September 2008

In my online course, we were asked:

It has been said that the American educational system is obsessed with testing, and that students sometimes spend more time taking tests than learning. Teachers are often accused of “teaching to the test.” What is your view of the role of assessments in a course? Take into consideration the frequency of assessments, format, learning outcomes, levels of difficulty, areas to be assessed, and testing time.

I think that the concept of teaching to the test is mostly, though not entirely, a function of the accountability process put into place in our K-12 system. Most people who teach to the test in this environment are doing so with the expectation of teaching their students the fundamental knowledge which is necessary for them to pass on to their next stage of learning.

Sometimes this is essential and useful. What if there were no understanding of end outcomes for a course/class/year/school? Then each one would be different and a student from one would not have learned or even studied the same things that a student from another did. We would not have anything like a basic level that could be assumed within education.

And this can be useful for a teacher as well. I went to high school in New York, where every student in a course must take the statewide final exam in their course. It did several things for the teachers.

First, it removed the onus of “it was too hard for X” because it is a statewide requirement that you know how to prove that a line has 180 degrees (or whatever).

Second, the final was useful because it gave the teachers a clear set of objectives to be aiming for. World history wasn’t just supposed to talk about the history of a single country outside of the US, but was supposed to cover art and architecture and politics throughout world cultures. European history wasn’t just modern or early, but covered everything from the Etruscans forward.

Third, it allowed teachers a bit of flexibility in grading. This was not mandated (like it presently is in Dallas or Pittsburgh), but a student not doing well in a course, but TRYING, could be given a low passing grade with the clear understanding that the student would not pass the course if they could not pass the final. That was a statewide requirement. So a teacher could reward effort of a student without doing social promotion or effort promotion for the entire course.

But since we are all college teachers, the question should probably be applied to college teaching. I think that in college teaching to the test is problematic.

College teachers usually create their own tests. They know what is on them and they should certainly make the information available to the students through discussions, readings, lectures, activities, and assignments.

But students often expect a review handout that covers every single question on a test, rather than types of questions or types of information. If the teacher says that is what the review handout is for, then clearly it should do that. However I often see students not studying, but memorizing the review handout. Then, when they go to a test, they are upset because the question, as presented in the review, was not on the exam. That’s ridiculous. Why should you need to come to class if the review handout is all you need to know for the exam?

In addition I have upon rare occasions had a teacher who taught only what was on the test and nothing else. Each class period consisted of covering ten or fifteen minutes’ worth of material which was boiled down to a single question on the exam. And that was all the class consisted of. I am opposed to this approach.

Thankfully I am in English and for freshman composition, my most common course, the tests of all kinds are writing. Since the focus of the course is writing and the students are writing and the tests are writing, there is a clear confluence of testing and teaching coming together. (At least that is the goal.)

In my British Literature course, I primarily use out of class papers, where the students have to integrate what they learned in class and what they have found or discovered on their own. I do have two exams, though, which cover factual materials in a paragraph form. In those exams the students must write about the work addressing a certain question.

Because the course is involved and we do lots of reading, I allow the students to use their notes. They cannot use the book, but they can use anything that they created. This does two things. It encourages reading as we go along (because there is no way they can do all the reading before the exams) and it encourages them to take extensive notes on my lectures, our discussions, and the texts themselves.

Some teachers might feel that they ought to remember the issues on their own, but I feel that the way I have created the test allows me much more flexibility and gives the students a greater likelihood of doing well.

I don’t expect them to have memorized Beowulf or Paradise Lost. I don’t expect them to remember every description of the characters in Gulliver’s Travels. But I do expect them to have a general grasp of the work (both for the test and afterwards) and to be able to find the more specific information (either in their notes for the test, or on the internet throughout their life).

In addition, for the final, I ask the students to create questions based on the information we have covered in the course. I usually use at least two of those and if they come up with a question I was already planning on, I let them know that as well. …In a class with twenty questions, I will say, “Four of these will be on the test. Two of them were already on the test and two of them have been chosen from your suggestions.” I do not, though, tell them which those are.

One thing that one of my other colleges had and that I wish we had here was a final exam that was department-wide for freshman composition.

For the exam, there would be five or six writing prompts chosen by teachers and could not be prompts used in classes that semester. Every freshman composition student would take the exam. Then each teacher would grade two exams for every student they had in their classes, but they would not grade their own students’ exams.

These grades would be on a scale from 1 to 5. When the exam was first created and used, teachers were required to get two grades next to each other. So if one teacher gave it a 1 and another gave it a 5, someone else had to grade it and either give it a 2 or a 4 for it to pass. Obviously those with two 3s or whatever were looked upon most favorably. Because of the growth of the English department and the class sizes, however, that school now only requires that they be within two points. So a 1 and a 3 would be a match or a 2 and a 4. Then they would get the average as their final grade.

What this did was allow the students an outside, nonpartisan grader examining their work. It eliminated any discussion of bias on the part of the teacher (at least for the final) and it allowed the department to know about any outliers. If, for example, my student got a 3 (a 70%) on the final, but they had a 98 in my class, there might be an issue. Or, on the other hand, if I consistently gave all my students better or worse grades than they earned on the final, this was also clear when I turned in my grades. (We had to give the final exam grade and the final average.)

This also let us know of any grading outliers in the department. If someone consistently gave significantly better or worse grades, their averages could be looked at and they could have extra norming help.

It created an interesting experience once when the first two graders gave a paper a 1 and a 5. The 1 was given because the audience (the teacher) was told that English teachers were idiots and the whole paper focused on how much smarter the student was than English teachers. The 5 was given because there was not a single grammar error in the whole eight pages of the paper (written in two hours). When other readers also failed to come to agreement, the entire department got back together to grade and discuss the paper.

Learning without thought is labor lost. ~Confucius

You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way. ~Marvin Minsky

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. ~John Lubbock

from the Quote Garden

For teachers, Princeton has a scary presentation on learning.

70% of learning & development takes place from real-life and on-the-job experiences, tasks, and problem solving. This is the most important aspect of any learning and development plan. For example, the real learning from a skill acquired in a training program, or from feedback, takes place back on the job when the skill or feedback is applied to a real situation.

20% comes from feedback and from observing and working with role models.

10% of learning and development comes from formal training.

That means only ten percent of the students’ learning is coming from what is typically done in a classroom.

I work hard to include modeling and role models, so maybe my students get a 30% learning in my classes.

This is definitely something to think on more.

An interesting set of information in a fun visual.

The University of British Columbia has a self-assessment quiz on learning that, after you have taken it, offers interesting feedback. It specifically relates to online classes and talks about your answers in reference to that.

I think this would be a good quiz for everyone taking an online course to have.

For instance, I said that when I am in a group, I prefer others to be active and enthusiastic. Their response was “Online group work can be challenging at times. Ensure you set up some good strategies and processes for handling conflict and disagreements.”

And I said that when I am brainstorming, I like to share my ideas with others. Their response:

You likely approach new learning from an activist perspective. You may find that you will benefit through the use of real time chat or instant messaging to communicate with peers or your instructor on collaborative projects. This way of communicating tends to lend itself to a quick sharing of ideas and brainstorming on a particular issue.

Learning: 19 Scenarios from Everyday Life has some interesting things in it. How do people learn… to be afraid of lab coats.

You need to build a good repertoire of information throughout your course.

Obviously having a course that was perfect would be preferred. But I’m not sure most of us are up to that yet. However, if you are teaching a course, hopefully you already think it is good. So how do you make it better? You build it up, piece by piece.

If you try to focus on improving the whole course at one time, you will be overwhelmed. Even dedicated multitaskers can’t do that.

So start at the very beginning. (Yes, yes, I know. It’s a very good place to start.)

Work on a few key lessons.

Don’t literally start at the beginning necessarily. (If you need to start at the beginning, the University at Honolulu has some good ideas. And you can look through my available tips on the first day.)

Pick two or three lessons that need upgrading or could use upgrading. Think of them, if you need to, as a grad school project. If you had to turn them in as is, would you get a good grade? If not, go back and revamp them.

There are good ways to choose which lessons to upgrade.

If you are confused about where to start, go over your notes from your last syllabus. Look for places where the students were confused or the plan didn’t work.

If you haven’t taken notes on your syllabus, look at your last semester’s grade book. What grades were the lowest across your classes? If you find that students got consistently lower grades on a project, it will be an indicator of what you need to work on.

6 ways to improve your key lessons.

Once you have decided which lessons need the most revamping, and work on those.

How do you work on them?

One of the things I do is look through Google. If I’m talking about women in Beowulf-era England, I would google “women in Old English” and “Women Beowulf” and “status of women throughout British history.” Then I look through multiple pages, searching for something good or several good somethings.

Sometimes I will find a lecture on the topic I am searching for. Sometimes I find artwork or music. In this day of multiple literacies, this can add value to my class. Sometimes I find an activity or an exercise that is useful.

It will, of course, depend on how common your topic is and how much other people have done on it what you find. But that is a good place to start.

Another thing to do is go to your school library. You can go to the physical library for books or to the virtual one for journal databases.

Look through those resources for ideas, kernels of lessons, and other useful information.

Sometimes I find things that look interesting, but I am not sure what to do with them. When that happens, I copy whatever it is and stick it in a folder (either a physical one or one on my computer). Often it will only be a few weeks before other ideas which are related come through my orbit and I can use all of them to flesh out this tidbit.

Make your lectures more memorable. MIT has a good article on how to make your lectures better. They have both a developed essay and a shortened “quick and easy ideas list.”

Developing more usable lectures can improve your course, even when you don’t add any new material. Sometimes just a new way of presenting the same material makes it better.

Come up with new/different exercises. Sometimes a new way of presenting information makes it more memorable.

How many people loved studying grammar in school? Probably not very many people. But one teacher I work with has come up with a great way to make grammar more fun. She has created a Jeopardy-type game where the questions are related to grammar. The class plays it in groups of two or three, with each person in the group answering a question. She says the students really enjoy it.

If you’ve always had a writing assignment for a particular unit, maybe a change of venue would be good. Perhaps a blog post on the topic could be created and posted to the class website.

Or maybe you could change the type of assignment you give. Instead of having a small research project and a paper, maybe you could assign a small research project and an oral report.

Solicit suggestions from your students. If you are trying to come up with new ways to teach a particular subject, you might ask your students for ideas. They are the ones in your class and they’re the ones who know it best.

One way to do this would be after a unit, pass out index cards and ask the students to write the best part of the unit and the least enjoyable. It won’t take them two minutes and it might be of great benefit to you.

Another way is to ask them for ways to make the unit better. Give this as an extra credit assignment. Tell them you will take any suggestions, but that useful ones will be given more credit. Is there a song that’s perfect for this topic? Maybe they know one and you’ve never heard of it. Is there a piece of art that could be the visual introduction? Do they want to create something for the unit?

Getting your students involved helps them to own the course. It’s not just a class they’re taking, but it’s one they are creating.

Solicit other teachers’ ideas.

Chances are you are not the only one teaching your course. Take a colleague to lunch and solicit their suggestions.

Or approach them on campus and make an appointment to meet with them at their office. Ask them what they have found to work best in their class. THEN take them to lunch.

While great minds may think alike, new approaches can often come from this solicitation.

Continue to improve your course over time.

You’ve chosen a few key lessons to upgrade and you’ve done that. Now what? Don’t stop there. Every time you teach the course, choose two or three lessons to improve.

Within a few years, or semesters if you teach the course each semester, you will have a course that is head and shoulders above the one you are teaching now. The satisfaction that comes from doing your best will show in your attitude towards the class, too, thus improving it in another way.

Always be getting ready to update your course.

Keep a source of ideas, a blog, a notebook, a doc. Whenever you have a relevant idea, write it down. Then get it into your main resource as soon as possible.

This gives you a stash of good ideas for working on your courses. It also can help jumpstart your improvement when you hit a mental road block.

Keep your mind active.

Taking a course yourself or taking your research in a new direction, reading a new book on a topic or getting involved with faculty development helps keep your mind from atrophying.

If you are learning, your information will be fresh.

One way I found was useful when I first started out was taking teaching journals, reading them and copying any good ideas into a notebook. I still have and read through that notebook. I have probably 500 ideas from other people that I may have used and forgotten or never had the opportunity to use. It’s been a benefit to me throughout my teaching career.

Portland State Center for Academic Excellence has an excellent site with good points.

Plenty of Interaction!
Provide immediate and rich feedback to students. Students need reassurance that a real person is on the other end of the computer.
Threaded discussions are the most valuable part of your online class.
Provide motivation, support, and feedback for discussions by thanking students and summarizing points.
Student-to-student interaction is just as valuable as teacher-to-student interaction.
Provide clear policies on when and how you will be available. Let students know when you go on vacation or will be unavailable for a few days.

Engage the Learner
Create activities where students integrate new ideas with existing knowledge.
Students remember only 10% of what they read or see, but 80% of what they do and 90% of what they teach others.
Students can become overwhelmed by the vastness of resources on the Internet. Be specific when asking them to find resources on the web.
Make students responsible for their learning by asking them to summarize the weeks discussion, take a lead of a discussion, or teach others a concept.

According to their Instructional Design Handbook it should take about 120 hours to create an online course from scratch. That assumes you have designers/tech support helping you.

Listed below are some sites I looked at from which I learned something, but it wasn’t the point of what I was looking for.

This one is actually for universities or departments rather than people, but I learned something important from it.

Six Factors to Consider when Planning Online Distance Learning Programs in Higher Ed

• Visions and plans
• Curriculum
• Staff training and support
• Student services
• Student training and support
• Copyright and intellectual property

I learned something atrocious from this.  And it probably explains why the professors’ works that I’ve liked that have disappeared have not reappeared somewhere else.

When the authors are employed as full-time instructors, in legal terms, they are considered “work-for-hire,” and the college owns their work (lecture notes, exams, handouts) for 75 years from the date of publication or 100 years from the date the work was created, whichever is shorter (Janes, 1988).

Ouch.

Full-time instructors, though, have operated under an academic exception to the copyright act in which faculty own their own intellectual property. This is based on tradition, or practice, and is not a legal requirement.

The issues of copyright, fair use, and work for hire are all being reconsidered in this era of online distance learning. Instructors have been accustomed to the idea that they “own” their own work, even if they did not own it legally. Traditionally, when instructors changed colleges, they got to take their lecture notes, too. They could give away their lecture notes freely. Given actual copyright law, though, a part-time instructor can use the same lecture notes when teaching at two different institutions, but a full-time instructor legally may not. This also applies to online courses; they belong to the institution when a full-time instructor creates them. As courses are being put online, thereby becoming marketable, institutions are beginning to claim their rights to the copyright. Full-time instructors have no legal authority to keep the classes they write unless they negotiate for that right.

So, if I ever have an opportunity to plan a course when I am teaching, I need to first negotiate the rights to the course.  Otherwise I won’t be able to get it back in my lifetime.

five types of listening.

Research indicates that online, open book tests can be just as discriminating and can 
result in as much learning as traditional exams; therefore online unmonitored exams are  appropriate for the college classroom.  As Burke stated, “Most educators agree that  open­book tests are more challenging than traditional objective tests because they require high­order thinking skills rather than recall skills.  The greatest benefit from openbook testing may be that it encourages the type of thinking that will benefit students in the real world” (as cited in Beall, Shaw, & Seiler, 2005, sect. 1). 

[Some of this is a compilation of previous disparate posts.]
Sometimes we as teachers do not get to pick the textbooks. We don’t always like the ones that are chosen. So, when it is not our choice of text, what do we need to do?

What should we do with the text?

Use it. The students paid money for the book. Make sure it is integrated somehow into your classroom. Even if you didn’t choose the book and don’t like it particularly, there ought to be at least one section or one feature that you can take advantage of.

The book was chosen by someone in your department for a reason. Even if it wouldn’t have been your choice, there has to be redeeming features. Find them. Use them.

Then, when the work in the text is finished, let the students know they can go sell it back. That way, if the text is being used again, their texts will be purchased.

Do take advantage of the text you have.

There’s an old song “do what you do, do well.” I would modify this to “what you do well, do.” And you can use the text to help you with that.

What if my strengths aren’t supported in the text?

The texts I’ve usually taught from do not have case studies. That’s okay. I find them and supplement the text that way.

These stories make my teaching stronger because I am using my strengths to help my teaching.

I don’t know what your strengths are, but I am sure you have them. Use them in your classroom.

You can’t always ignore something because it isn’t your strength though.

I have found that the best thing for me to do is use the text when I can to shore up my weaknesses.

There may be things that are done well in the text that you don’t do as well in on your own. Use the text to help.

When I am talking about controversial issues, I don’t always remember what the best arguments are for both sides. But one of the texts I was required to use had readings that were in pairs: one for, one against. We would read those essays and, using them, begin a classroom discussion of the pros and cons of the issue.

It was a good use of the text (Tip 8 ) and it helped me do well at something that is one of my weaknesses.

Tip 3 also has a discussion on doing what you love.

What not to do with it

Don’t use the textbook as your lecture notes.

Your lectures should be more complete or, at least, different from the textbook. Do not use the textbook without supplementation. This doesn’t mean that you have to lecture, just use an activity or a project or an assignment that isn’t covered in the book.

I usually use the book, in a composition class, to introduce the basics. I hit the highlights in the book and make sure the students know that if they did not understand a portion of it, they can go back and read later. Then I introduce my assignments with handouts I have created or been given by others.

If you simply read the text, as I had teachers do, the students are wasting their money.

Don’t assign it as extraneous material. Make it an integral part of your course.

I have also had professors who assigned the book as a reading assignment and never discussed the information covered in the text. I figured that meant they hadn’t had a choice and were giving it to me to read so they wouldn’t be in trouble for not using it. I hated it.

If you have a textbook that you don’t love, find the best parts of it and integrate those into your syllabus. Use the text. Someone, at one time, went to a lot of trouble to put it together. And someone in your department thought it was worthwhile to use. And, most importantly for your students, they had to pay for that book, often more than $100 for a sometimes fairly simple text that has been out for twenty years. We don’t want our students to feel that our class is a waste. Let’s not give them an indication that the textbook is.

Don’t use only the text.

Find an angle that you can add.

It is all too easy to find the text, offer the info in the text, do the writing assignments in the text, and nothing else. The text is supposed to offer the students something amazing. (They’re paying $100+ for it after all.) But it shouldn’t be all there is. If they could just read the text, then you aren’t adding anything to the course.

Jakob Nielsen’s Alert Box has a good selection of information on reading online.

It gives research:

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (Update: a newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.)

and it tells how to take advantage of the research:

As a result, Web pages have to employ scannable text, using
highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
meaningful sub-headings (not “clever” ones)
bulleted lists
one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
half the word count (or less) than conventional writing
We found that credibility is important for Web users, since it is unclear who is behind information on the Web and whether a page can be trusted. Credibility can be increased by high-quality graphics, good writing, and use of outbound hypertext links.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article referring to Jakob Nielsen’s work.

The author isn’t too happy with reading online and what it has meant for our students.

Fast scanning doesn’t foster flexible minds that can adapt to all kinds of texts, and it doesn’t translate into academic reading. If it did, then in a 2006 Chronicle survey of college professors, fully 41 percent wouldn’t have labeled students “not well prepared” in reading (48 percent rated them “somewhat well prepared”). We would not find that the percentage of college graduates who reached “proficiency” literacy in 1992 was 40 percent, while in 2003 only 31 percent scored “proficient.” We would see reading scores inching upward, instead of seeing, for instance, that the percentage of high-school students who reached proficiency dropped from 40 percent to 35 percent from 1992 to 2005.

And we wouldn’t see even the better students struggling with “slow reading” tasks. In an “Introduction to Poetry” class awhile back, when I asked students to memorize 20 lines of verse and recite them to the others at the next meeting, a voice blurted, “Why?” The student wasn’t being impudent or sullen. She just didn’t see any purpose or value in the task. Canny and quick, she judged the plodding process of recording others’ words a primitive exercise. Besides, if you can call up the verse any time with a click, why remember it? Last year when I required students in a literature survey course to obtain obituaries of famous writers without using the Internet, they stared in confusion. Checking a reference book, asking a librarian, and finding a microfiche didn’t occur to them. So many free deliveries through the screen had sapped that initiative.

This is to say that advocates of e-learning in higher education pursue a risky policy, striving to unite liberal-arts learning with the very devices of acceleration that hinder it. Professors think they can help students adjust to using tools in a more sophisticated way than scattershot e-reading, but it’s a lopsided battle.

and we shouldn’t need them except for exceptionally slow students because everyone coming to college has graduated from high school or, at least, gotten their GED.

The Higher Education Roundup this week has an interesting section titled “Remedial Courses Cost Colleges and Taxpayers $2.3 Billion, a New Report States”

Nearly four out of five students who are required to take remedial courses in college had a high school grade point average of 3.0 or higher, according to a new report from Strong American Schools, a group advocating more rigorous academic standards in high school. The report, “Diploma to Nowhere,” calculates the cost of remediation, borne by colleges and taxpayers, to be between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion each year. Overall, the report states, more than one-third of college students take remedial courses. The rates are highest at community colleges, where 43 percent of students take remedial courses.

Good resources for teachers are available on the net

on preparing or revising a course

If the course is new to you and has never been offered before, review textbooks on the topic of the course. Reviewing textbooks will give you a sense of the main themes and issues that your course might address, which is especially useful if you are preparing a course outside your areas of specialization. (Source: Brown, 1978)
…
Identify the constraints in teaching the course. As you begin to design the course, ask yourself, How many hours are available for instruction? How many students will be enrolled? Are the students primarily majors or nonmajors? At what level? What material can I safely assume that students will know? What courses have they already completed? What courses might they be taking while enrolled in mine? Will readers or graduate student instructors be available? What sorts of technological resources will be in the classroom? (Sources: Brown, 1978; Ory, 1990)

on Principles of Adult Learning

Adults have accumulated a foundation of life experiences and knowledge that may include work-related activities, family responsibilities, and previous education. They need to connect learning to this knowledge/experience base. To help them do so, they should draw out participants’ experience and knowledge which is relevant to the topic. They must relate theories and concepts to the participants and recognize the value of experience in learning.
…
Adults are relevancy-oriented. They must see a reason for learning something. Learning has to be applicable to their work or other responsibilities to be of value to them. Therefore, instructors must identify objectives for adult participants before the course begins. This means, also, that theories and concepts must be related to a setting familiar to participants. This need can be fulfilled by letting participants choose projects that reflect their own interests.