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Motivating Students
November 15, 2011
Motivate students to learn by offering “extra credit” opportunities that reinforce course learning outcomes
Near the end of a term, more students will ask their instructors if they will give them opportunities to earn extra credit to improve a course grade. Instructors have many good reasons to object to these requests. Completing an extra assignment requires time that a struggling student ought to allocate to study and completion of regular course assignments. Students often expect that the extra work will earn all the credit they need to make the target grade. If a student spends time on an extra assignment and still does badly in the course, the unmet expectations create a conflict between the student and the instructor. If the extra credit activity is unrelated to the primary learning outcomes of the course, the inflated grades will fail to accurately describe student achievement on the student learning outcomes for the course.
The following assignments and activities can be used to provide students with opportunities to improve their course grade and motivate students to learn the intended course skills and content.
- For large classes using multiple-choice exams, include an optional short essay question as a “bonus question.” Students who have difficulty with multiple-choice questions have an opportunity to demonstrate their learning in an essay (and improve poor performance on the main exam). High performing students might earn grades of more than 100%, but this will not impact the distribution of grades in the course.
- Create an extra-credit assignment such as completing a practice quiz in eLearning or writing a short paper that applies a concept from current course readings and lectures to a practical problem. The assignment must be submitted before the exam date. In this case, when students complete the extra credit assignment, they also engage in structured study of course content for the exam.
- Students write and submit multiple-choice questions for course content that the instructor might actually include on the course exam. The student who writes a question included on the exam will get an added benefit when taking the exam. Award extra credit only for exam-worthy questions to avoid problems created when students submit trivial fact-based questions that do little to improve their understanding of course material.
- Suggest course-related web or print resources that explain or illustrate course concepts effectively and accurately. Require students to submit an evaluation of the resource and describe why the resource is effective for learning. This assignment should have a due date earlier than the scheduled exam date on this course content.
- Allow students to revise and resubmit an assignment to earn up to half of the points missed in the original submission. Manage the extra grading produced by this option and avoid an end-of-the semester rush for extra credit by requiring resubmission no later than one week after the work is returned to the class.
Thanks to Ed Gehringer, North Carolina State University, Stacy Jacob, Texas Tech University, Stuart McKelvie, Bishop’s University, and June Pilcher, Clemson University for suggestions included in this teaching tip.
September 13, 2011
Short video guides for students on effective study strategies
College students frequently waste time using ineffective study strategies because they are unaware of which strategies are effective or don’t retain the suggestions for effective study provided by their instructors. Stephen Chew, a cognitive psychologist at Samford University, created a series of 5 short YouTube videos that describe effective study strategies and explain why these strategies produce learning that lasts.
In each video, Chew provides context and defines terms so that an instructor can direct students to an individual video for good advice on studying. However, because each video builds on concepts explained in detail in earlier videos, the greatest benefit will be gained by asking students to view all of the videos in sequence. The following annotated guide to the five videos is based on descriptions provided by Stephen Chew.
Video Guide: How to Study Long and Hard and Still Fail…or How to Get the Most Out of Studying
The overall theme of the videos communicates two important ideas. First, students who use ineffective or inefficient ways of studying will discover that they study long and hard and still fail. Second, students who use effective strategies will get the most learning out of their study time and will be more likely to succeed.
Video 1: Beliefs That Make You Fail…Or Succeed
Chew examines common mistaken beliefs students often possess that undermine their learning. The video tries to correct those misconceptions with accurate beliefs about learning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH95h36NChI
Video 2: What Students Should Understand About How People Learn
Chew introduces a simple but powerful theory of memory, Levels of Processing, that explains why some strategies are more beneficial than others for learning. Application of the Levels of Processing model when selecting study strategies can help students improve their study.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O7y7XEC66M
Video 3: Cognitive Principles for Optimizing Learning
Chew operationalizes the concept of level of processing into four principles that students can use to develop effective study strategies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xeHh5DnCIw
Video 4: Putting the Principles for Optimizing Learning into Practice
Chew applies the principles of deep processing to common study situations. Chew describes the conditions in which the student’s method for taking notes in class or highlighting text while reading corresponds to either shallow or deep processing, with predictable consequences for quality of learning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9GrOxhYZdQ
Video 5: I Blew the Exam, Now What?
Chew addresses what students should and should not do when they earn a bad grade on an exam.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QVRiMkdRsU
The first four videos are based on a presentation Stephen Chew makes to freshmen at Samford, which he described in a publication of the Association for Psychological Science Observer (2010).
Chew, S. L. (2010). Improving student performance by challenging student misconceptions about learning. Observer, 3 (4).
Available at the following URL:
January 4, 2011
Engage students in your course by placing it in the context of the student’s major
Students enroll in courses for a variety of reasons, some intrinsic, some extrinsic. They might be curious about a topic or discipline. They might have heard positive comments about an instructor from other students. Or the course might be required, either for all majors in a discipline (or related discipline) or as an option to meet a graduation requirement.
Students who register for a course for intrinsic reasons arrive on the first day excited and motivated to engage in the course. Students who register primarily because a course satisfies a requirement might feel coerced in their choice and be resistant to engaging in the course. How can instructors engage and motivate students who arrive with ambivalence about the course?
Students sometimes select a major without fully understanding the breadth and skill expectations of the discipline. They might regard some required courses merely as obstacles to their goals rather than as important components of the knowledge and skills that characterize the discipline. The first day of a class is a good opportunity to place the course in the context of the major and clarify the importance of the learning outcomes associated with that course for development of professional skill in the discipline.
Courses that function as service courses to a variety of majors may present additional challenges, although the subset of learning outcomes that align with the program outcomes the course serves should be identified. Instructors might benefit by learning which students are enrolled in their course to pursue a major in the discipline and which students are enrolled for other reasons. This information can be useful later in the term when selecting specific examples of applications to discuss in class. Including applications that are relevant to service programs as well as applications within the major discipline will help keep these students engaged throughout the term.
October 26, 2010
Balance flexibility and fairness when designing courses
Learner-centeredness shifts responsibility for learning to students by creating varied learning opportunities and multiple evaluation options that allow students to make choices and determine how they will demonstrate their learning (Weimer, 2002). Learner-centered course designs simultaneously hold students responsible for their learning and provide allowances for flexibility when life “interrupts” their studies, while preserving our “lines in the sand” for academic standards and our sanity.
Students need to know that submitting work late creates obstacles for getting and using feedback effectively. Still, life sometimes gets in the way of the best of intentions. Instructors who provide flexible solutions for these situations create opportunities for students to manage deadlines and learn material without delivering instructions or course material multiple times.
Examples of course design ideas that accomplish this:
- Include carrots that create incentives for on-time submission of assignments. Grant the option to rewrite a paper and incorporate your feedback for an improved grade only to those students who submit their work on time. You might accept papers late (up to a limit for efficient grading on your part, e.g., up to three days late) but only timely submissions earn the right to improve the work for a second review.
- Create flexibility with reasonable boundaries. Give students a “syllabus quiz” in the first week of the semester. Every student who passes earns 5 credits that can be “cashed in” to offset penalties for turning in work late (1 credit = 1 day past the due date). Students can cash in all of their credits at once with one assignment, or they can split them across assignments at different times in the semester. In this case, students earn “wiggle room” for deadlines and must use their “late options” wisely.
Weimer, M. (2002). Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
This tip was adapted from a contribution to the Teaching and Learning Writing Consortium, (sponsored by Western Kentucky University) by Mark Potter, Center for Faculty Development, Metropolitan State College of Denver (http://www.mscd.edu/cfd/).
September 21, 2010
Textbook affordability: Encourage students to read by making sure they have access to a text
Many students have difficulty acquiring course texts, especially at the start of the term if they must delay purchasing texts until after their financial aid has been disbursed. Instructors have several options to help make textbooks more affordable for their students.
- Place a copy of required texts on reserve. Some instructors will place a copy of the required course text on reserve in the library to provide immediate access to the text for students who might not be able to make an immediate purchase.
- Textbook rental program. The UWF bookstore initiated a textbook rental program in the Fall Term, 2010. Timely submission of the titles selected for use in your course in future terms will enable the bookstore to determine which of these textbooks are available for rental. The bookstore requests that texts for the Spring Term be ordered by mid-October. Orders for Summer Term should be submitted by mid-March. Orders for Fall Term should be submitted by mid-April.
Information about accessing the textbook rental program is available at: http://www.rent-a-text.com/
- Consider selecting a textbook from the Orange Grove. UWF participates in the Florida Orange Grove, Florida’s Digital Repository of electronic texts and instructional resources. Visit the Orange Grove at: http://florida.theorangegrove.org/og/logon.do and select the “log in as guest” link. Click “Browse Collections” and then select the Open Textbooks Collection. You can search for items by keywords, titles, and author names, or browse the textbooks. Additional textbooks are available through Orange Grove Text Plus, a partnership of the Florida Orange Grove and the University Press of Florida.
Visit the FAQ page for the Florida Orange Grove for additional information, including pricing information: http://www.theorangegrove.org/OGTtest.htm
April 6, 2010
Help students organize their learning by identifying the “big questions” for your course
Gerald Nosich (2009) points out that any large body of knowledge has a core belief, “a fundamental and powerful concept . . . that can be used to explain or think out a huge body of questions, problems, information, and situations.” Fundamental concepts are useful for instruction because they help students understand and organize the course content. Blythe and Sweet note that they begin their courses in World Literature each semester with a discussion of one fundamental idea that illuminates the overall content of the course: Art reflects its culture. In each subsequent class, they discuss how the work studied that day reveals something about the culture that produced it.
Identifying a few fundamental concepts for your course serves two purposes. First, it demonstrates your own mastery of the subject. Second, it creates a touchstone for your students to organize their understanding of new content throughout the semester. These fundamental concepts will also transfer to other courses within the discipline. When students complete a course in World Literature and then take a course in English or American Literature, they will begin these courses with the advantage of knowing that the works they will study will reveal aspects of English or American culture.
Tip contributed by Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY.
Nosich, G. (2009). Learning to think things through: A guide to critical thinking across the curriculum (3rd ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
March 23, 2010
Improving student learning by helping students understand the value of errors for improvement of self-regulated learning
Self-regulated learning involves acquiring skills such as setting goals, monitoring progress during study, and evaluating and modifying study strategies to improve performance on a learning task.
Two problems plague student learning:
- Students are frequently overconfident about their knowledge. They assume they will understand new material just by sitting through a lecture or reading a chapter.
- Students tend to attribute failures to outside forces (The teacher is mean, The textbook wasn’t clear) rather than attributing failures to internal factors (I didn’t study enough, I didn’t study with effective strategies).
Barry Zimmerman (CUNY) argues that students can be coached to evaluate their study strategies and monitor their learning progress realistically to improve learning and overall skill in learning new material.
Effective coaching requires that instructors provide accurate feedback about learning so that students can assess strengths and weaknesses in their study strategies. When students make mistakes, they need coaching to help them reflect accurately on what went wrong. It isn’t enough to simply provide accurate feedback to students. Ensure that students process this feedback by requiring them to demonstrate that they understand the feedback they receive.
One way to encourage students to reflect on feedback is to ask them to respond to the following questions after getting feedback on exam performance:
- Did you do as well as you expected?
- If not, why not?
- What will you do differently when preparing for the next exam to make the outcome different?
This approach is particularly effective when it is connected with specific content because the strategy that will work when solving one type of problem might differ from the strategy that will be effective when attempting to solve a different type of problem.
Barry Zimmerman (Ed. Psych, CUNY) runs a self-regulated learning project at CUNY. This tip is based on an article on Dr. Zimmerman’s project published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12, 2010.
January 12, 2010
Help students succeed in your course by sharing effective study strategies
As experts in academia, faculty sometimes forget that the study habits that enabled them to be successful as students and distinguished them as competitive applicants to graduate programs were (and continue to be) rare skills among undergraduate students. Share your expertise as a student with your students and describe the skills and habits they should acquire to be successful in your course.
An example of this sharing of expertise is the following handout that Julie Ann Williams provides to students in her Operations Management course at the beginning of the term. Although some of her advice is specific to successful completion of this course, much advice is transferrable to other courses.
How to Be Successful in MAN3504
- Prepare for class. At the beginning of each lecture section, a list of preparation tasks are listed. For maximum learning and grade benefit, do these tasks prior to the lecture. The preparation tasks include reading appropriate materials, reviewing solved problems, thinking about discussion problems, working problems, and thinking about application issues. Many of the practice problems have solutions posted on eLearning. Student feedback has indicated that separating practice questions and solutions helped them to study better for the quizzes and tests.
- Attend every class on time with your textbook and course packet, calculator, and ruler, ready to take notes and enjoy discussing the topics.
- Review your notes after each lecture.
- Check your course eLearning website and email for any new course materials as well as for solutions to some of the preparation practice problems.
- Email or bring questions to class or office hours, especially before each quiz! For example, bring a question from your lecture preparation activities to class.
- Work the practice problems in your course packet as well as even numbered problems (for which your textbook provides answers to check your work). Practice will help you learn the methods so you can apply them in a timely manner. Some of the practice problems have detailed solutions on eLearning.
- Study for quizzes, the midterm, and the final. Take every quiz! Even though there is a drop quiz, you will still see that material on a midterm or exam.
- Look for applications in your everyday life and the business world. For example, past students have brought examples of packaging design (we discussed the impact on the supply chain, etc.), product design, process design, menu design, scheduling, etc. that we discussed in class. Bringing an example of operations management concepts will make the course more interesting and relevant to you.
Thanks to Julie Ann Williams for sharing this handout.
Julie Ann Stuart Williams, Ph.D., P.E.
Associate Professor
Department of Management/MIS
University of West Florida
November 18, 2008
If an activity is good for student learning, make it a requirement
Creating an engaging and beneficial student activity is no guarantee that students will make use of this activity. We can ensure that students will benefit from these activities by making activities that improve learning required. Include explicit credit for participation in these activities, if only as a participation grade worth 10% of the final grade, to motivate students to engage in these activities.
Carol Twigg (2003) describes a course redesign project at the University of New Mexico in which a collection of supplementary online activities (interactive web-based activities, online quizzes, and programmed self-instruction modules) was added to the General Psychology course (with a reduction in the amount of face-to-face time in lecture). The redesigned course was more difficult than the traditional lecture-only course. For example, the course covered the content in all chapters in a high-level text (versus the common practice of deleting one or two chapters because constraints on lecture time). In one semester, students in all sections of this course had access to the online materials and were encouraged to use them. Students in one section were required to use these materials and earned course points for their participation whereas these activities were optional in the other section. Students in the section with mandatory participation outperformed their peers in the voluntary participation section on identical exams administered in face-to-face settings: 37% of students in the traditional course earned A’s and B’s on these exams whereas 77% of students in the course with mandatory participation earned A’s and B’s on the same exams.
Want to help students improve study habits and develop personal life skills that will help them succeed in academia? Each semester, the UWF Counseling and Wellness Services offers weekly Living Well Workshops. Students can learn about time management, study skills, managing test anxiety, and other topics that can improve their academic performance. Consider encouraging students in your course to participate in one or more of these workshops by providing an incentive for participation in your course syllabus.
Review the Living Well Workshop schedule to identify workshops that might be relevant to your course or helpful to your students:
http://www.uwf.edu/cws/wellness/programs/index.cfm
Twigg, C. A. (2003, July). Build it, but will they come? Learning Market Space. Electronic newsletter published by the National Center for Academic Transformation. Retrieved from http://www.thencat.org/Newsletters/Jul03.htm#1
November 10, 2008
How to Deal with Uninterested Students?
Students may be disengaged and uninterested in courses when they believe they only enrolled in the course because it was required. One way to engage these uninterested students is to discover common ground between their interests and the course content. During the first week of class, gather information about your students’ interests. In addition to gathering their names, majors, and e-mail addresses, ask them the question: What do you do? Students will describe their jobs and out-of-class interests, which might be connected to course content through specific examples. If students in a course include a large number of non-majors (e.g., if the course is frequently used as part of another major or if students in another discipline frequently select your course as part of a minor), illustrate course topics with examples that are related to these other disciplines to engage these students with the course. If you know that a number of students are interested in video games or work in restaurants, you might be able to create assignments or use examples in class that connect to these experiences. Students can be asked to create these connections themselves as part of an assignment. Ask students to identify and describe relations between specific course material and an interest or issue they encounter in their daily life.
Arvidson, P. S., (2008, October 3). Students 101: How to tailor your teaching to the interrupter, the hijacker, and other familiar types. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=pXTd9YygrhV8dXbv4fssJZnRxYpK4csh (accessed 9/30/2008).
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Relate the material you are teaching to real-world contexts and potential careers. Information in textbooks can often be abstract or very theoretical in nature. Students will understand, appreciate, and remember information a lot better if they can relate it to current events, how it is used in real settings, how it relates to what they will do after they graduate, how it relates to other topics in their field or even other disciplines, etc.
Another strategy to encourage students to actively engage with class material is to ask students to bring a standard 3X5 index card to each class for a brief “quiz.” Present a question on the topic of the day that requires the student to consider how the topic relates to something real in their lives. This strategy requires the student to consider the relevance and implications of the course material to their lives outside of the class. Any response that indicates reasonable consideration of the issue is regarded as “correct” and receives credit. In addition, because the quizzes comprise a portion of the final grade for the course, this activity encourages attendance and affords an easy way for the instructor to take attendance for record keeping.
Thanks to Eman El-Sheikh (Computer Science and CUTLA Fellow) and Ron Belter (Psychology) for these suggestions.
Updated 11/21/11 cdw