January 10, 2012

First things first:  Start lectures and classes with the most important ideas

One of the most robust findings in the psychology of memory is the phenomenon known as the serial position effect, which describes the pattern of recalling the information presented at the beginning of a list and the last few items in a list best.  This phenomenon influences memory in many everyday situations.  You are most likely to recall the names of the first and last people introduced during a meeting.  Jurors are more likely to remember the first and last evidence presented during a trial.   

During a typical 50-minute lecture, students are more likely to remember and retain material, information, and concepts that are presented during the first 15 minutes of class (Prime Time 1) and during the last 10 minutes of class (Prime Time 2). 

Maximize student retention of the most important points of your lecture by discussing them during one or both of these Prime Times for learning.  Resist the temptation to squander these critical times with mundane housekeeping tasks (routine announcements, taking attendance).  Use Prime Time 1 to introduce important new course concepts and reinforce previous material.  Use Prime Time 2 to summarize and reinforce the major content discussed during the day’s lecture.

This tip is based in part on a suggestion from Barbara Millis, Teaching and Learning Center, University of Texas at San Antonio (www.utsa.edu/tlc/).

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November 29, 2011

Engaging students through interactive lectures

For over 500 years, lecture has been associated with teaching in higher education.  In the medieval university, texts were rare and expensive.  Instructors read texts aloud so that students could hear and take notes on them. During the renaissance, the practice of lecturing referred to public instructional discourse, with or without the reading of texts.  In nineteenth century America, orators like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Jennings Bryan grafted rhetorical skills honed at the pulpit with the academic tradition and raised lecture to an art form. The Chautauqua tradition of delivering polished, engaging, public lectures treated the lecture as a means for both public enlightenment and entertainment.  Roosevelt claimed that Chautauqua lectures were "the most American thing in America."

The recent focus on collaborative learning and student engagement, bolstered by research findings that document the value of specific strategies to improve the retention of complex information, raises questions about the value of lectures as the primary mode of instruction.  Is lecture truly an ineffective method for learning and teaching? The most correct answer is, "It depends." There are times when lecture may be the most appropriate instructional strategy to use. 

When used properly, lecture can be an effective and enjoyable pedagogy. When used incorrectly or over-used, it can become a stumbling block to learning.  The following guidelines will improve the value of lecture for promoting effective student learning:

• Insure that the instructional purpose and material is well suited to the lecture format. Use lecture to create initial motivation in students to study the material, disperse largely informational material, or frame a discussion in a particular way.
• Design the class period to interleave 10-15 minutes mini-lectures with activities that help students focus, process, question and re-engage. This lecture strategy is called an interactive lecture.  The instructor interweaves lecture with activities using tools such as concept tests, clicker questions, short quizzes, pair-share activities for peer mentoring, and other Classroom Assessment Techniques (Angelo & Cross, 1993).
• An instructor who wants to use lectures effectively must possess polished presentation and rhetorical skills.  Prepare the lecture ahead of time.  Identify key points and the means for making effective transitions between ideas.  Collect examples and stories to illustrate key points.  Develop a presentation style that is pleasant and clear.  Avoid distracting mannerisms.  Integrate appropriate humor, graphics or other presentation aids into the lecture to capture and maintain attention.
• Avoid making the use of lecture the default instructional strategy.  Select lecture as an instructional strategy because it fulfills specific instructional goals.  Select other strategies to meet other instructional goals.

This tip is based on a contribution from Devan Barker, Instructional Development, Brigham Young University Idaho (http://www.byui.edu/).

Angelo, T., & Cross, P.  (1993).  Classroom assessment techniques:  A handbook for college teachers (2nd ed.).  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass.

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November 8, 2011

Using game show formats to engage students with course content

Are you looking for a novel way to review material, encourage participation, or use an activity to refocus attention during a lecture? Consider incorporating games in your class to involve your students in the learning process. 

Benefits of using games

• Involve students in active learning
• Create lively sessions for material that requires memorization (foreign language vocabulary, technical terms in a discipline)
• Encourage students to use thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation
• Increase student motivation
• Create a common experience that promotes bonding and a sense of community among students
• Create intrinsic rewards for learning
• Foster a more positive attitude toward the classroom experience – students become more attentive, attend class more regularly, participate more in classroom discussion
• Improve retention of content, decision-making skills, and comprehension of general principles
• Encourage cooperation among students

Tips for successful use of games for learning

• Identify the learning goals that the game will promote
• Create games that are challenging, but not frustrating
• Provide opportunities for students to experience success and positive reinforcement
• Include a combination of knowledge and luck to keep the game lively
• Building a game based on cooperative teams can be beneficial for classroom climate
• Debrief students afterwards to connect the game activity with the intended learning outcomes
• Incorporating student-generated questions (these can be an added motivating assignment)

Want to try using a popular game show format for a class session?  Several web sites offer free templates that enable you to transform a PowerPoint presentation into a game show.  Download the template and add your course questions and material.

Downloadable Game Templates

PowerPoint Games (http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/ppt-games/)
Includes Who Wants to be a Millionaire (PowerPoint Template by Mark E. Damon), Jeopardy, & Password

Point4Teachers.com (http://www.point4teachers.com/)
Template for Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?

Family Feud Demo Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8RIeR8UKj4
Template: http://www.gameshowvideos.com/files/feud.pptx

This tip is based on a contribution from Allison Boye, Suzanne Tapp, and Micah Meixner Logan, Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center, Texas Tech University (http://www.tltc.ttu.edu).  

Resources

Millis, B.J. and Cottell, P.G. (1998).  Cooperative learning for higher education faculty.  Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press.

Jones, K. (1997).  Games and simulations made easy:  Practical tips to improve learning through gaming.  London: Kogan Page Ltd.

Rosato, J.L. (1995).  All I ever needed to know about teaching law school I learned teaching kindergarten: Introducing gaming techniques into the law school classroom.  Journal of Legal Education, 45, 568 – 581.

Sarason, Y. and Banbury, C. (2004).  Active learning facilitated by using a game-show format, or who doesn’t want to be a millionaire?  Journal of Management Education, 28, 509 – 518.

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October 18, 2011

Create graphic organizers to improve student learning in large lectures

A graphic organizer or set of essential questions provides an overall organization for material that instructors discuss during a lecture.  Cognitive research has demonstrated that individuals retain more information when they have a structure that organizes the new information.  Mnemonic devices often depend on existing learned structures to organize new learning and function as reliable retrieval cues for new information.  When organizing structures are also related to the relations between newly-learned concepts, these structures promote understanding and articulation of these meaningful relations as well as retrieval of content (Bransford & Johnson, 1973; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999).

Organize your lecture on a given day around a big-picture question or relation between concepts that can be illustrated through a graphic organizer.  The organizer can take the form of a concept map, a matrix or grid, a flow chart, or a list of 3 or 4 key questions.  If instructors provide the basic structure as a handout (distributed at the start of class or posted in D2L for printing before class), students can use the organizer while taking class notes.  Alternatively, students might rework notes taken during class to incorporate key points into the appropriate areas of the graphic organizer.  Both exercises will help students identify the key concepts and details discussed during class and integrate these individual details into a coherent whole.

Tip based on suggestions included in Sibley, J., and Canuto, L. (2010).  Guide to teaching for new faculty at UBC.  Available at http://issuu.com/ubc-aspc-cis/docs/faculty_guide-2010

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.).  (1999).  How people learn:  Brain, mind, experience, and school.   Washington, DC:  National Academy Press.

Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K. (1973).  Considerations of some problems of comprehension.  In W. G. Chase (Ed.), Visual information processing.  Orlando, FL:  Academic Press.

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September 20, 2011

Not just fun and games!  Structure class demonstrations to reinforce learning goals

Classroom demonstrations that illustrate an important process, phenomenon, or application of a concept can generate interest and engage students with course material.  Although students enjoy classroom demonstrations, they sometimes remember the activity but do not remember the course learning goals that instructors want to promote when they design the demonstration.  An effective demonstration connects student memories of the classroom experience with the concepts the activity was designed to demonstrate.

Strategies that transform an entertaining demonstration into an effective learning experience

• Identify the learning outcome(s) you intend to promote with the classroom demonstration.  For example, a demonstration that illustrates a counterintuitive or surprising outcome can be used to identify assumptions that lead students to make erroneous predictions.  Students experience surprise at unexpected results, which motivates curiosity and encourages students to give weight and credibility to disciplinary concepts and models that explain these findings. 
• Practice the demonstration to ensure it works properly during class.
• Prepare students for the demonstration.  Observations are biased by preconceptions (Bransford & Johnson, 1972).  Two observers of the same event will remember it differently if they experience the event with different frameworks and expectations (Holst & Pezdek, 1992).  Don’t assume students will notice the details you notice or interpret the demonstration in the same way you do.  Begin with an explanation that gives students the framework they need to focus their attention on the most relevant aspects of the demonstration.  Remind students about the relation between observations during the demonstration and the course material.
• If possible, make students predict the outcome before you conduct the demonstration. 
• After the demonstration is finished, ask students to discuss the outcome and their observations with each other and the class as a whole. 
• Reinforce the purpose of the demonstration with a debriefing discussion that identifies and explains the principles demonstrated.  Explicitly connect the observations from the demonstration to course content and the learning goals for the activity.  Use the curiosity elicited by a surprising outcome to focus attention on disciplinary explanations that are based on valid disciplinary assumptions and models rather than the naïve models students used when they made their initial prediction.
• Ask students to take a minute or two to write a reflection on the demonstration.  What did they learn from this experience?  What was the purpose of including this activity in the class?  Reflective writing will reinforce student learning.  These essays will also reveal areas that continue to confuse students, which instructors can use to refine the demonstration for use in future classes. 

Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K.  (1972).  Contextual prerequisites for understanding:  Some investigations of comprehension and recall.  Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 717-726.

Holst, V. F., & Pezdek, K.  (1992).  Scripts for typical crimes and their effects on memory for eyewitness testimony.  Applied Cognitive Psychology, 6, 573-587.

Pyper, B. A. (2008).  Best practices in physics demonstrations or “Oh, I thought this was just for entertainment.”  Power Point slides for a presentation at the AAPT UT/ID section meeting, Boise, ID.
Retrieved August 2, 2011:  http://emp.byui.edu/PyperB/Best%20Practices%20in%20Physics%20Demonstrations.pdf

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September 6, 2011

Use Power Point to prompt engaging learning activities during class

Dilbert depicts Power Point presentations as a direct route to slumber and employee revolt.  Power Point presentations need not be deadly.  Instructors can create slides that prompt class activities that engage students, motivate meaningful class discussion, and promote deep learning (Berk, 2011).

Instructors commonly organize and plan the presentation of content while they create a set of Power Point slides.  Consider creating slides to plan and prompt engaging learning activities at key points during a class presentation.

Instructors who use personal response systems (clickers) can add a slide that poses a question to evaluate student understanding of a critical concept or to ask students to apply a model or principle to a specific application.  Allow students a moment to think individually or discuss the question in small groups before they record their response to the question with their clickers. 

An instructor who does not use clickers can present a slide that poses a question as a prompt for small group discussion (e.g., as a pair-share activity) or a brief in-class written response to the question (e.g., a minute paper).

Share responses to the prompt with the entire class.  If using clicker questions, display a chart summarizing the pattern of responses from the group.  Otherwise, ask for a show of hands for typical responses or initiate a class discussion in which several groups report the consensus response from their discussion.

Wrap up the discussion and refocus attention on the content that triggered the activity. 

• If common misconceptions about the critical concept emerge in the pattern of responses, spend some time defusing these misconceptions. 
• If the prompt asked for application to a real world problem, discuss and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the applications proposed.
• If the prompt asked for opinions on a controversial topic, ask the class to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the different positions that emerge.   

Include no more than one or two of these engagement slides during a class session to engage student interest and focus attention on critical points for the day’s lesson.

Berk, R. A. (2011).  “Powerpoint® engagement” techniques to foster deep learning.  Journal of Faculty Development, 25, 45-48.

Bruff, D.  (2009).  Teaching with classroom response systems:  Creating active learning environments.  San Francisco, CA:  Jossey-Bass.   

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March 22, 2011

Improve classroom dynamics through inclusion: Use the Classmate photo roster to connect names with faces and call on students by name

Learning student names at the start of a new semester can be challenging.  Many students decide to attend a regional comprehensive university like the University of West Florida rather than a large university because they expect that the smaller class sizes and lower student-faculty ratios at UWF will increase their ability to get to know and interact with faculty.  They may be disappointed if they attend class regularly, participate occasionally, and find that their instructor still does not know their name.  When faculty can recognize students and recall their names when calling on them during class or during out-of-class conversations, students feel a stronger sense of community and inclusion in the class.  The classroom dynamic may also improve, fostering more frequent participation and student engagement.

The class rosters available through Classmate now include student photos.  These photos can work as handy tools to aid instructors in learning and recalling student names.   Learning the names of many students in a large enrollment class can be a daunting task.  Make this task more manageable by creating small groups of students and learning the names of students in one group at a time.  Usually one page from the Classmate roster prints approximately five or six student faces and names, which should be a manageable number for one day.  Limit your study to one page of student photos on any given day. 

Open one page of the roster at the lectern during class (or bring a printed copy of the page) and scan the audience as class discussion gets underway.  Search for the faces of students in the group on your page and call on these students by name during class.  At the end of the class, return to the photos in the roster and rehearse the faces and names of these students once more to reinforce your memory.  Prior to the next class session, review these faces and names.  Once you are familiar with the names and faces of students in this group, select a new page in the roster and focus on this new set of students during class.  Gradually, you will be able to match the names and faces of a large number of your students.

Thanks to Michelle Hale Williams, Government & Political Science, University of West Florida, for this suggestion.

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February 10, 2009

Keep ‘em on their toes: Engage students in lecture classes by creating variety

Predictability is one of the most deadly characteristics of a presentation. Variation produces powerful effects on audience attention and engagement (Middendorf & Kalish, 1996). One of the evils of PowerPoint presentations is that they tend to chain us to the podium where the computer is housed. Sometimes we get hidden behind the computer screen (not an engaging location).

 Movement draws attention. Break up the predictable routine of lecture by varying your location. Change your position from day to day and move around the room during a particular class. Instructors may be unaware of the reinforcing effects of attentive students on their classroom behavior. We are drawn to locations in the classroom where our most attentive students sit. Although their attention reinforces us and increases our attentiveness to them, we need to ensure that we include and engage the entire class. Make an effort to make eye contact with the student lurking in the back row as well as the student who is eagerly attentive.

Middendorf, J. & Kalish, A. (1996). The “change-up” in lectures. The National Teaching& Learning Forum, 5 (2), 1-5.

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April 7, 2009

Micro-lectures: Just-in-time teaching for critical topics and skills

Attaining competence with some concepts and skills requires repetition and practice. Instructors can use class time more efficiently if they create short electronic modules that discuss a particular concept or demonstrate a skill that students struggle to learn. Create an out-of-class assignment in which students view the micro-lecture and then complete an activity, small project, or written assignment that entails applying the concept or using the skill. Micro-lectures can be as short as 60 seconds to 5 minutes or as long as 15-20 minutes.

• Micro-lectures should focus on a specific concept or skill. This technique works best with content that can be explained or discussed in small chunks. An advantage is that narrowly-focused micro-lectures allow students to access instruction on a specific concept or skill they need to practice. They do not have to wade through a longer presentation to review one specific topic. Students can return to a micro-lecture any number of times to get the practice they need.

Use micro-lectures to:

• Provide an overview for a particular concept or small group of related concepts.
• Demonstrate a single problem-solving procedure (e.g., solving a particular type of problem in physics, chemistry, statistics, algebra, etc).
• Provide step-by-step instructions and demonstrate completion of a task or laboratory procedure.
• Create the micro-lecture as a narrated PowerPoint, a short video, or an Elluminate session. The Academic Technology Center can provide guidance and technical support if you need help creating a micro-lecture using this technology (http://uwf.edu/atc/).
• Structure the micro-lecture carefully. Prepare a 15-30 second introduction and conclusion for each micro-lecture to create an appropriate context for the content presented or the skill or procedure demonstrated.
• Include an activity, example problem, or written assignment as a follow-up assignment. Require students to apply the learning from the micro-lecture. Students overestimate their understanding and need concrete feedback to determine whether they have adequately learned the material. If they need to see the demonstration again, micro-lectures are short enough to allow students to view them as often as needed.
• Upload the micro-lectures into your course content in D2L. Students are more likely to use micro-lectures and complete the application activity if the work is a course requirement that contributes to the final grade. You might be able to construct a quiz for content material in D2L that provides immediate feedback to students about the quality of their learning without increasing your grading burden during the term.

Shieh, D. (2009). These lectures are gone in 60 seconds. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 55 (26), Page A13.

Want to create a micro-lecture and need help?
Contact the Academic Technology Center: http://uwf.edu/atc/

 

 

Updated 01/10/12 cdw