Center for Teaching and Learning

In the New York Times book review “The Chess Master and the Computer,” former world chess champion Gary Kasparov outlines the history of chess grandmasters vs. computers and what that history has revealed about humans’ and computers’ capabilities. Some of his observations offer us possible insights not just about chess, but also about teaching and learning.

Kasparov was the world champion who oversaw the dramatic transformation of technology that has lead to computers’ surpassing humans in the game of chess. He has worked closely with programmers both to develop computers’ capabilities and to challenge them. In 1997, Kasparov lost the human vs. computer battle — but to the dismay of A. I. advocates, not via computer self-consciousness.

This difference between computer processing and human reflective thinking has produced some interesting chess experiments. In 1998, Kasparov hosted and participated in a computer-assisted tournament. Each player had access to the software of his choice. In Kasparov’s words,

Having a computer partner also meant never having to worry about making a tactical blunder. The computer could project the consequences of each move we considered, pointing out possible outcomes and countermoves we might otherwise have missed. With that taken care of for us, we could concentrate on strategic planning instead of spending so much time on calculations. Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions.

Kasparov discovered the extent to which his advantage in chess depended on his having the upper hand in memory and performing calculations with fewer errors. As Kasparov explains of his games with Veselin Topalov, “since we both had equal access to the same database, the advantage [now] came down to creating a new idea at some point.”

We all know that technology levies an equalizing force onto performance. I will never forget exam monitors’ checking the aisles for hidden calculators. In fact, I have a confession. My memories of exam monitors encourage me to refer to the above tournament as “assisted chess,” as if an unassisted game were somehow tougher or a more authentic measurement of capabilities. The real title of the tournament, however, was “Advanced Chess.” And the tournament took place twelve years ago.

Kasparov is discussing a new era, an era in which computer assistance is not cheating — and moreover, is expected. We live in a world not only of ever-improving immediate access to vast information and processing capabilities. We live in a world also in which we demand from each other immediate recourse to more than the human mind can memorize or process. This new era has brought about more than new learning objectives and pedagogies in chess — or in the college classroom. It has promoted changes in the way the human mind performs even an “unassisted” game — or unassisted learning.

Schools of thought have broken down. Bricolage has become the norm. According to Kasparov,

The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

This loss of allegiances, norms, or even what an older generation might refer to as “standards of play” has not impeded the younger generation. On the contrary, players reach the level of grandmaster at younger and younger ages — and not because of their unparalleled genius:

Bobby Fischer’s 1958 record of attaining the grandmaster title at fifteen was broken only in 1991. It has been broken twenty times since then, with the current record holder, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, having claimed the highest title at the nearly absurd age of twelve in 2002. Now twenty, Karjakin is among the world’s best, but like most of his modern wunderkind peers he’s no Fischer, who stood out head and shoulders above his peers—and soon enough above the rest of the chess world as well.

Technology has leveled the playing field by facilitating access to information. Even in areas where there are not a lot of chess players, children pick up the game online. The normal child whose attention span is not ready for complicated books on chess tactics or theory still learns that information, only now in more abbreviated forms on websites and in podcasts. On their own, children study parts of games. When it comes to study, their attention is limited. But in the name of their entertainment, they assemble those parts into wholes.

What about in the learning of course material for a college class? I’ve known students who watched YouTube podcasts to gleam information they didn’t adequately understand in the classroom. Some have admitted openly to relying more on random, online content than on their professors or textbooks — because they didn’t understand or were bored by those more traditional engagements with the material.

But what about students’ accessing the internet on their phones or laptops during a lecture? What if they’re on Facebook?

I have an interesting anecdote to relate. My sister-in-law is an undergraduate at a different university. One morning she initiated a live chat with me through Facebook by asking a question about a particular philosophy. After telling her that I didn’t know the philosophy but would look it up, I started with Wikipedia and then worked my way up to quick skims in Google Scholar to provide her with a piecemeal answer that at least acknowledged some debate — and then sent her links so she could research the nuances more fully on her own. Our online conversation took less than ten minutes with a lot of extended pauses. When I asked her if she was writing a paper on the subject, she said no, that she was currently in class, the professor had mentioned the philosophy as if everyone knew what he was talking about, and she needed a little more information in order to understand the rest of what he was saying.

This is not an entirely isolated incident. I’ve had multiple law-school friends initiate online chats with me while they were in class — usually to debate about real-time course content because the lecture format prohibited them from immediately discussing or challenging the professor’s statements.

There are a plethora of negative and positive ways of describing these occurrences. Maybe my sister-in-law and law-school friends have grown so accustomed to immediate satisfaction that they lack the attention span for sustained engagements with a lecture. Perhaps their experiences with mobile technology have enabled them to acquire the multitasking skills for multiple, simultaneous engagements with the course content. Possibly they prefer social learning to more solitary experiences like that of sitting quietly in a lecture. Maybe they’re bad students. Maybe they are taking a more active approach to their learning. Perhaps they are developing a more nuanced understanding. Possibly their multitasking is forcing them to miss the overarching narrative forest for incidental trees.

Just as with daydreaming, their online activities might cause them to lose track of the course narrative, a particular theory, or a greater concept. However, maybe they’ll pull their disjointed understandings together when confronted with an engaging objective.

If their attention is limited, but in the name of their entertainment they’ll assemble those parts into wholes, then maybe the pedagogical response isn’t necessarily to restrict “assisted” learning in the classroom.  If we prohibit their digital escapism, then not only do we  increase the likelihood of their mentally shutting down (daydreaming) during the lecture. We also eliminate the possibility of their escaping to more engagements with course content.

It’s been too long since I’ve posted. During the spring semester, I prepped for two different courses in addition to serving the university in my regular capacity.  My first response was, I took on more responsibilities than I care to again. My second response was, Dr. So-and-So consistently accomplishes more than I do — and that person exudes inner peace. How do I achieve that?

Just like our students, all teachers at some point feel overwhelmed. To be fair, graduate school does prepare us for that high-productivity lifestyle; in order to graduate, we learn to manage our time enough to complete a large number of complex tasks within a short period of time. But our surviving graduate school does not prepare us for managing those tasks effectively, at least not effectively enough that we maximize our free time and reduce our stress levels. When we don’t take the extra steps of assessing and improving our time- and stress-management skills, “finding a balance” means “growing accustomed” to stress — at best, living only three additional stress factors away from overwhelming anxiety, irrationality, incompetence ….

And worse yet, certain semesters heap even more responsibilities onto us.

But we can update our time- and stress-management skills so that we can handle even more obligations. Mind Tools offers a lot of free resources for that very process. Also, identifying our dominant learning styles enables us to reorganize our to-do lists into their most digestible forms. Do you need a white board, cork board, or any other visual model to move you from task to task? How about an alarm to identify starting and stopping points? Are you the type of person who should have a physical routine: check emails at 8 am, 11am, and 4pm; schedule specific tasks (including your breaks) for specific hours in the day; reserve your most complex tasks for that particular time of day when you’re always most alert …? Maybe you need all three: a white board, alarms, and a consistent routine. Reorganizing the way you process your tasks to suit your dominant learning styles can save you both time and stress.

The summer is a great time for re-evaluating and updating time- and stress-management skills. Find that role model on campus who accomplishes the quantity and quality of both work and free time you hope to achieve, and update your time- and stress-management skills until you achieve them. (Ahem, and pass on whatever tricks you learn to your students!)

At the end of every semester I try to ask myself, What have I learned?

For this semester, that answer is difficult to condense. I’ve had invaluable conversations about teaching, learning, advising, course redesign, assessments, and classroom technology with both visiting speakers and administration, faculty, and staff at Austin Peay. We at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and the Office of Title III Grant hosted the Course Redesign Summer Teaching Academy, 19 campus-wide events, a departmental meeting with a guest speaker, an orientation for new faculty, and two individual consultations. I had the honor of participating in the planning and assessment of an advising program that targets students with identifiable at-risk characteristics. Not to mention, I had the pleasure of meeting with course-redesign teams, interviewing Provost Denley about course redesign, participating in an interview with Dr. Chris Dede about media-influenced learning styles, and coordinating with Susan Jones, the Professional Development Coordinator of the Clarksville-Montgomery County School System. For our resource center, we collected over 150 books and DVDs on pedagogy, advising, diversity, course redesign, assessments, tenure and promotion, and other aspects of professional development. Thanks to Austin Peay, my semester’s list of learning opportunities not only extends beyond what I’ve enumerated, but in fact seems endless to me.

So what have I learned?

First and foremost, that the combined efforts of APSU administration, faculty, and staff created every one of these learning opportunities. My personal role was relatively insignificant — merely that of taking an idea from Person A and bringing it to Person B, C, D, E … until that idea, somewhat transformed by its journey, became a reality.

Some ideas didn’t complete that journey. Other ideas became events but drew insufficient attendance. Beyond the obvious correlation with what’s left of my shoes’ soles, I learned a more simple lesson: So long as a plan is viable and we can generate enough interest, we can accomplish anything — but the reverse is also true.

With this understanding, we’re looking for ways to wed the professional-development program with the greater campus community. For example, we’ve organized an Advisory Committee for Faculty-Development Planning. This committee will assess the faculty’s professional-development needs in teaching and advising and produce a list of ten teaching strategies that professional development will target. In addition, we’ve rolled out a growing list of events for the spring semester. This list hopefully will enable interested faculty and staff to plan their schedules around at least certain events they would like to attend. Also, I intend to build coalitions around shared objectives and thereby increase the financial and human resources for professional-development opportunities.

How has my exposure to these conversations, events, and resources influenced my understanding of their topics? What I’ve learned about teaching, learning, advising, diversity, course redesign, assessment, and classroom technology are complex, critical conversations — much of which I hope to distill for the two courses I’m teaching next semester. I’ve learned that for me to quote a colleague, speaker, book, or DVD is not adequate proof of what I’ve learned. Pardon the pun, but I need to put these ideas to the test.

In other words, I realize I need to get back into the classroom. And I thank the APSU English department and PASS program for giving me these teaching opportunities.

Happy Holidays, Austin Peay!

Sincerely,

Gray Kane

What is a student-centered approach to designing and teaching a course? From a student-centered perspective, how does a teacher determine learning outcomes? How can she build assignments that facilitate the students’ achievement of those outcomes? How might a teacher write lectures and other supplemental materials that keep the students productively engaged with those assignments — that is, how does a teacher do this from a student-centered perspective? Obviously these questions are open to debate. And even more to the point, there is no one answer for any one of those questions.

So what are some of the debates?

A growing number of teachers imagine how and why different types of students encounter and relate to each learning opportunity: communal learners, solitary learners, visual learners, kinesthetic learners, millennial learners, adult learners…. Although the list is potentially endless, ultimately arbitrary, and likely inaccurate, even the most avant-garde, student-centered teacher often relies on some working list as a starting point for rethinking the course from multiple points of view.

Those points of view are cookie-cutter interpretations. Human eyes — specific students’ eyes — don’t look through them. And yet, is not this initial stage of designing a course the central crux of student-centered pedagogies — if not in the ways those pedagogies are practiced, then in the ways they’re written, published, and otherwise presented?

For a proponent of the above pedagogical approach to claim that what a more traditional teacher does is not student-centered — well, that’s just offensive. What even the most avant-garde teacher has to remember is that the more traditional approaches are also student-centered.

Yes, the traditional course-designing process may lean heavily on the teacher’s side of perceiving the course and its delivery systems: what a student should accomplish, how a student should accomplish it…. But even the more radically student-centered teachers have to determine learning objectives from additional perspectives, not just from the students’. In other words, the pedagogical debate about student-centered teaching is not between opposites. There’s no such thing as pro- or anti-student-centered teaching.

Once a more traditional teacher gets to know his students, he contemplates the specific problems certain students are having — only without referring to generalizations or types.

So where’s the argument?

More traditional teachers object to the reliance on stereotypes about students. Not every student of a certain age is a “millennial student.” Not every student of a certain age fits the description of an “adult learner.” A teacher’s reliance on those inevitably false categories can hurt students more than help them.

Even the most avant-garde teacher has to agree with those claims. Regardless of how different articles or guest speakers may define our students, we ultimately can’t define our students. We have to know them.

More traditional teachers disagree with the abandonment of the lectern and other time-weathered course-delivery systems for ultimately untested pedagogical fads.

The avant-garde teacher might cite data to show that time-weathered course-delivery systems are no longer working. And the traditional teacher might point out that a lot of these avant-garde techniques infiltrated the secondary educational system in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s; he could argue that consequently, today’s college students are inadequately prepared. She might identify that if incoming students are under-prepared, classroom sizes and the need to teach to standardized tests play a role: they restrict students’ abilities to practice critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. She could argue that, meanwhile, the student body has diversified in ways that traditional teaching methods haven’t been able to accommodate. But no one will win this argument. The data tells us only what, not why.

Traditional teachers often see redesigning a course from the students’ perspective as essentially dumbing down the course. Forfeiting the dissemination of facts for building students’ abilities and attitudes, according to the traditional perspective, does not adequately prepare students for the next course in the curriculum: We’re doing them a disservice by not providing them with the basics. And often because of this line of reasoning, many traditional teachers interpret the political, social, and administrative calls for educational reform as in fact encouraging lower educational standards.

The more avant-garde teacher might argue that one can always look up facts. Google on a web-based phone replaces encyclopedic memories. True understanding, which has less to do with what than with how and why, is more important for the next course in the curriculum — not to mention, for our current students’ future professions and lives.

I’ve tried to polarize this debate as much as possible. But in truth, most of what occurs in classrooms are compromises. Even those who make any one of these arguments will appropriate ideas and practices from the other side. The dividing line no longer exists. But the divisive conversations still do — and should continue to — until the data catches up with the interpretations.

The following two videos are of a workshop on classroom-assessment techniques (CATs) from Austin Peay’s 2009 Summer Teaching Academy. CATs are not merely different techniques for assessing students. They are a part of a larger strategy to assess the accessibility of lectures, promote active learning, revise the next day’s lecture to accommodate the students’ needs, and create a truly student-centered environment even in a high-enrollment course.

Classroom Assessment Techniques 1

Classroom Assessment Techniques 2

In a previous post, I introduced Classroom-Assessment Techniques (CATs) as opportunities to improve both lectures and student engagement:

CATs are routine, often anonymous, and non-graded snapshots of the students’ relationships with the lecture material. They help a lecturer assess and revise his or her lectures. But they also help students both learn and increase their involvement in the learning process. In other words, CATs not only help the lecturer cater the material to the students, but they also promote active learning.

In form, CATs are not unlike quizzes or other in-class assignments. However, the anonymity of a CAT enables at-risk and other students to participate freely without fear of judgment. That is, CATs can promote memory and critical-thinking and problem-solving skills even more than document them.

Of course CATs raise a pedagogical question we should consider before constructing any in-class activity: What is the objective of the activity? Are we assessing the lecture’s effectiveness? Are we also trying to encourage students’ background knowledge, information recall, conceptual understanding, critical-thinking skills, problem-solving skills, or some other learning skill? Often, teachers rotate different types of assessments throughout a course, and ideally, the activities improve the students’ relationships with the very lectures or learning skills that are being assessed.

But there is one type of assessment that many teachers forget to include: an assessment of students’ motivation. Motivation is essential to learning. If an assessment enhances the students’ relationships with what it measures, then a course should include routine assessments of motivation. So how do we assess motivation?

Obviously, an infinite number of ways to assess motivation lurks in the Platonic ether for you to develop. Yet, before we consider even one possibility, perhaps we should think about what motivates our own recall, conceptual understanding, critical-thinking skills, problem-solving skills, etc. We should ask ourselves, in other words, What motivates our learning?

I personally don’t remember much from my undergraduate years that isn’t tied to some greater objective which I have elevated in some way onto a pedestal: the improvement of my understanding of the world, communication skills, interpersonal relations, etc. These heightened objectives determine the value or lack-thereof that I attribute to the information I encounter. In other words, if I interpret a connection between information and one of these objectives — the information as means, obstacle, or otherwise related to the objective — then I retain that information, and the inconsistency of that retained information leads me to contemplate it, think critically about it, problem-solve with it….

In short, I learn thanks to a narrative: “X is important to me. Y enables or prohibits me to achieve X. I now think about Y in order to achieve my goal of X.”

In order to assess my own motivation, I would have to ask myself, “What do I value or hope to achieve in my life that has a connection to this information? What would I have to be able to do with this information, specifically in order for it to improve my relationship with what I value or to help me achieve my greater goal?” The more I can explain, the greater my motivation will be to think about that information.

This reflective process then leads me to create a new assessment question for students:

What do you value or hope to achieve in your life that has a connection to this information about________? Explain what you would have to be able to do with this information, specifically so that it improves your relationship with what you value or otherwise helps you achieve your greater goal.

It is possible you won’t see a connection between this information and what you value or hope to achieve in your life. If this is the case, then thoroughly explain what you value or hope to achieve. Next, clarify what you will have to do to improve that relationship with what you value or to achieve your greater goal.

If I were to evaluate at least a sample of the students’ feedback, I could revise my lectures to cater the course material to these specific students’ values and objectives. That is, I can tie information to students’ lives in such a way that likely increases the students’ motivation to think about the course material.

Obviously, we do not experience motivation in the same way. I included my own reflective process not to impose my learning style onto others, but rather to encourage that reflective process in the creation of classroom activities. What do you remember from your undergraduate education? Which course was that in? Who taught it to you? How does it relate to what you’re doing now? Do you value that information? Why or why not? What motivated you to remember that information?

And how can you transform what you just learned about your own motivation into an assessment that might improve your students’ motivation to learn?

Last Friday, Dr. John Volker and I had a conversation about online and hybrid courses that has left me thinking. First, Dr. Volker recited the all-too-common reason for a professor’s resisting online educational trends: The students don’t get the same out of an online course that they get out of an on-ground course. Then Dr. Volker pointed out another variation of that same complaint: Students don’t get as much out of an online course as they do from an on-ground course. Dr. Volker agreed with the first point but not with the second. Why?

When a teacher chooses the on-ground classroom model as the basis for online interaction, Achilles never catches the tortoise. When a teacher designs a digital interaction to simulate a traditional one, all the students get is an inferior imitation that will never catch up with the real thing.

Does this mean we teachers should resist online educational opportunities? Is Achilles really an inferior imitation of a tortoise? Absolutely not, Dr. Volker insists. We instead should abandon the on-ground model when we design online interactions. Let Achilles run his own path.

Classroom interactions have an embodied crowd effect. If a teacher can generate enough personal, kinetic excitement for the material, that excitement spreads relatively easily to those students who are already engaged. Through these students’ overt excitement, other students who are more interested in their classmates than in the material, in turn, can develop vicarious interest in the material. And even vicarious, sustained interest increases the likelihood of learning.

However, online course interactions have different dynamics than those of an on-ground course. A classroom discussion might silence some shy students who are concerned about how they are perceived. But a disembodied engagement might offer those students the masks — or in digital terminology, the avatars — they need to protect their senses of self from the fires of heated intellectual confrontations.

I don’t want to suggest that this or any other difference we encounter in an online setting is always a benefit. The mask effect can embolden some students to the point of their initiating “flame wars” — or in lay terms, those unproductive contests for domination that sometimes transpire in a discussion-board setting. Where digital engagements differ from on-ground interactions, problems can arise. But those problems often unveil sites where we haven’t adequately reconceptualized online interaction. In other words, the mask effect that produces flame wars is not inherently an obstacle to the learning process.

What are some other potential benefits of an online setting?

The most common answer has to do with the difference in students’ learning styles. Many students have to utilize multiple modes of engagement — visual, auditory, read/write, kinesthetic — before they’ll fully grasp the course material. Others need to be able to access the course material in one specific mode. An online interface can host a variety of learning opportunities in an array of different mediums.

But an on-ground course also can diversify modes of engagement for diverse learning styles. So what is distinctive about an online environment?

There are two distinctions in particular that draw me to online learning environments. First, digital mediums potentially level the playing field for the different learning styles. What does that mean? Those who learn the easiest by reading and writing (such as those students who become teachers) traditionally have had an advantage over other students — to a large degree because reading and writing are both recursive activities. In other words, text is reviewable both in selective parts and as a whole. Students who learn the easiest by reading and writing can revisit course material either in specific areas of uncertainty or as a global narrative. For other students, the course material ends up reduced to a collection of classroom activities — singular events that fade per the human limitations of memory.

Digital mediums attribute the recursive characteristic of written text to non-written mediums. If students need to pause and review the last few moments of a lecture, they can. In an online environment, kinetic learners can actively and repeatedly engage with what in a classroom or a textbook might be little more than a stable diagram.

In fact, as far as kinetic learners are concerned, hypertext reconfigures written text into a tactile experience. That is, digital mediums level the playing field by attributing not only the characteristics of written text to non-written mediums, but also the characteristics of non-written mediums to written text.

Although digital mediums undoubtedly help students who are not inclined to learn through reading or writing, digital mediums similarly help those who do prefer reading and writing. Both teachers and students can write on videos and thereby attribute the quality of written text to visual and auditory learning experiences. In other words, digital mediums potentially level the learning playing field, not by handicapping those who excel in more traditional environments, but rather by opening up each and every learning opportunity to every learning style.

The second distinction that draws me to online learning environments has less to do with D2L, Angel, Blackboard, or other course-shell providers than with the free online learning activities, like blogging and microblogging. A professor can require that students blog or microblog about their learning experiences, link their monologues to an extracurricular online community about that particular topic, and thereby increase the likelihood that their students will remain engaged in a learning community about that topic even beyond the termination of the course. If we tie our students’ learning to the confines of a course, that learning can end with the completion of the semester. If we tie that learning to a more permanent community, our students’ learning, even about a particular topic, will likely become more permanent.

These are just two of what are possibly an infinite number of potentially positive ways that an online environment can uniquely contribute to the learning experience. In other words, Dr. Volker is right. Students don’t get the same out of an online course that they get out of an on-ground course, and if we teachers take the time to analyze how online environments differ from classroom environments, we can transform those differences into an improved learning experience.

There are some common misconceptions about some equally common classroom practices. According to one misconception, to borrow a metaphor from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Oppression (2007), lectures deposit knowledge in students and classroom assessments measure that investment’s rate of growth.

Lectures do provide information for students to apply when solving problems. Often, tests and other assessment methods do measure memory and both critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. The more students retain from and understand a lecture, the greater the yield of that investment in real-life circumstances.

However, in a lecture environment, students rarely get the opportunity to practice critical-thinking or problem-solving skills prior to a graded assessment. In other words, through homework, quizzes, and tests, professors at least initially judge each student’s either innate or nurtured, preexisting abilities. Those types of assessments, or at least in the way that we use them, measure little more than the students as information receptacles.

And perhaps more importantly, many students interpret graded assessments in that way. Yes, homework is practice for quizzes, quizzes are practice for tests, tests for exams, and exams for future courses or even life itself. But at-risk students in particular fear they are both not “good enough” and going to be “found out.” Even when they study effectively, many attribute good grades more to luck than their performance. And as another symptom of their object-status in the classroom, some blame their bad grades on the professor.

This perceptual problem isn’t a one-way street. Unfortunately, as the expressions “sink or swim” and “cream rises to the top” document, the dominant lecture strategy can negatively influence a professor’s perception of students. According to one such perception, whether due to the students’ will or character, upbringing or genetics, some students have the agency to navigate rigorous course material, but others don’t — regardless of the classroom format. Through this lens, the university system acquires the responsibility of not only documenting excellent and satisfactory learners, but also weeding out inadequate ones so businesses know in whom to invest.

Freire criticizes the influence of the investment model on pedagogical practices, because it locates agency in the investor, the lecturer, and reduces each student to a biologically or socially either suitable or damaged receptacle. Freire observes not just a metaphorical problem, not a mere language game devoid of real consequences. The dominant structure of dissemination dampens ingenuity, fosters dependency, and inhibits the very critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that a professor often lists in a course’s learning objectives. By imposing a “sink or swim” structure, many lecture courses do less to promote critical-thinking and problem-solving skills than to document their existence.

However, some of us teach in a lecture hall with over 75 students. Without incapacitating ourselves with endless grading, how can we transform the lecture hall into an active-learning environment?

Perhaps the first step is to revise our understanding of classroom assessments to include what are commonly called Classroom-Assessment Techniques.

Definition of Classroom-Assessment Techniques (CATs)

CATs are routine, often anonymous, and non-graded snapshots of the students’ relationships with the lecture material. They help a lecturer assess and revise his or her lectures. But they also help students both learn and increase their involvement in the learning process. In other words, CATs not only help the lecturer cater the material to the students, but they also promote active learning.

In form, CATs are not unlike quizzes or other in-class assignments. However, the anonymity of a CAT enables at-risk and other students to participate freely without fear of judgment. That is, CATs can promote memory and critical-thinking and problem-solving skills even more than document them.

Also, CATs do not drown professors in superfluous grading. First of all, CATs are not graded. Second of all, if a professor requires each student to confine his or her activity to a single note card, CATs are easy for the professor to review. Third of all, the professor has to examine only a sample of 20 cards to identify both common points of understanding and typical misunderstandings.

By acknowledging and responding to those typical misunderstandings at the start of the next lecture, the professor not only corrects misconceptions early in the learning process. That simple acknowledgment simultaneously sends a message to the at-risk students that their misconceptions are not just theirs, but also “common.” That sense of commonality encourages a sense of community.

We hear a lot about promoting a sense of community in the classroom, but what does a sense of community do for an at-risk student?

At-risk students withdraw easily from a course, but very few people withdraw easily from a strong sense of community. And the longer a learning community maintains contact with a student, the more the community influences that student.

The following research question was merely a starting point for how I chose which CATs to address in this post. Please revise the research question to suit the specific needs of your course or field.

RESEARCH QUESTION

How can we encourage our students to

1) pay more attention both to the lecture material and their interpretation of it,

2) intellectually organize the material, and

3) formulate their own ideas in language

…while at the same time we assess how well our lectures have connected with the students in our collective classroom effort to meet the course objectives?

Below you’ll see a list of only seven from what are ultimately an infinite number of possible CATs. I have appropriated these particular CATs from Diana Kelly’s “Evaluating Teaching and Learning” (2008), but you can find most of these and other CATs on The National Teaching and Learning Forum. Please, don’t confine yourself to the CATs you encounter here or even elsewhere. Once you get a feel for how CATs work in relation to your course’s specific learning objectives, you’ll likely want to create your own.

Background-Knowledge Probe

At the start of a course or new topic, the background-knowledge probe encourages students to recall relevant prior knowledge or experience. A lecturer can use a background-knowledge probe both to organize his or her lectures around a specific audience’s knowledge or experience and to measure overall learning during the progression of the course.

Common prompts for this three-minute writing exercise:

· List relevant educational, personal, or work-related experience in the subject.

· Briefly explain your current beliefs about the subject.

· List your motivations/reasons for studying the subject, as well as your concerns about the subject.

· Briefly explain what you hope to learn and how it will help you succeed.

A background-knowledge probe helps the professor investigate each student’s starting point in the journey to meet course objectives. But it also asks students to situate the upcoming lecture within the context of their own knowledge, experience, and/or situation. By personalizing the lecture in this way, a background probe increases the likelihood that the students will pay attention to both the lecture material and its relationship to what they already know. The latter is the starting point for their organizing that information: what fits and what doesn’t fit with what they already know. The assignment also asks students to formulate their ideas in language.

Focused Listing

Focused listing asks students to recall a set of relevant terms, facts, or concepts that they should know for the subject at hand. A lecturer can assign focused listing at the start of a new lecture or topic, not only to assess what the students remember, but also to encourage that memory. Or the lecturer can assign focused listing at the end of a lecture or topic — again, both to assess student recall and to encourage it.

Directed Paraphrase

By asking students to explain a new concept or set of instructions in their own words, a lecturer can both assess and encourage the students’ understanding beyond rote memorization.

Application Cards

A lecturer asks students to apply a newly discussed theory, principle, or procedure to a relevant, real-world context of either their or the instructor’s choosing. The lecturer uses the cards to determine how well students can apply what they’ve learned and to respond to those applications during the next lecture. But application cards also encourage students to think about a lesson contextually.

Memory Matrix

The lecturer provides a list of items down the left side of the matrix and of characteristics “A” through “C” across the top.

Characteristic A, Characteristic B, Characteristic C
———————————————————————————
Item 1
———————————————————————————
Item 2
———————————————————————————
Item 3

Students fill in the blank boxes with their understanding of how the listed items (names of biological cells, governmental structures, economic theories, literary genres, discursive modes, etc.) are different. The memory matrix facilitates both assessment of the students’ understanding of the material and their retention of that material.

Process Self-Analysis

The lecturer asks his or her students both to organize their fulfillment of an assignment into a series of steps and to calculate how long each step took them to complete. Then the students are to determine which steps caused them the most trouble and how they can improve their approaches to those steps.

The One-Minute Paper

This CAT gives both lecturers the information they need to revise the next lecture and students an opportunity to reflect upon what they’ve learned. The lecturer asks his or her audience thoughtful, reflective questions, not factual ones, questions that the lecturer really wants to know the answer to and plans to respond to at the start of the next lecture. Here are some example questions:

“What did you learn the most today about __________?”
“What did you find the most important about __________?”
“List what you learned today about __________.”
“What did you find the most helpful about today’s lecture?”
“What would you have liked to learn more about?”

All course-assessment techniques require that the lecturer in some way discuss student feedback during the next lecture. In fact, some lecturers dedicate entire class periods to student feedback to ensure a truly student-centered environment. As a lecturer acknowledges their comments, students not only measure their own performance against the backdrop of their classmates’ responses; they also discover that others wrote similar comments. This discovery raises self-confidence for the at-risk students who are experiencing difficulties, but it also promotes a sense of community out of the anonymity of the lecture environment. And both self-confidence and a sense of community increase student retention.

Exercise:

Write down the learning objectives for a particular course you are teaching and then review one of your lectures for that course. Now, devise at least one CAT. Feel free to try one of the seven CATs above, but as you feel more comfortable with how CATs relate to your course’s specific objectives, try to create your own CAT.

REFERENCES

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2007.

Kelly, Diana. “Evaluating Teaching and Learning: Enhancing the Scholarship of Teaching by Asking Students What They Are Learning.” The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Rowena Murray, Ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2008; 80-90.