class, don’t do the homework but still perform well, are they docked for not showing effort?

Even if effort could objectively be measured (some of you may have figured ways), that still leaves the question of whether it’s a viable dimension of the grade? Should you get credit for trying if you don’t succeed or just barely succeed? I always fall back on the brain surgeon analogy when asked if effort counts. If you have a brain tumor, do you want a brain surgeon who tries hard or one who knows how to deal successfully with brain tumors?

The authors of this study also wondered whether students’ perceptions of professors’ grading fairness and competence were influenced by whether the professor counted effort. Here’s what they found. “Findings appear to suggest that students judge professors as unfair when the perceived effort invested in the completion of an assignment does not compensate for actual poor performance . . .” (p. 58) Students also perceived the professor as a less competent grader under these conditions.

If students are coming to these conclusions, regardless whether we’re counting effort or not, it certainly is a topic that merits discussing with students. They should know what we are doing and why. They need to be reminded that assessing effort is all but impossible given that professors generally aren’t with students when they expend effort and many of us are cynical. We have been conned by students before. If effort counts, we should seek ways to make the assessment of it as objective as possible. Maybe discussion of that topic begins with a definition of effort, or a description of what it takes to learn something. As authors of the 2011 study found, students estimate they spend just a bit over 14 hours a week studying. Faculty reported they thought students spent a little more than 19 hours studying per week.

References: Tippin, G. K., Lafreniere, K. D. and Page, S. (2012). Student perception of academic grading: Personality, academic orientation, and effort. Active Learning in Higher Education, 13 (1), 51-61.

Zinn, T. E., Magnotti, J. F., Marchuk, K., Schultz, B. S., Luther, A., and Varfolomeeva, V. (2011). Does effort still count? More on what makes the grade? Teaching of Psychology, 38 (1), 10-15. (An article highlighting these findings appears in the November, 2011 issue of The Teaching Professor.)

But would we know one when we see one? What does an autonomous learner do that differentiates them from learners who aren’t—those we typically call dependent learners? Here’s a description with enough detail to add meaning and depth to our understanding of the term. “. . .autonomous learners take responsibility for their own learning, are motivated to learn, gain enjoyment from their learning, are open-minded, manage their time well, plan effectively, meet deadlines and are low in procrastination when it comes to their work.” (p. 357) The only trouble I see with that description is that it doesn’t fit very many of our students.

Most students don’t have this love of and commitment to the kind of learning that happens in college classrooms. We could ask why and that would be an interesting discussion, but I rather get us thinking about how we might cultivate more autonomy in learning and the article that proposes this description contains a helpful resource. Authors Ann Macaskill and Elissa Taylor (both at a university in England) have created and tested a survey that can be used to measure how autonomous students are as learners. They developed it as a resource for educational researchers, but it’s another of those instruments that are of value to classroom teachers as well.

It’s a short survey, containing just 12 items. The article explains the various analyses undertaken to establish the validity and reliability of the measure—the results indicate the instrument is psychometrically sound. Students rate the items listed below on a 5-point Likert scale with “1″ being “very like me” and “5″ being “not at all like me.”

Please rate how each statement describes you.	1	2	3	4	5
I enjoy new learning experiences
I am open to new ways of doing familiar things
I enjoy a challenge
I enjoy finding information about new topics on my own
Even when tasks are difficult I try to stick with them
I tend to be motivated to work by assessment deadlines
I take responsibility for my learning experiences
My time management is good
I am good at meeting deadlines
I plan my time for study effectively
I frequently find excuses for not getting down to work
I am happy working on my own

Do our students know the difference between autonomous and dependent learners? Do they know which they tend to be? Taking this survey can help develop that awareness. If you use it with several different cohorts, you can establish some norms for your students. Maybe you could compare those norms with data collected from colleagues. As you can see from the items, most faculty are going to be way over on the autonomous learner side of the scale.

Do you have class time to devote to an activity like this? If not, could this be posted on the course website or otherwise available online? Should we devote class time to activities that develop students’ awareness of themselves as learners? My answer is absolutely. I am becoming more and more convinced that the most important thing students take from their college careers is not their diplomas or their content knowledge, but their learning skills. Yes, some of those skills do develop automatically as a consequence of being in college. But when they’re developed with direct instruction and supported by opportunities for practice, the quality of those skills increases significantly. I also believe that even short activities like this can contribute a level of awareness that makes them worth doing.

Reference: Macaskill, A. and Taylor, E. (2010). The development of a brief measure of learner autonomy in university students. Studies in Higher Education, 35 (3), 351-359.

The authors of the following list of strategies write that they attempted to “focus … on strategies and activities that typically do not require … a radical reframing of current standard practice, and are therefore more readily accessible to most science educators.” (p. 263) They discuss each strategy in much more detail than space here allows, and they include many references describing experiences with and alterations of these seven strategies.

Questions – These are questions that students discuss. Short periods of discussion occur after every 10 to 20 minutes of lecture, or they can be used to open and close a class session. Students may write ideas about answers, they may talk about answers with those sitting next to them, and they may explain answers to each other. As valuable as it for students to articulate content-related ideas and information, there is a caveat with this approach. “Good outcomes require good questions, and framing good questions is hard.” (p. 263) Closed questions (ones with one- or two-word right answers) have their place, but they are not very effective at promoting student interaction and reflection. Questions and discussion can be used in large classes and can contribute to student learning.

Technology for “on-the-spot feedback” – Clickers engage students with the content and provide instructors with valuable feedback. They are particularly well-suited for large courses, with the cognitive benefits of clickers a function of the quality of questions students are responding to. The goal is to develop those questions that move students in the direction of higher-order thinking.

Student presentations and projects – This article references another article in which 10 to 15 students researched and prepared reports on a “disease of the week.” They prepared materials for fellow students, and findings were also presented in class. Some instructors have used a poster-session model, where a different subset of students prepares and presents a poster to classmates each week. Presentations and projects can also be prepared by groups of students. They can be presented online and review of them assigned as homework.

Learning-cycle instruction models – Here’s a common example of a learning-cycle model: 1) engagement that draws students in with a video clip, provocative question, or other short activity; 2) exploration that uses other learning tasks to focus on the concepts and skills necessary to understand the central topic; 3) explanation that provides more examples and opportunities for students to demonstrate their understanding; 4) elaboration that seeks to deepen understanding with applications and implications; and 5) evaluation during which student understanding is assessed. In this model the instructor’s presence is most visible during the explanation step, with students doing much of the work in the other steps, although they do so using instructor-designed tasks and materials.

Peer-led team learning – This strategy uses peers to facilitate learning in small groups and is described in detail in another article in this issue.

Inquiry-based approaches – Here students use simple equipment to do laboratory-type exercises in class. “Despite this necessity for simplicity, students can exercise the intellectual power behind designing aspects of the experiment, predicting outcomes that would lend support to their hypotheses, and analyzing and interpreting their findings.” (p. 265)

Problem-based learning and case studies – These are the kinds of problems that promote learning on a need-to-know basis. They can be formatted in a variety of ways, with students working on the problems in class. At various intervals the instructor might lecture about relevant content or be available to answer questions submitted by the groups.

Biology workshop – This model combines class and lab experiences as students explore a theme that is integrated into the content, activities, and assignments of the course. “Students explore and discover fundamental concepts through asking and answering their own questions.” (p. 266)

Given the continuing presence—indeed increasing prevalence of large courses—those who teach them must explore ways of making them rich learning experiences for students. As this article demonstrates, there are a variety of alternatives, all of which have been tried by instructors who teach large courses.

Reference: Allen, D., and Tanner, K. (2005). Infusing active learning into the large-enrollment biology class: Seven strategies from the simple to the complex. Cell Biology Education, 4 (Winter), 262-268.

Excerpted from The Teaching Professor, 25.3 (2011): 7.

A survey of more than 3,600 students at a public university in the Midwest provides an answer to that question. After reviewing previously published work on incivility in the classroom, faculty researchers identified 23 uncivil classroom behaviors. The list is included in the article. Students were asked, “To what degree do you consider the following behaviors to be uncivil?” Respondents ranked each behavior by using a five-point Likert-type scale, with 1 being not uncivil and 5 being extremely uncivil.

Four of the 23 behaviors had means above 4.0. They were continuing to talk after being asked to stop (4.50); coming to class under the influence of alcohol or drugs (4.45); allowing a cell phone to ring (4.14); and conversing loudly with others (4.09). Nonverbally showing disrespect for others followed closely, with a mean of 3.94. The two behaviors ranked lowest were nose blowing (1.72) and yawning (1.88). Just above them was eating and drinking, with a 2.03 mean.

Some of the midrange behaviors, those not of great concern to students in terms of classroom civility, still do compromise the climate for learning in the classroom and therefore must be of concern to teachers. Examples include using a PalmPilot, iPod, or computer for nonclass activities, with a 3.25 mean; getting up during class; leaving and returning (2.99); doing homework for other classes (2.88); and reading nonclass material (2.70). Although students may not consider these behaviors seriously uncivil, they are behaviors indicative of a lack of engagement with the content of the class.

Students were asked to respond to a second question that inquired about the frequency with which the behavior was observed. As might be guessed, texting topped the list, with a 4.00 mean. It was followed by packing up books before class is over (3.76), yawning (3.47), and eating and drinking (3.39). Those behaviors observed least often included coming to class under the influence of alcohol or drugs (1.65), continuing to talk after being asked to stop (1.97), nonverbally showing disrespect for others (2.04), and making disparaging remarks (2.06).

A Pearson product moment correlation calculated between the mean ratings of the degree of incivility of student classroom behaviors and the means ratings of the frequency of these behaviors was significant at minus 0.46. “This negative correlation demonstrates that the most egregious classroom behaviors are perceived to be occurring less frequently.” (p. 17)

The faculty researchers make this observation in their discussion section. “Whatever approach an individual faculty member or administrator takes, the rationale for addressing the behavior can be squarely located not in the individual’s personal preferences or idiosyncrasies, or even in the perceptions of faculty generally, but in the perceptions of students. Faculty or administrators can have greater confidence that they are indeed addressing classroom behaviors that may interfere with learning.” (p. 17) Said more succinctly, when it comes to classroom incivility, students and faculty are pretty much on the same page.

Reference: Bjorklund, W. L. and Rehling, D. L. (2010). Student perceptions of classroom incivility. College Teaching, 58 (1), 15-18.

Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, 25.1 (2011): 4.

First off, there’s the amount of the awards. I don’t think $2500 (and that’s more than many awards) for any number of years of outstanding teaching is much of a reward, especially when compared with the level of reward that research productivity garners. Those rewards are salary increments, not given once, but as permanent additions to the salary. Is something always better than nothing? Or can something be so small that it ends up devaluing what it’s supposed to be rewarding? We live in a culture where value is measured in monetary terms. Some basketball stars get $10,000 every time they take a shot. Most teaching award stipends don’t even keep up with increases in the cost living.

When I make this point to my colleagues, they almost always respond that the award isn’t about the money. It’s the honor, it’s knowing that one’s efforts are appreciated by the institution and by one’s students. That is a valid point, but it raises another concern: the selection criteria used to decide who gets the awards. Nancy Chism, who has completed one of the few substantive analyses of teaching awards (she looked at 144 different award programs across a range of institutions), found that 52% specified no criteria beyond teaching excellence. What does this assume? That the characteristics of teaching excellence are so obvious there is no need to name them? That conclusion reinforces the perception that good teaching is ephemeral (Chism’s term)—that we can’t define it, and we only know it when we see it. This makes it pretty hard to assist anyone who aspires to excellence.

When good teaching isn’t defined and award criteria are not specified, this leaves these awards open to various kinds of manipulation. In the early part of my career, my institution distributed a booklet picturing winners of the major teaching awards with accompanying laudatory commentary about their teaching. Thumb through that booklet and you’d think the faculty at my institution were gender balanced and racially diverse. In fact, those were the years when tenure-track female instructors filled less than 15% of the positions, and racial and ethnic minorities were in less than 5% of the tenure lines. I’m not saying the recipients didn’t deserve the awards. I’m simply proposing that the absence of criteria makes it easy to let other factors influence whose teaching gets recognized.

Chism’s analysis also revealed that when characteristics were specified, they were all about teaching performance: communication skills, organization, high standards, clear goals, enthusiasm, strategies for student engagement and an emphasis on higher order thinking skills. This focus explains why so many winners of teaching awards have these larger-than-life, charismatic teaching styles. Their teaching is performance-driven. But I wonder whether there is ever recognition for those teachers who help students learn in quieter but perhaps more enduring ways.

To improve current teaching award practices, Chism recommends specifying the criteria and then collecting evidence that supports the criteria. If excellent teachers are “organized,” what evidence documents their organization? The course syllabus? Judgments offered by students in the class? Observations by colleagues? Similarly, if excellent teachers have “high standards,” what are these standards and what illustrates their application in the classroom? Chism found that often the evidence collected isn’t relevant to the specified criteria.

Consistently excellent teaching deserves reward and recognition. I just want the rewards and recognition to appropriately acknowledge the effort that goes into teaching that regularly results in learning for a range of students, and I don’t think what is typically done now is the best we can do. There’s room for more creativity and innovation.

If your institution uses a unique approach, or if you’ve heard of one or can imagine a teaching award that you would love to win, please share it below.

Reference: Chism, N. V. N. (2006). Teaching awards: What do they award? The Journal of Higher Education, 77 (4), 589-617.

1. Learning involves the active construction of meaning by the learner. This well-established principle involves the fact that students link new information with information that they already know. New and old information are assembled into mental models. If the old information is faulty, that compromises the learning of new information. “Learning can be thought about as a process of conceptual change in which faulty or incomplete models are repaired.” (p. 161) Fixing faulty mental models can be very difficult, as witnessed by research documenting that even after taking a course (physics is often used as an example), students still hold serious misconceptions.

2. Learning facts and learning to do something are two different processes. This explains why students can know a set of facts and still be unable to apply those facts to solve a problem. If students are to successfully use knowledge, they must have opportunities to practice and obtain feedback. A variety of other instructional advice follows from this principle, including the fact that students who are learning to solve problems need to know more than whether the answer is right or wrong. The sequence of problems from easy to hard is also important. Students should only move to harder problems as they improve. Moving students too fast or before they are ready compromises their efforts to learn.

3. Some things that are learned are specific to the domain or context (subject matter or course) in which they are learned, whereas other things are more readily transferred to other domains. What’s at issue here is knowledge transfer and whether students can take what they know about one subject or topic and transfer that knowledge to another subject or topic. As many college teachers have observed, students often have great trouble with this. There are still a number of research controversies in this area, but there is growing recognition that transfer involves skills that students need to be taught.

4. Individuals are likely to learn more when they learn with others than when they learn alone. Many faculty are very independent learners and so struggle a bit with accepting this principle. However, it is based on “impressive results” in different disciplines “that support the power of getting students to work together to learn.” (p. 162)

5. Meaningful learning is facilitated by articulating explanations, whether to one’s self, peers, or teachers. Students learn to speak the languages of disciplines when they practice speaking those languages. That’s part of what this principle involves, but it is also true that articulating an answer, an idea, or a level of understanding aids in learning. The speaking or writing makes clear to the learner what they do and don’t understand, and/or their understanding deepens as they frame a description that is meaningful to them.

Like any set of principles, these are general statements that, in this case, cover large, complex research areas. They are a useful means of getting a broad perspective. Decisions about instructional practices can certainly be based upon them. However, one should not read the principles and assume an in-depth understanding of the complicated phenomenon called learning.

Editor’s note: I just recently discovered this very impressive review of research on active learning. What we call active learning (and we aren’t always clear about the definition) involves a messy, disorganized research domain. As this author points out, there is not one definitive study that proves the efficacy of active learning, but there is instead a “multiplicity of sources of evidence” that makes an argument for active learning “compelling.” (p. 165). This is the second review I’ve discovered of the research on active learning. Both were prepared for discipline-based audiences but are eminently useful to all of us. Both are well worth reading and keeping in one’s library of essential pedagogical resources. I still refer people to the Prince review we highlighted several years back and will now add the Michael review to my recommendations.

References:
Michael, J. (2006). Where’s the evidence that active learning works? Advances in Physiology Education, 30, 159-167.

Prince, M. (2004). Does active learning work? A review of the research. Journal of Engineering Education, 93 (3), 223-231.

Reprinted from Learning: Five Key Principles. The Teaching Professor, 25.3 (2011): 2.

Consider a course that incorporates several different small group learning experiences. We have opted to use groups because we want students engaged, interacting and learning the content collectively. In addition, we want these group experiences to teach students something about working with others—how disagreements can be handled constructively, how work can be divided equitably, how the group can influence what individual members do. Thinking developmentally means that each of these group experiences should be different. Perhaps each one focuses on a different skill or each one requires more sophisticated use of developing skills. This means the order in which they’re experienced matters. Each experience should build on what happened in the previous one.

Or, what about a course where one of the objectives is developing critical thinking skills? We’ve discussed previously in this blog how our disciplines define critical thinking differently. Teachers who aspire to develop critical thinking abilities in their students must start with a clear understanding of what it is they want students to be able to do. Our hypothetical course, like most courses, contains a variety of assignments and activities. The question is what does each contribute to the development of critical thinking skills? Once again order is important, as is how these activities are related and build on each other. We can’t just assume they somehow all work together … well, we can, but the desired outcomes are less assured and more happenstance than if we approach skill development systematically.

Thinking developmentally also should happen across a collection of courses. For individual faculty, it’s probably easiest to start with two courses in a sequence. Whether they are taught by the same professor or two different ones, they offer the opportunity to purposefully develop knowledge and skill sets across a longer time frame. They also make it possible for students to see that courses are not islands but rather connected territories where what they learn in one relates to what they learn in the other. And where what they do in one course, they can then do with greater skill in the next.

This kind of purposeful planning can significantly enhance the development of a variety of important skills if the planning isn’t just focused on what content should be covered in what course. That’s important yes, but the question is much more complicated than who gets to teach what. It’s also the question of what content, coupled with what assignments and activities, best develops the necessary skills and knowledge base for students in a specific program.

Finally, thinking developmentally considers the maturation process, especially when the students are young adults. In the early 1990s Stommer and Erickson authored an excellent book called Teaching College Freshmen which was republished in 2006 as Teaching First-Year College Students. It’s a book I regularly recommend to those who teach these students. It provides an excellent overview of developmental issues relevant to beginning students. For years I’ve been saying that it ought to be the first book in a series. We need a book on teaching sophomores, one on juniors and finally one on seniors. Knowing something about where students are developmentally enables us to make better decisions about how we intervene and advance that process.

Developing assignments and activities that promote deep learning and significant skill development is a challenging intellectual task. But we don’t have to do everything all at once. We can start small; thinking developmentally about a set of related activities in the course, or purposefully planning how we will use two different assignments or activities to develop a particular skill. I’m guessing the results will motivate greater involvement with this important task.

Reference: Erickson, B. L., Peters, C. B. and Stommer, D. W. Teaching First-Year College Students. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006.

Smith decided to use five “tactical strategies” (p. 72) in his junior-level financial management class. First he gave students access to previous exams. He put two semesters’ worth of exams on reserve in the library. They were exam copies minus any answers. Part of this was a fairness issue. Greeks on his campus collected previous exams—it didn’t seem fair that non-Greek students had no access to those exams. More important, having access to the exams relieved a lot of anxiety students had over the format, style, and difficulty of the exam. The downside of this strategy is that it forces the instructor to write new questions every semester. That is easier in some content areas than in others.

Next, Smith conducted a review session prior to each exam. He scheduled the two-hour sessions the evening before the exam. Students could come and go at their leisure—between 80 and 90 percent of the students attended the session. The decision to schedule the session the night before the exam was based on the assumption that students would have already devoted time to study. Smith provided correct answers to the exam questions during the session. Most of the students had already tried to work the problems, and so they came with questions. “The review session provides a wonderful teaching opportunity in that students are very attentive. In other words, it is a prime learning opportunity.” (p. 74)
The sessions did not take place in the regular classroom, and Smith found that made for more open dialogue.

Students were allowed to use a cheat sheet during the exam. Specifically, it was a 5×7 hand-written card. Most students filled their cards with definitions, formulas, and instructions for solving particular kinds of problems. Being able to use a cheat sheet got the message across to students: they didn’t need to memorize the material. Smith says that the stress-relieving effects of the cheat sheets were “one of the most gratifying unforeseen consequences.” (p. 76) Coupled with having access to prior exams, this allowed students to come to the exam much more focused on the material. Interestingly, Smith observed many of the students rarely looked at their cheat sheets. When they did, it was to quickly check something. The process of preparing the cheat sheet seemed to have helped students organize and remember the material.

Smith’s exam questions require an answer with justification. The exams contained 25 to 30 multiple-choice questions. Students selected the correct answer, but then they had to provide a written justification for their choice, and it was that written justification that was evaluated, not what the students had circled. The practice virtually eliminated guessing because students who had the correct answer marked but provided an erroneous or irrelevant justification could get only partial or no credit for the answer. Likewise, if an incorrect response was supported with a reasonable justification, it could earn partial or full credit.

And finally and most innovatively, Smith individually graded each exam with the student present. This took place in a 15-minute appointment scheduled during the week after the exam. The instructor and the student sat down together at a table and proceeded through the exam. The discussion was easy when the answer and justification were correct. The discussion was not as easy if the answer was correct but not the justification. Smith reported that he spent time listening carefully as students re-explained their thought processes. He learned much about students’ thinking processes and could more easily identify the problematic assumptions they had made. Clearly, this was a time-consuming process. Because he didn’t spend any class time talking about the exam, Smith canceled one class session and used the time for individual appointments. He used this technique in classes with 25 students.

Smith thinks the impact of each individual strategy is enhanced when all of them are used. “Each strategy is a cog in a larger system, and there are many interdependencies among the various tactics.” (p. 81) When Smith uses all five strategies, “the first noticeable systematic effect is that students are willing to work harder.” (p. 82) The strategies also help build trust between the instructor and students. It’s a way of using exams that makes students more accountable and lets them experience how much learning an exam can promote.

Reference: Smith, T. “Exams as learning experiences: One nutty idea after another.” In R. J. Mezeske and B. A. Mezeske, eds., Beyond Tests and Quizzes: Creative Assessments in the College Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, 25.2 (2011): 5.

When I write posts, I’m thinking about us having a good conversation about teaching and learning. And what characterizes good exchanges on instructional topics? They start off being on a topic of interest. I think the relevance of the topic needs to be established by the title and in the first couple of lines. Anybody writing about teaching and learning fights against the absence of norms expecting faculty to grow and develop professionally by reading. We all know that colleagues who don’t read experience few professional consequences. True, their students suffer, but they don’t, although perhaps their professional experiences are not as rich and satisfying.

So, goal number one: Discuss topics of interest and relevance to college teachers. Good conversations among educated folks are well informed. It’s not about sharing opinions with no evidence behind them, misinformation, myths or urban legends. And here, I aspire to set an example because I am regularly dismayed by the caliber of many of the conversations on teaching and learning that I hear. The knowledge base is too often exclusively experience-based. I know that much of what we have learned about teaching and learning derives from first-hand experience. I also know that experience has made us wise and not so wise to varying degrees. What folks take from experience is most often based on previous experience. So, if you start with a wrong conclusion, one not justified by the experience, subsequent experience most often further confirms what was incorrect in the beginning. This explains how some teachers end up with very wrong ideas about students, learning and teaching. What we believe we have learned from experience must be verified with an infusion of ideas and information from outside. I want this blog to showcase how much is known about teaching and learning, and how much we can learn from and with each other.

Goal number two: Share the rich experimental and experiential knowledge base on which good instructional practice should rest. I think good conversations about teaching and learning are provocative. They constructively raise hair on the back of necks. They make those in the conversation want to respond—to agree, disagree, point out what’s been missed, ask a follow-up question or in some other way state what they think and why. And provocative we should be about teaching and learning because so many of the assumptions behind what we do have not been examined. We haven’t thought about them deeply, critically, analytically—all those intellectual things academics do so well, but don’t often do when the topics and issues are instructional. Good conversations make us think. They follow us around, make us see what we’re doing from a different perspective and motivate us to talk about things with others.

Goal three: Provide provocative content that makes teachers think and talk more. Last and most important of all, good conversations about teaching cause us to act. We don’t just listen, we don’t just respond, we do. The beauty of teaching is that it happens every day or several times a week—whatever the interval—teaching happens regularly and that gives us an opportunity to use what we’ve learned. Good conversations are motivational. Maybe we can do something better, maybe the students would understand more if we changed, maybe doing something different is just what we need to keep us charged.

Goal four: Motivate teachers to act on what they are learning. Technology has changed how we converse, but I don’t think it has altered the characteristics of a good conversation. Blogs offer another and perhaps easier way for us to learn from and with each other. But there is learning potential whenever teachers exchange ideas and information about teaching and learning. Research continues to confirm that most of our instructional ideas and information come to us from colleagues, which is why we need to keep talking and keep working to make these good conversations.

They do go on to point out that there are claims inherent in the notion of learning styles that are supported by the research. The learning style theorists do have this correct: “Learners are different from each other, these differences affect their performance, and teachers should take these differences into account.” (p. 33)

Riener and Willingham identify four areas of difference that exist between learners. First, learners vary in their ability to learn certain kinds of content. We may call this talent, ability, or intelligence, but we have all seen those students who master the material easily and others who struggle with it mightily. Second, and not entirely disconnected from the first, students have different interests. Some love music, others like to solve problems, and still others find their passion in sports. These interests motivate their involvement in and commitment to learning. Third, students bring to any learning task different kinds and levels of background knowledge, and what they bring influences their learning. If a student doesn’t bring basic math skills to a college calculus course, success in that course is highly unlikely. And finally, some students have specific learning disabilities (dyslexia, for example) that directly influence how they learn. Clearly, not all learners are the same.

However, proponents of learning styles go further. They believe that “learners have preferences about how to learn that are independent of both ability and content and have meaningful implications for their learning.” (p. 34) One learning style is not assumed to be better than others, but is rather preferred by the learner. “However, when these tendencies are put to the test under controlled conditions, they make no difference—learning is equivalent whether students learn in the preferred mode or not.” (p. 34) So, what learning style proponents have long advocated—matching the mode of instruction to the preferred learning style—is not supported by research. The review of research articles identifies the problems with much of the research that has been used to support the need for teachers to accommodate learning style differences.

Riener and Willingham point out that the idea of learning styles is widely known among postsecondary teachers and students. They cite research showing that 90 percent of the students agreed that “people have their own learning style.” This belief can constrain learners—if a student thinks she’s a visual learner and the instructor is not supporting the presentation of material visually, then the student may think she can’t learn it.

Assessing students’ learning styles and not soliciting feedback on their background knowledge is a waste of time, according to Riener and Willingham. They conclude with what they call the “punch line”: “Students differ in their abilities, interests, and background knowledge, but not in their learning styles. Students may have preferences about how to learn, but no evidence suggests that catering to those preferences will lead to better learning.”

If you’d like to learn more, both of the articles referenced below are worth consulting.

References: Paschler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., and Bjork, R. (2010). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9, 105-119.

Riener, C. and Willingham, D. (2010). The myth of learning styles. Change, (September/October), 32-35.

Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, 25.1 (2011): 5.

Uhl defines steering into the curve with examples. Here are a couple included in the article. It’s the first day of class. Uhl opens by sharing assessments of his course that appear on the “Rate My Professor” website. The assessments he selects are widely divergent—from best class ever to this class sucks. “I steer into the curve by acknowledging what is real in the room … on the first day of class, college students are sizing up their professors—they are shopping!” (p. 105)

Uhl’s goal on this first day is to create an atmosphere of candor and authenticity and at the same time make a distinction between observations and judgments. He builds that point by asking students to look at him and say what they see—a balding male wearing a sports coat and bowtie. And from that they tell him they suspect he’s a formal, conservative, eccentric, aging professor. He asks them to close their eyes, during which time he takes off the bowtie and sports coat and replaces them with a black leather jacket and a red bandana that he wraps around his head. And what do students see now? A laid-back, aging hippie … maybe one who smokes weed. And why are these outfits and the conclusions they prompt important? They influence decision making. Uhl then shares a different kind of assessment made by a former student. “This class is crap if you want it to be but it can be gold if you want it to be.” (p. 106)

And how would one “steer into the curve” on those days when a classroom activity goes bad? Uhl describes how once he attempted to use a guided meditation experience. He had students explore the anatomy and musculature of each other’s hands as he offered a guided visualization of the evolutionary history of the human hand. Students giggled and fidgeted but Uhl carried on even though he knew the activity was not achieving the goals he intended. He contrasts that to another classroom experience in which two students were presenting and doing poorly—his assessment confirmed by the bored, confused looks of students listening to the presentation. He decided to name the “elephant” in the room. He raised his hand and asked the presenters how they were feeling. They were confused, but after he inquired further, they admitted that doing the presentation felt like torture. It was not fun. He also got the class to acknowledge their boredom.

“It is fear that diminishes us and keeps us pretending. And, if you haven’t noticed, fear is everywhere on college campuses—in administrators, in teachers, in teaching pedagogies, in classroom layout, and in students.” (p. 108)

“For me steering into the curve is ultimately about letting go of my small-minded, fear-directed agendas and steering into the unknown, with all its risks and opportunities for transformative learning.” (p. 108)

Reference: Uhl, C. (2010). Steering into the curve: Getting real in the classroom. College Teaching, 58 (3), 105-108.

Reprinted from What’s Real in the Classroom? The Teaching Professor, 25.1 (2011): 2.

Just today I found a reference to a 2007 study (Crisp) where a cohort of undergraduate social work students got detailed feedback on a writing assignment. Six weeks later they did a second, very similar assignment and 66.7% of their grades were within four percentage points of the grade received on the first assignment. This and other analyses caused the researcher to conclude, “this study found only limited support for the idea that students respond to feedback by making changes which are consistent with the intent of the feedback received.” (p. 571)

It takes a lot of time and effort to provide students with good feedback. Most faculty I know tackle the task seriously and conscientiously. We should be getting a better return on our investment. You’d think as grade-oriented as students are, they would want to do better on subsequent assignments, and would use the teacher feedback to help them accomplish that goal.

Another article I was reading hinted at what might be part of the problem. The feedback we offer students tends to be focused on justifying the grade. It defends the decision to award the paper a B and not an A-. That feedback is appropriate but it doesn’t highlight what the student needs to do to improve. “If assessment feedback is to be effective in guiding learning, it should focus on growth rather than grading encouraging and advancing student learning,” write Rae and Cochrane (p. 217). I have to admit, I don’t think I ever gave much thought to the focus of my feedback. I know I identified problems, but did I indicate how they could be fixed or did I assume that would be obvious to the students? I’m thinking it might be useful to take a set of graded papers or essay answers and do an analysis of the comments. As always, colleagues can be especially helpful in getting us to see things that might not be all that apparent to us.

Feedforward is another interesting way to think about the feedback offered students. This more future-oriented feedback responds to what the student did, but in light of what needs to be done on the next assignment. Rather than isolated comments, it distills the feedback into three or four specific suggestions that target what the student should work on to improve the next assignment.

I continue to worry that we have so long left students out of the evaluation process that they are truly bereft of self-assessment skills. They don’t recognize what’s good about work they’ve completed and they don’t see the problems. I know, some of them don’t care, but those students aside, we need to think of ways to help students gain what Sadler calls “appraisal expertise.” Teachers have it; gained through years of practice. We have graded more pieces of student work than most of us can count.

Perhaps students would make better use of our feedback if they used that feedback to develop an action plan for the next assignment. “Based on the teacher’s feedback and my own assessment of this work, here’s the three things I plan to improve in the next assignment.” Maybe students don’t get the grade for the first assignment until the action plan has been submitted. And maybe that action plan then gets submitted along with the next assignment. I’m exploring options here. Please be welcome to share your insights and ideas for getting students to read our feedback, but more importantly, to act on it.

References: Crisp, B. R. (2007). Is it worth the effort? How feedback influences students’ subsequent submission of accessible work? Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 32 (5), 571-581.

Rae, A. M. and Cochrane, D. K. (2008). Listening to students: How to make written assessment feedback useful. Active Learning in Higher Education, 9 (3), 217-230.

Sadler, D. R. (2010). Beyond feedback: Developing student capability in complex appraisal. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 35 (5), 535-550.