Group Work that Works (Even in Large Classes!)

Ah, November. Crisp air, leaves turning colors and the looming dread of mediocre group papers and tedious group presentations through which we will soon suffer.  With finals on the horizon, we see rising levels of tension and resentment in our student groups, as good students assume more responsibility for their group’s final product, grinding their teeth as they feel forced to “carry” the slackers among them.

Next term, it doesn’t have to be this way.

There is a better design for group work that can stimulate the kind of engaged give-and-take discussion we want our students to have as they learn to use the intellectual tools of our disciplines.

We all want students to learn how to do our disciplines, but with exceptions like labs and field trips, the college classroom mostly prohibits us from involving students in real, raw disciplinary practice. What we can do in the classroom is give students practice making the kinds of decisions that we make in our disciplines—giving them what John Dewey calls “dramatic rehearsal” for real-world problem solving.  Our disciplines are, after all, defined by the kinds of questions they ask and how they go about answering those questions.

Bottom line:  effective group assignments do not require students to collectively author a paper or make a presentation. Writing and presenting are often individual tasks, and charging a group with these tasks, without special guidance on how to perform them, is to set up yourself (and your students) up for frustration and mediocrity.  On the contrary, effective group assignments simply give groups a set of data and require them to make a difficult decision, much like a courtroom jury is given a great deal of complex information and asked to render a “guilty or not guilty” decision.  In this format, student energy is focused on analyzing different pieces of evidence, weighing their merits against one another, and using the concepts from your discipline to argue toward a “best” conclusion together.

Instead of “group projects” think of these as “application activities” taking the form: “Given X, students must decide Y.” Of course, X and Y will vary based upon your discipline, topic and learning goal, but experience has provided a few basic principles for how these activities can best be carried out. Each of these principles starts with the letter S, so we have come to call these “Four S Activities.”

1. Significant Problem

Students should work on a problem, case, or question demonstrating a concept’s usefulness so they understand its impact. Instead of asking students to discuss some abstract set of conceptual distinctions, embed those distinctions within a set of concrete circumstances that would be likely to occur within your discipline. The idea here is to create a case study that grounds the experience in sets of details that would matter in your discipline.

2. Specific choice

Within the case, students should be required to use course concepts to make a decision (With which of the following three statements would Foucault most likely agree? Should the company buy, lease, or rent a fleet of trucks? Were Carnegie and Rockefeller “Robber Barons” or “Captains of Industry”? Which part of this bridge design is the most dangerous?). Groups can be required to generate short, written rationales for their choice, but groups must first be required to take a position.

3. Same problem

Students should all work on the same problem, case, or question so they will care about what other groups think about it and energetically engage each other around the course content.  If my group had one question and your group had another, I’ll have invested no energy in the details of your question and will probably tune out while you talk about it. However, if our groups addressed the same question but came to different conclusions, then I will want to hear what thinking led your group down a different path than the one mine took.

4. Simultaneous reporting

If possible, students should report choices at the same time so differences in group conclusions are not smoothed out by “answer drift” and can be explored. It can be a powerful instructional experience when a minority of students in the room actually come to a better answer than the rest, and when answers are reported sequentially, students in the minority can be strongly tempted to change their answers as their minority status becomes clearer.

Simultaneous reporting can take many forms:  from simple methods like pointing to one wall, the ceiling, or the other wall—to more sophisticated methods like having groups hold up cards indicating their choice (A,B,C,D), or even posting their answers and brief rationales on the classroom wall so they can “gallery walk” the thinking of other teams.  ”Clickers” are used by many teachers to achieve the simultaneous reporting effect.

Simultaneous Report

The best application activities not only stimulate intra-team discussion, they also stimulate inter-team discussion once the groups have reported their decisions. When all groups report their decisions, the teacher’s job is then to facilitate conversation among the groups to compare how and why they thought differently and came to different decisions. This is why simultaneous report is so important: when groups report simultaneously, differences between decisions are candidly revealed and can be explored by encouraging teams to explain the rationales for their choices to one another.

Some teachers use cases that clearly have a right answer and grade teams accordingly, some teachers do not grade choices but instead grade rationales given, and some teachers use ungraded application assignments when they feel the discussion itself is valuable enough to have in its own right.

These application activities are part of Team-Based Learning (TBL), an increasingly-popular  form of collaborative learning in higher education.  Team-Based Learning  interlocks and amplifies students’ social and intellectual experience of the classroom unlike any other form of group work.  To see it for yourself, you can watch a video with real footage of TBL in action here: http://www.utexas.edu/academic/ctl/teaching/tblvideo.php

Do You Talk Too Much? Tips for Facilitating Classroom Discussions

By: Maryellen Weimer in Effective Teaching Strategies

Discussion is a staple in most teachers’ repertoire of strategies, but it frequently disappoints. So few students are willing to participate and they tend to be the same ones. The students who do contribute often do so tentatively, blandly, and pretty much without anything that sounds like interest or conviction. On some days it’s just easier to present the material.

When describing the problems with discussion, it’s good to remind ourselves that all too often faculty are part of the problem. Our principal offense? We talk too much.

A chapter in the book referenced below offers six pointers—all aimed at helping us control how much we contribute while at the same time we improve the overall climate for discussion in a class.

1. Learn to draw out contributions—Ask a question and wait. Do not fill the silence with your opinions and views, thinking that your comments will prime the pump and get the class going. Rather, this action demonstrates that if students don’t speak, you will. Students will happily wait you out. Instead, you should wait and while waiting, look confident. Establish eye contact with whomever might be looking. Offer encouragement and let the question stand. If you feel as though the silence may be the death of you, ask a question about the question.

2. Learn to withdraw and attend to managing the discussion—Because we are leaders in the classroom and experts to boot, and because we regulate and control the flow of communication, we easily fall into being in charge of the discussion as well. “However, in the interest of fostering discussion, it will be better if much of the time you refrain from doing so, for nothing suppresses potentially fruitful discussion as quickly or as thoroughly as professors who hold the floor and treat student contributions as springboards for their own comments.” (p. 60)

3. Learn to hold back your own thoughts—Often the answers that students give to open-ended questions are not very good. The ideas are stated without a lot of clarity, the opinion is not supported with much evidence, or the viewpoint is not logically coherent. Teachers are very motivated to correct and improve those answers—that’s our job! But the climate for discussion is improved when a teacher asks the student to explain something in more detail or when the teacher defers to the rest of the class, asking, for example, “Is there anything anyone would like Sarah to clarify?” (p. 61).

Reference: Laing, D. “Nurturing Discussion in the Classroom.” In Smith, K., (ed) Teaching, Learning, Assessing: A Guide for Effective Teaching at College and University. Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 2007

Teaching and Grading Group Assignments

Teaching and Grading Group Assignments

Group assignments are another area where faculty in our workshops raise many questions. When you assign several students to produce a major assignment together you will have to consider not only the quality of the task they complete but also the effectiveness of their interaction. If one of your course objectives is that students will learn to work altogether with colleagues, then teach them how. The steps are the same as for teaching and grading discussion:

* Provide criteria and instructions.

* Provide opportunities for practice and feedback.

Here are suggestions for guiding group processes:

* Begin with instructions and guidelines for group work. Address the ways in which groups could go astray.

* Construct a rubric by which the groups will be evaluated.

* Have groups compose and sign a written agreement, at the beginning of their work together, that details what all of them will be responsible for (for example, being on time for meetings, completing their share of the work by certain deadlines, communicating regularly with other group members) and what each will do (Mary will research this part; John will research this part; Ling-Chi will produce the first full draft; Jamal will edit the draft).

* Ask the group to appoint people to certain roles: record keeper, convener, and others.

* Ask the group for frequent feedback to you and to each other.  At the end of each meeting, whether online or face-to-face, group members can write to one another what they thought was successful about the group meeting and what they thought needed improvement.  Responses can be shared with you, and you can step in quickly if the group is struggling.

Ask a recorder to post or submit to you a record of the group's activities. When did they get together? Who was present? What did each person do? What progress was made? What problems arose, and how did the group address them? What do they need from you, if anything?

* Schedule a face-to-face or synchronous online meeting with each group at intervals to check the group's progress and interaction. At these meeting, anyone who feels another group member is not doing his or her
share should say so right here in the group so the issue can be discussed and you can facilitate.

We find in our workshops a number of faculty who want to grade students' contribution to the group as part of their grade for the project, but the faculty members don't know quite how to structure the grading. An obvious method is to ask students to report on, or even grade, other students' contributions. But think again whether this will supply the information you are looking for. Asking students to evaluate one another's contributions to the group can make you into the parent and the students into the tattling siblings. Group members may deliberately or subconsciously collude to cover up inequality of effort just to avoid conflict. Or the group may discount the contributions of women, historically underrepresented groups, or persons with disabilities--prejudices that turn up regularly in the research literature, so likely are present in your classroom as well. We suggest that you do not merely have students evaluate one another's group contributions at the end of the project. Spread the evaluation throughout the process, anchor it to behavior, be present as facilitator and listener, and help the group address any difficulties early on.

The guidance we have suggested helps you be the coach along the way, helps students raise workload and interaction issues while they can still be addressed, and results in ongoing, not just end point, information to you about how the groups are doing. 

What If They All Get A's?

Faculty members in workshops sometimes raise the possibility that if they teach what they are grading. more students will meet the highest criteria for student performance. You'd think this would be a good thing, but some faculty operate in environments where they fear they will be in trouble if they give too many A grades. In this special kind of case, where grades in your own class are rising because students are doing better work, you have two choices. The first is to raise the standards so that it takes more to get an A. Students are getting better teaching, so they should be performing at a higher level. A second option is to keep the standard the same, give an A to all students who reach the standard, and then, if you are questioned about it, be ready to show your department head or promotion tenure committee some samples of your assignments and tests, together with student work that earned an A and work that earned a B. You can begin a discussion on this topic in which you are open to the other person's ideas, and the other person has a chance to see what you are doing. 

 

University of Oregon 

Teaching Effectiveness Program

Scheduling Course Work in Ways Which Encourage Students to Stay Up-to-date in Their Work

by Michael Theall, Youngstown State University

Background

Faculty often express interest in having students learn basic knowledge, understand major concepts, develop problem solving and critical thinking skills, acquire professional habits and attitudes, and become committed to lifetime learning. One thing that is less frequently mentioned is the need to create conditions under which these objectives can be most effectively achieved. Within this general category, lies an important practical skill: time management, which is one component of "self regulation" (1). While teachers put careful thought into how to fill the available time in a course, they sometimes do not consider or accurately estimate the amount of time that students will need to complete the assigned work. For many students the ability to manage coursework and balance it against other activities is the difference between success and failure. In fact, a major review of research on the effects of college (2) considered the impact of working (holding a job) on academic performance. Interestingly, the finding was that while working reduced the time available to do coursework, there was no significant difference in academic performance between those who worked and those who did not. The authors attribute this lack of difference to the possibility that, "...employment provides a context in which they (students) acquire efficient organizational skills and work habits" (p.
133). Thus, the critical issue seems to be how well one manages one's time rather than how much time is available. It seems important then, that teachers provide structures and models of effective work that encourage students to carefully balance their course work and other obligations. To use the common expression, teachers should help students to "work smart, not just work hard."

Helpful Hints

Research on the dimensions of college teaching provides powerful evidence of the importance of helping students to organize their time. With respect to student achievement, the most strongly correlated teaching dimensions are organization and clarity. When teachers make clear how topics fit and how the assigned work can be efficiently carried out, they help students to construct accurate schemas and clarify the structure of the discipline. The result is better student learning and increased student satisfaction because that learning becomes more apparent. Provide an organizational structure that helps students plan and carry out coursework. This not only keeps students on task, but it is also motivational in that it demonstrates that the teacher wants to promote deep learning rather than busy work and surface learning. For example, break work down into manageable chunks and suggest progress benchmarks so that students have the greatest chance for consistent success. In Keller's description of a motivational design of instruction, key elements involve creating conditions that promote positive expectations and provide opportunities for success. Helping students to stay organized and on task are two such conditions.

A complete syllabus with clear timelines is a solid beginning. Reinforcing the syllabus with regular checkpoints via class dialogue, e-mail, or other communications will help. Personal contact with students who are lagging behind is absolutely necessary. Using collaborative or group work provides a way for students to help each other (as long as the group work is itself organized and supervised). A very useful technique is to ask students, from early in the course, how they plan to organize their time and what they will do to most efficiently carry out the work. An early exploration of these issues will enhance students' investments in the course and raise issues that might otherwise be
missed.

Assessment Issues

Assessments addressing this item are somewhat different than those used to determine more typical cognitive or affective outcomes. Angelo and Cross offer some methods for determining the success of assignments (pp. 343-361), but other options more specifically addressing workload, currency of work, and the extent to which students understand the "why" and "how" as well as the "what" of assignments can be very useful. Some research has demonstrated that when students understand the rationale for assignments and when they see value in doing the work, they are more motivated to do the work carefully. As this understanding increases, so do students' positive opinions about the course and the teacher. Three techniques can be helpful. First, an adaptation of the Small Group Instructional Diagnosis (SGID) process can assess the degree to which students are keeping up. Second, the use of electronic communications available in course management systems can provide a way for students to report difficulties and for the teacher to monitor progress. Third, and most important, conduct regular dialogues with individuals and the class about progress. The instructor's personal involvement (in casual conversations, e-mail, or class dialogue) in keeping students on track demonstrates both concern for student progress and the importance of the work. It is necessary for students to "learn the material," but often it is equally important to provide guidelines for "learning how to learn," that demonstrate how to best manage course workload and meet deadlines.

References

(1) Pintrich, P. R. (Ed.). (1995). Understanding self-regulated learning. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 63. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

(2) Pascarella, E. J., & Terenzini, P. (2005). How college affects students: A third decade of research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

(3) Feldman, K. A. (1989). The association between student ratings of specific instructional dimensions and student achievement: Refining and extending the synthesis of data from multisection validity studies. Research in Higher Education, 30, 583-645.

(4) Fink, L. D. (2003). Creating significant learning experiences. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

(5) Entwistle, N., & Tait, H. (1994). Approaches to studying and perceptions of the learning environment across disciplines. In N. Hativa & M. Marincovich (Eds.), "Disciplinary differences in teaching and learning: Implications for practice." New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 64. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

(6) Keller, J. M. (1983). Motivational design of instruction. In C. M. Riegeluth (Ed.) Instructional design theories and models: An overview of their current status. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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

(8) Franklin, J., & Theall, M. (1995). The relationship of disciplinary differences and the value of class preparation time to student ratings of instruction. In N. Hativa & M. Marincovich, (Eds.) "Disciplinary differences in teaching and learning: Implications for practice. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 64. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

(9) Clark, D. J., & Bekey, J. (1979). Use of small groups in instructional evaluation. Insight Into Teaching Excellence. 7(1), 2-5. Arlington, TX: University of Texas at Arlington.

IDEA Paper No. 40: Getting Students to Read: Fourteen Tips, Hobson
IDEA Paper No. 41: Student Goal Orientation, Motivation, and Learning, Svinicki
IDEA Paper No. 42: Integrated Course Design, Fink
IDEA Paper No. 27: Writing a Syllabus, Altman and Cashin

©2005 The IDEA Center This document may be reproduced for educational/training activities.

Ideas for Quiet Discussion

Passed- Paper Conversation

Students begin class by writing their response to a prompt (or prompts) on the board. (It helps to use an extra long piece of paper and provide students with a set of directions. See example) When a student is finished, they make eye contact with another student who is done and exchange papers. The student reads the paper she’s exchanged for her own and then writes her response, in the form of questions, connections, or observations. Then the process is repeated as many times as you like. Finally, the long piece of paper with this rich discussion goes back to the originator of the thread. Each student is responsible for writing a summary and synthesis of the discussion spurred by their initial response.

Example:

Directions for First Silent Activity (Read through all of the instructions before you begin.)

1. Please conduct this exercise in silence.

2. Beneath these instructions you will find a sheet entitled “Silence” containing three questions. Use the extra sheets attached for your answers. Answer each question on a separate sheet as others will be adding their written responses to what you say. Please put your name on each sheet.

3. When you are finished responding to the questions, silently exchange your papers with someone.

4. Read through your partner’s answers and add your comments and questions. Questions are particularly effective in helping this silent “conversation” go deeper.

5. If at any point you finish early, begin reading the two articles you will find underneath the sheets for our first activity.

6. When you have finished responding to a partner, exchange your papers again with someone else, read what is written, comment and question.

7. When this activity is completed, we will do a verbal debrief.

Paused discussion

This is very similar to a typical discussion, except that there is a pause of 45 seconds to a minute between each contribution. After a student is done speaking, everyone is silent. Students either write or think silently until the facilitator says, “ Okay,” and then another student can contribute. The advantage of this kind of conversation is that it allows students who process non-verbally to slow the conversation and gather their thoughts. It also allows verbal processors to develop their listening skills. They practice processing silently, writing down their reactions and often feel less urgent about sharing these reactions and more willing to cede conversation time to quieter students.

A Thousand Words

Every student brings or produces an object, image, sound, etc. that is representative of an important concept, relationship, or issue. The images/objects are displayed gallery style. At that point every student has “spoken.” There are several directions you can go with this exercise.

1) Each student could have a stack of post-its and they could write notes, commentary or responses about these objects and post them around the objects.

2) Ask students to pick one object or image and explain what they see as the connection to the concept .

3) You can begin a general discussion by choosing an object or image and asking, for example, “What does a rubber band have to do with the teaching/learning relationship?”

Teaching Effectiveness Program
University of Oregon

Constructing Evaluation Instruments

The posting below gives some excellent advice on constructing evaluation instruments and their uses in testing and grading. The author is Stanford C. Ericksen.

Testing and Grading

Fair play is the first and final requirement in matters of testing and grading. Students will accept pressures for hard work but object strenuously and rightly so, to signs of unfairness in a teacher's assessment of their efforts. Being an expert in an area of subject matter and having the speaking skills required for teaching are quite different dimensions of professional competence than are the abilities to construct discriminating examinations and to assign valid grades. Improvement on the part of instructors in the areas of testing and grading is nearly always in order.

An important distinction must be made between evaluation and grading. Evaluation is information provided to the student about particular aspects of what was said or done during the effort to learn, to solve a problem, or to organize and integrate facts and concepts. As they move into unknown intellectual territory, students must have guideposts to confirm that they are moving in the right direction. The qualitative comments about particular aspects of a term paper are far more constructive aids for the specifics of learning and remembering than is the grade on the cover page. Evaluation, therefore, is indispensable to students for gaining understanding and to fix what is learned in memory. A grade, on the other hand, is a gross index which typically comes too late for the student to take corrective measures about the specifics of learning.

A few guidelines about testing and grading can help instructors to: (1) strengthen the process of instruction, (2) clarify the diagnostic value of testing, (3) make a fair assessment of what each student knows, and (4) report this achievement through grades.

Testing as a Tool for Instruction

Students tend to concentrate their study effort in preparation for an exam, and they structure this effort in anticipation of the nature of the questions they will be asked. If students anticipate the need to know unassimilated facts, they will concentrate on memorizing information; if they expect to be asked to integrate, extend, and evaluate information, they will try to prepare themselves along those lines. The management of testing is an opportunity for the instructor to underline the essential elements making up the course.

As a matter of fact, a program for the orientation and training of beginning college teachers could well be geared to the interdependence among: the objectives of a course, the sequence of topics (and their classroom presentation), and the manner in which this can be assessed by means of tests, papers, and special projects. I recall a science professor whose overriding goal was "to teach students to think like a scientist thinks" but whose tests were almost solely measures of how well students memorized. He changed his exams to emphasize integration of material, and everyone felt better about the course.

The Diagnostic Use of Tests

Placement testing is commonly used at the department and college level, but within our own courses we can also make effective use of similar testing for making a grade-free diagnostic appraisal of what information is already known by the students or is not known but should be. Diagnostic testing is an excellent instructional tool because when a student says, in effect, "I don't see why the question was scored that way," an inquiry is started toward unscrambling the false connections. In this close-up look, the teacher may note a pattern of mistakes showing a misunderstanding of a particular rule, procedure, or principle. It may also appear that a student has the right answer but for the wrong reasons.

A diagnostic test is a sort of intellectual X-ray showing the strengths and weaknesses in a student's inventory of information, understanding, and skill. The evaluative emphasis is on the responses to individual test items, on information prerequisite for understanding the larger concepts and procedures in this particular course of study.

When students realize the significance to themselves of grade-free probing, they are more likely to open up and reveal low points in their preparation profile, anxieties, misconceptions and deficiencies in knowing how to do certain tasks. A sprinkling of short, diagnostic quizzes early in the term suggests to students that the teacher cares about how they are doing and is taking corrective steps to help them along - an excellent climate for starting the semester.

Assessing Achievement

Although test scores in any setting are affected by students' aptitude, study skills, motivation, background preparation, and the influence of the teacher, our classroom examinations should be designed primarily to measure subject-matter achievement. To this end, the teacher and student seek the same wavelength within an assigned domain of knowledge. A frustrated student expressed a contrary state of affairs quite clearly, "I don't like to play the professor's game: I've got a secret, see if you can guess what it is."

Effective classroom instruction is central to student learning, but students are short-changed if the examinations are trivial, irrelevant, confusing and tangential to the substance of the course. College teaching is not complete without an accurate and fair assessment of students' achievement during the term and at its conclusion.

Objective Tests

Objective (machine-scorable) tests are almost mandatory in large classes, but constructing such instruments is a demanding task. Although it is tempting for teachers to make use of commercially available examinations, to pull old tests from the file, or to overuse test items taken from a teacher's manual, students are best served when their instructors develop exams tailored to their specific course and based on sound principles.

Two basic concepts need to guide the development of classroom examinations:

1. Validity refers to whether an instrument measures what it is supposed to measure. A valid test, therefore, samples what students should have learned from your course offering. It measures here and-now achievement rather than, for example, how well a student reads or how much information the student had gained outside the course. Test items about minutiae and footnote information are temptingly easy to put together but lack the validity of questions that elicit a student's understanding of key concepts, important factual data, and relevant procedures. A valid test is an unambiguous reflection of what is worth knowing and remembering.

2. Reliability refers to the consistency of an instrument's results. A good short quiz is better than a poorly constructed long test but, assuming equal quality of items, a 50-item test is more reliable (stable, consistent) than a 10-item quiz. The random errors due to ambiguous wording, idiosyncratic interpretations, distractions, and other flaws are more likely to cancel out in the longer test, resulting in a more dependable total score. Thus, the easiest way to reduce the unreliability in the measuring instrument is simply to increase the length of the test.

Objective tests come in many forms, but the multiple-choice format carries most of the burden. When carefully worded, multiple-choice items can probe a student's understanding of factual information, skills and procedures, concrete and abstract concepts, and the implications from different scales of values. (True-false items are altogether too constrained to be effective discriminators for most college courses.)

To strengthen the quality of the set of items used, a complete item analysis should be made of each new test. This test-of-the-test is mainly to determine and adjust the difficulty level of each item. It is normal to find that many of our carefully conceived questions turn out to be too easy or too difficult or just seem to ride along as excess baggage. Such items use valuable testing time but add little to the discriminating power of the test. They don't help to separate the top group of students from the bottom group of achievers.

Because ambiguity of meaning is a persistent problem, the wording of test items is critical. Careful editing of the draft exam includes close attention to such pitfalls as cluing the right answer, overlapping correct alternatives, or asking for a positive answer to a negative question. Good test items are parsimonious in meaning and simple in wording. It is surprising how quickly excess words can lead to double meaning or obscure the correct answer. It is appropriate, however, to expand the stem - the lead-in statement of the multiple-choice question - by using a relevant quotation or making reference to a particular body of factual data.

Score the test in a straightforward manner, e.g., in terms of the number of right answers. Trying to adjust (punish) for guessing may, in effect, simply open further sources of variability. Combining raw scores from different performance measures, i.e., tests, term papers, class participation, special projects, etc., can easily distort your original intention. The statistical solution is to convert the different measures to a common scale through the use of some type of standard-score scale.

Subjective Evaluation

The distinctive value of essay exams or term papers is the freedom they offer for students to probe and develop the personal meaning of ideas and to express these thoughts in their own words. To organize an integrated chain of thought, to elaborate on findings, and to communicate ideas to others are stronger tests of achievement than is the recognition or recall of isolated units of information.

1. Essay Exams. In an essay examination, the student is staring at a blank page and generating, from within, a complicated sequence of responses aimed at organizing a meaningful unit of knowledge. This ability to recall is a more demanding test of memory than simply to recognize something. As essay examination elicits the ability to retrieve information but with little help from presently given cues. The perceptive teacher (reader) can evaluate the strong and weak points in a written argument even when the student's perception of a question differs from the teacher's. Evaluative permissiveness can, of course, go only so far.

A steady and unwavering evaluative state of mind is difficult to sustain when reading page after page through a set of exams. Three procedural controls help to reduce the evaluating drift: (1) turn under the front (name) page to forestall confounding effects from those students we particularly like or dislike; (2) read one question at a time through the entire set of exam booklets; (3) shuffle the order of the booklets periodically to balance the inevitable effects of reader fatigue or an emerging tilt toward one pattern of answers.

2. Term Papers. In some respects, the term paper is the essence of what a student has gained from the course. It sets forth what the individual student has learned and how the student has pulled together all the information for comprehension and understanding. This, in turn, serves to keep the knowledge available in long-term memory.

A written handout is a useful guide regarding the due date, length, use of references, comments about style, and any other restrictions or suggestions about the assignment. It may, for example, be helpful to remind students about the difference between describing versus analyzing events and ideas. The heavy task of reading these papers is counterbalanced, somewhat, by the satisfaction of reading the better papers - some of which can be truly exciting.

Grading a stack of exams and papers is a time consuming and pressured task because, throughout, the matter of fair play is squarely on the back of the reader. By way of evaluation, the teacher should indicate in some detail the rationale for assigning the gross grade, making specific reference to identified parts of the exam or paper. The instructional value of essay exams and term papers is practically wiped out if the student receives nothing back other than the grade.

Grading

Faculty standards for A-grade performance define the meaning of excellence within the university. We must guard the criteria of achievement, since everyone pays the price of academic inflation when these standards are lowered. Students work hard for grades because "making the grade" is personally rewarding and is an important basis for special awards, admission to advanced training, and employment prospects ' With such payoff potential it is unfair for a teacher to be casual or careless in assigning this index of achievement. Judgments about professional competence must take into account the quality of a teacher's procedures for testing and grading.

There are two basic options available to instructors for grading student achievement:

1. Norm-referenced grading, more commonly referred to as grading-on-the-curve, sets the scale of achievement by the average level of class performance. Students basically compete against one another in this approach.

2. Criterion -referenced grading has the teacher measuring the students against some absolute standard with respect to what they are expected to learn. The competition here is between the student and mastery of a finite body of knowledge.

In practice, these two approaches overlap and merge since a teacher's judgment about levels of achievement is influenced by the levels of student performance with which one is accustomed at a given school. Also, the departmental culture enters into the picture, because a teacher's procedures and standards for testing and grading are expected to fall in line with the traditions or policies of the home department.

The danger in grading-on-the-curve is its diminishment of the teacher's responsibility for evaluating the students' level of understanding against his or her preset criteria of subject-matter achievement. The final examination, for example, is a revealing statement sampling the information and skills the teacher believes should be carried from the course.

With criterion-referenced grading, there is the danger that the instructor may set the expected level of achievement unrealistically high or low, with the result that students perceive the exam as inappropriate and unfair.

Grades serve the academic purpose of showing intellectual achievement in a limited domain defined by books, teachers, laboratories, and the like. They are not designed to predict success in the off-campus setting where special weight may be given to information, aptitudes, and personal characteristics extending beyond the boundaries of teachers and their courses. Only indirectly or on occasion, do grades reflect a student's tolerance for stress, independent decision-making, congeniality in human relations, ability to cope with unexpected problems, and the like. Teachers can best sustain the credibility of the grading system by making their assessments reflect as fairly as possible how well each student has achieved the stated objectives of the course.

Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching

from Chapter 12, Common Problems, in the book: On Course - A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching, by James M. Lang

Q: How do I handle rude student behavior in my classroom-talking, laughing, getting up and down during class?

"No experience of new faculty as teachers," writes Robert Boice, "is so dramatic and traumatizing as facing unruly, uninvolved students-especially in the large, introductory courses traditionally assigned to newcomers" (81). Undoubtedly true; equally troublesome, with the omnipresence of laptops and wireless-enabled classrooms, are students spending class time shopping for shoes online, rather than taking notes (see following question).

Two major points here. First, rude student behavior often comes about because of what's happening at the front of the classroom. If students are talking and reading the student newspaper during the lecture, sending e-mails, or IMing their friends, your lectures may be boring. If students are chit-chatting with each other during the discussion, you may not be asking interesting questions. A well-taught class is the best preventive measure you can take to counter what Boice calls as "student incivilities." His research on this issue suggests that newcomers face student incivilities at much higher rates than highly rated teachers with years of classroom experience (81-98). Fortunately for you, you are doing the work right now to become a highly rated teacher, and following the prescriptions of this book-and other preparatory work you do for your first semester-will be the best measure you can take against poor behavior.

However students, like the rest of the population, can be just rude idiots, so sometimes your best teaching efforts won't be enough to eliminate such behaviors. You won't know always know about students surfing the internet in class, but you will certainly know about noisy and rude students. When that happens, you can either shame such students by calling them on the behavior in front of their peers, or you can find ways to discuss their behavior with them in private. My non-confrontational personality, coupled with a dozen years of teaching and raising children, have convinced me that the latter route is the better one for correcting poor behavior. When identifiable students are acting uncivilly in your classroom (however you may define such activity), you can stop them after class and give them the standard lines you would expect to give-that such behavior makes it difficult for you and other students to concentrate, and so on. You can also ask them to come see you in your office, and discuss it there, if you think they require a more serious dressing down. A third method that I have used is to append a P.S. to one of my final comments on their papers, addressing the behavior and asking them to improve it or to come see me in my office. Calling them on the behavior privately like this has always worked for me. If you try this and it doesn't have the desired effect, check with your chair; seriously persistent and disruptive behavior should be observed by a senior faculty or administrator so that you won't suffer for it in your teaching evaluations (and they may be able to intervene with the students).

Q: Students have their laptops, cell phones, PDAs, and what-have-you on in my classroom, and whenever I step out into the seats I can see that half of them are shopping for shoes or downloading music or text messaging their friends. Some students have cell phones going off in class. What can I do about this?

A: This is probably the most annoying problem we will all face in the future, so best to consider it now and decide how you want to handle it. The solutions seem to me different for different sized-classes. In small classes, twenty or thirty or less, you need to have a strong physical presence in the classroom. You should be using interactive teaching methods in classes that size, of course, and such methods give you an opportunity to move out into the seats, work your way around the classroom, and let students know that at any given moment you will be standing behind them, seeing whatever they have on their desk or laptop. Do not isolate yourself in the front of the classroom; you command the entire space of the classroom, and you need to make yourself felt at every desk. You don't need to be in constant motion, of course; student awareness of your mobility will go a long way towards keeping them on task.

In larger lecture classrooms and auditoria, you can still do some of this, but the problems will be worse here. So you have two choices, and neither of them are ideal: learn to live with a certain amount of technological distraction, or ban the technologies that are disrupting your classroom. If you choose option one, it doesn't mean you should do nothing. At the very least, you should discuss the inappropriate use of technology in the classroom at the beginning of the semester, and perhaps even include on the syllabus a technology warning like the one cited by Michael Bujega in a Chronicle essay on this subject:

If your cellular phone is heard by the class you are responsible for completing one of two options: 1. Before the end of the class period you will sing a verse and chorus of any song of your choice or, 2. You will lead the next class period through a 10-minute discussion on a topic to be determined by the end of the class. (To the extent that there are multiple individuals in violation, duets will be accepted).

Whether you use humor in such a warning or not, including an admonition on the syllabus gives you an excuse to discuss the use of technology with students in the classroom, and to help the conscientious (but perhaps clueless) students see how to comport themselves more appropriately.

However, if you are teaching in a large wireless classroom, facing a sea of laptops, and you are convinced that the vast majority of the students are not listening to your scintillating words, then don't hesitate to ban laptops, either outright or for specific parts of the session. No student has a constitutional right to bring a laptop to class, so you have every right to forbid them (you might announce that you will make special provisions for students with disabilities, however). Don't feel bad about it; students have been taking notes with pencil and paper for many hundreds of years; it won't kill them. A less stringent option would be to allow or encourage laptops for specific activities in class-asking students to join you in reviewing a website or program you have scouted for them in advance, or working with them on a program or problem-but then asking them to close the laptops for the fifteen-minute lecture module you have planned for the end of the class, when you will be summarizing the main idea of the day.

Remember-you are in charge. As Bujega concludes at the end of his essay on inappropriate technology in the classroom, "despite digital distractions, large classes, decreased budgets, and fewer tenured colleagues, professors still are responsible for turning students on to learning. To do so, we just may have to turn off the technology."

Q: Students are not coming to class, or they come late. Do I leave those choices up to them, since they are adults, or do I become an enforcer and start each class with a daily quiz?

An article on poor attendance in college and university courses, which appeared in the spring of 2007 on insidehighered.com and provoked a massive outpouring of responses, offered a bleak picture of this issue. The article included the following statistics on attendance and tardiness patterns:
A 2005 survey of first-year undergraduate students by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles showed that while a majority of college students spend 11 or more hours in class per week, 33 percent reported skipping class and 63 percent said they come to class late "occasionally" or "frequently."A similar survey showed that the proportion of students who report coming late to class has jumped from 48 percent in 1966 to 61 percent in 2006 - evidence, one could argue, of a growing indifference to class in general.

I'm going to start sounding like a bit of a skipping CD here, but the first principle is to ensure that you are creating a classroom experience which students could not duplicate by copying someone else's lecture notes, or by listening to a recording of your lecture. Students, in other words, should play a role in the classroom. If you are giving students a role to play-through discussions, group work, in-class writing, problem-solving, and so on-then you have every right to say that the success of the course depends upon the presence of the students, and to require that presence. If you are standing in front of a podium and lecturing for fifty minutes, then I'm with the tardy and missing students on this one-why should they come to class, when they can get the same material more efficiently, and in the comfort of their dorm rooms, from other means?

As long as you are offering a class worth attending, which depends upon students for its success, then you should not hesitate to drop the hammer on late and absent students. Take whatever measures seem appropriate to you, from locking the door at the start of class to giving daily quizzes at the opening of class, from calling tardy students to the carpet as they walk in the door to penalizing students who miss more than three classes on their final grade. Consult the article on insidehighered.com for more ideas on combating this problem, and especially the responses that follow.

Q: I have trouble remembering the names of my own children; the prospect of remembering the names of several sets of twenty or thirty or forty undergraduates each year just seems impossible. Can I call on them as "red baseball cap" or "kid who plagiarized" or "crewcut" just to keep things simple for me?

A: I did know a teacher who managed this successfully, actually. At the beginning of the semester he hit upon some aspect of a student's appearance or mannerisms, gave them a nickname linked to it, and then referred to him or her in that manner in class. He pulled it off because he was eccentric and had a great sense of humor, and did not use offensive or embarassing nicknames (i.e., no one was nicknamed "baldie" or anything). The potential ways in which this practice could go bad are so numerous, though, that I really wouldn't recommend it.

Mary McKinney, a clinical psychologist who counsels academics on career issues, addressed this problem in an essay for the online academic news site insidehighered.com, and described there more than a dozen techniques for learning the names of students-her list is worth consulting, and is available online for free (see below for reference). The one that I like best, number twelve, may be the simplest. Every time a student asks a question or speaks in class, ask them for their name; repeat the name somehow in the answer-"Jane asks an important question here . . ."-and if that question or your response to it comes up in class again, associate it once again with her name: "You'll remember that Jane asked us this question last week . . ." The more times you repeat the name, the more likely you will be to remember it. This technique has the bonus benefit of affirming the importance of student contributions in your classroom, making visible to them how their ideas are woven into the fabric of the lectures and discussions. Classes of fifty or more obviously do not require you to learn everyone's name, but don't abandon names altogether. Learn any names you can, but don't fret about not having comprehensive coverage.

- University of Oregon, Teaching Effectiveness Program

A Handout for Students on How to Study

Adapted from How to Study by Ronald C. Blue

How to get started:

Survey:

Before you start your learning task, read over the major headings and summaries of the chapters in the textbook. This gives you a feeling for the whole picture and to what material you should pay attention to while reading the chapters. Research shows that students who do this make higher grades, and this simple step is the most powerful thing you can do.

Reading, underlining, and taking notes:

As you read the material, you must take written notes and underline. Use only the left half of the page. Transfer to the right side of the paper comments your teacher made about the material during lecture. You must always be ahead of your teacher in your reading.

Research shows that the more different ways you present information to the brain the easier it is to learn. In other words hear it, see it, say it, write it, practice it, highlight it, quiz it, etc. Underlining is a skill that must be developed. The tools of underlining should vary based on your preference. Use highlighters or colored pens. I recommend red and blue Flair pens. If you use these, you need a plastic ruler for underlining. Use a drafting plastic triangle and have it cut off at the three ends about one inch each.

Now spray paint the underlining ruler with flat black paint. This reduces or eliminates glare from light when reading and underlining. At first you should underline approximately 85 percent of material. Later on as your skill increases, you should reduce the material underlined.

Use red and blue Flair pens for underlining important material as you read. Use red for extremely important material or to offset important material, and blue for moderately important material. You should use a pink and yellow highlighter when reading the material the second time. The process of reading and deciding if the material is important enough to be underlined increases memory for that material. It is the decision and thinking that creates the memory. It is best to over predict your instructors at first. It is easier to cut back on the material to be learned than to increase the amount to be learned. Use stars to arrange the material in hierarchies of importance. Three stars (would be more important than two stars.

The 3"x5" card system.

Using the colors of red and blue, now make 3"x5" cards, putting the vocabulary of the course, long lists of items, experiments, and lecture on the cards. Key words should be written in red. If you have to be different, go with 1"x3" instead of 4"x6". One theory, concept, or vocabulary word per card. The biggest problem with textbooks and lecture notes is that we cannot separate the material that we know from the material that we do not know. Because of this, we waste hours studying what we already know, rather than concentrating our valuable time on what we do not know. The red tells your mind that this is extremely important material. Writing the material stores the information in the brain in a way that is not normally used. On the back of the cards is definition about the material on the front. After numbering the cards so you can put them back in order later on, you should start studying the cards until you feel you know the material.

Now then turn the cards over and try and answer your fill in the blanks orally. If you get the questions right, place the material into a "I know this material" stack. Now continue working on the material that you don't know until you can answer the questions on all the cards.

Review:

Now reread the material that you underlined in the book. Note that you do not read the material you did not underline. This is why over prediction is important.

As you reread the chapter, bracket and star the material you believe is extremely important. Sometimes use a yellow highlighter for critical information.

Now reread the material you have bracketed or stored and high speed review the material on the 3"x5" cards.

Audio option:

The more different ways that the material to be learned can be experienced the easier it is to remember the material. If you have time, read the material that you have underlined to a tape recorder. Then play back and listen to the material. Some people are so good at learning by listening that this is the only way they have to study.

Overlearning:

The more you overlearn the material the easier it is to take a test with confidence and in a relaxed manner. In addition, the more you overlearn something, the longer you will remember it.

Special problems:

Some people have reading difficulties. Current research suggests that blue or gray sunglasses may help dyslexic people process and learn to read. Self typing of the material is another way shown to have positive benefits for dyslexics. The key concept is that learning requires work. Good nutrition helps learning. Research suggest that zinc and B vitamins are essential for learning.

General Guidelines for Developing Multiple-Choice Items

adapted from a longer article by Mary E. Piontek, Best Practices for Designing and Grading Exams

Multiple-choice items have a number of advantages. First, multiple-choice items can measure various kinds of knowledge, including students' understanding of terminology, facts, principles, methods, and procedures, as well as their ability to apply, interpret, and justify. When carefully designed, multiple-choice items can assess higher-order thinking skills as shown in Example 1, (below) in which students are required to generalize, analyze, and make inferences about data in a medical patient case.

Multiple-choice items are less ambiguous than short-answer items, thereby providing a more focused assessment of student knowledge. Multiple-choice items are superior to true-false items in several ways: on true-false items, students can receive credit for knowing that a statement is incorrect, without knowing what is correct. Multiple-choice items offer greater reliability than true-false items as the opportunity for guessing is reduced with the larger number of options. Finally, an instructor can diagnose misunderstanding by analyzing the incorrect options chosen by students.

A disadvantage of multiple-choice items is that they require developing incorrect, yet plausible, options that can be difficult for the instructor to create. In addition, multiple-choice questions do not allow instructors to measure students' ability to organize and present ideas. Finally, because it is much easier to create multiple-choice items that test recall and recognition rather than higher order thinking, multiple-choice exams run the risk of not assessing the deep learning that many instructors consider important (Gronlund & Linn, 1990; McMillan, 2001).

-------------------------------
Example 1: A Series of Multiple-Choice Items That Assess Higher Order Thinking:

Patient WC was admitted for 3rd degree burns over 75% of his body. The attending physician asks you to start this patient on antibiotic therapy. Which one of the following is the best reason why WC would need
antibiotic prophylaxis?
a. His burn injuries have broken down the innate immunity that prevents microbial invasion.
b. His injuries have inhibited his cellular immunity.
c. His injuries have impaired antibody production.
d. His injuries have induced the bone marrow, thus activated immune system.

Two days later, WC's labs showed: WBC 18,000 cells/mm3; 75% neutrophils (20% band cells); 15% lymphocytes; 6% monocytes; 2% eosophils; and 2% basophils. Which one of the following best describes WC's lab results?
a. Leukocytosis with left shift
b. Normal neutrophil count with left shift
c. High eosinophil count in response to allergic reactions
d. High lymphocyte count due to activation of adaptive immunity
(Jeong Park, U-M College of Pharmacy, personal
communication, February 4, 2008)
------------------------------

Guidelines for developing multiple-choice items

There are nine primary guidelines for developing multiple-choice items (Gronlund & Linn, 1990; McMillan, 2001). Following these guidelines increases the validity and reliability of multiple-choice items that one might use for quizzes, homework assignments, and/or examinations.

The first four guidelines concern the item "stem," which poses the problem or question to which the choices refer.

1. Write the stem as a clearly described question, problem, or task.
2. Provide the information in the stem and keep the options as short as possible.
3. Include in the stem only the information needed to make the problem clear and specific.

The stem of the question should communicate the nature of the task to the students and present a clear problem or concept. The stem of the question should provide only information that is relevant to the problem or concept, and the options (distractors) should be succinct.

4. Avoid the use of negatives in the stem (use only when you are measuring whether the respondent knows the
exception to a rule or can detect errors).

You can word most concepts in positive terms and thus avoid the possibility that students will overlook terms of "no, not, or least" and choose an incorrect option not because they lack the knowledge of the concept but because they have misread the stated question. Italicizing, capitalizing, using bold-face, or underlying the negative term makes it less likely to be overlooked.

The remaining five guidelines concern the choices from which students select their answer.

5. Have ONLY one correct answer.

Make certain that the item has one correct answer. Multiple-choice items usually have at least three incorrect options (distractors).

6. Write the correct response with no irrelevant clues. A common mistake when designing multiple-choice questions is to write the correct option with more elaboration or detail, using more words, or using general terminology rather than technical terminology.

7. Write the distractors to be plausible yet clearly wrong. An important, and sometimes difficult to achieve, aspect of multiple-choice items is ensuring that the incorrect choices (distractors) appear to be possibly correct. Distractors are best created using common errors or misunderstandings about the concept being assessed, and making them homogeneous in content and parallel in form and grammar.

8. Avoid using "all of the above," "none of the above," or other special distractors (use only when an answer can
be classified as unequivocally correct or incorrect).

All of the above and none of the above are often added as answer options to multiple-choice items. This technique requires the student to read all of the options and might increase the difficulty of the items, but too often the use of these phrases is inappropriate. None of the above should be restricted to items of factual knowledge with absolute standards of correctness. It is inappropriate for questions where students are asked to select "the best" answer. All of the above is awkward in that many students will choose it if they can identify at least one of the other options as correct and therefore assume all of the choices are correct - thereby obtaining a correct answer based on partial knowledge of the concept/content (Gronlund & Linn, 1990).

9. Use each alternative as the correct answer about the same number of times.

Check to see whether option "a" is correct about the same number of times as option "b" or "c" or "d" across the instrument. It can be surprising to find that one has created an exam in which the choice "a" is correct 90% of the time. Students quickly find such patterns and increase their chances of "correct guessing" by selecting that answer option by default.

-----------------------------
Checklist for Writing Multiple-Choice Items
* Is the stem stated as clearly, directly, and simply as possible?
* Is the problem self-contained in the stem?
* Is the stem stated positively?
* Is there only one correct answer?
* Are all the alternatives parallel with respect to grammatical structure, length, and complexity?
* Are irrelevant clues avoided?
* Are the options short?
* Are complex options avoided?
* Are options placed in logical order?
* Are the distractors plausible to students who do not know the correct answer?
* Are correct answers spread equally among all the choices?
(McMillan, 2001, p. 150)
----------------------

References (for full article)

Brown, F. G. (1983). Principles of educational and psychological testings(3rd ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston.

Cashin, W. E. (1987). Improving essay tests. Idea Paper, No. 17. Manhattan, KS: Center for Faculty Evaluation and
Development, Kansas State University.

Critical thinking rubric. (2008). Dobson, NC: Surry Community College.

Grading systems. (1991, April). For Your Consideration, No. 10. Chapel Hill, NC: Center for Teaching and Learning,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Gronlund, N. E., & Linn, R. L. (1990). Measurement and evaluation in teaching (6th ed.). New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company.

Halpern, D. H., & Hakel, M. D. (2003). Applying the science of learning to the university and beyond. Change,
35(4), 37-41.

Isaac, S., & Michael, W. B. (1990). Handbook in research and evaluation.San Diego, CA: EdITS Publishers.

McKeachie, W. J. , & Svinicki, M. D. (2006). Assessing, testing, and evaluating: Grading is not the most important
function. In McKeachie's teaching tips: Strategies,research, and theory for college and university teachers (12th ed., pp. 74-86). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

McMillan, J. H. (2001). Classroom assessment:
Principles and practice for effective instruction. Boston:
Allyn and Bacon.

Seymour, E., & Hewitt, N. M. (1997). Talking about leaving: Why undergraduates leave the sciences. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Svinicki, M. D. (1998). Helping students understand grades. College Teaching, 46(3), 101-105.

Svinicki, M. D. (1999a). Evaluating and grading students. In Teachers and students: A sourcebook for UT-Austin faculty(pp. 1-14). Austin, TX: Center for Teaching Effectiveness, University of Texas at Austin.

Svinicki, M. D. (1999b). Some pertinent questions about grading. In Teachers and students: A sourcebook for UT-Austin faculty(pp. 1-2). Austin, TX: Center for Teaching Effectiveness, University of Texas at Austin.

Thorndike, R. M. (1997). Measurement and evaluation in psychology and education. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Wiggins, G. P. (1998). Educative assessment: Designing assessments to inform and improve student performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Worthen, B. R., Borg, W. R., & White, K. R. (1993). Measurement and evaluation in the schools. New York:
Longman. Writing and grading essay questions.(1990, September). For Your Consideration, No. 7. Chapel Hill, NC: Center for Teaching and Learning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

How to respond to a question when you don't know the answer.

What if I don't know the answer to a student’s question?

It’s curious that what students most fear is what teachers fear as well—not knowing. Our students hesitate when we turn from the board and say, “Any questions?” They don’t want to appear stupid, to let others know they still don’t understand.
Many graduate teaching fellows’ biggest fear in teaching for the first time is facing a question from a student that they are unable to answer. Some full professors have the same fear.

And yet not knowing is what learning is all about.
You might consider addressing this issue from the get go. Talk about a process your community of learners will use when a question arises that no one can answer. Talk about how exciting it is to discover a new area of learning. Talk about how a good learner approaches questions. Teach your students the skills of how to begin investigating what they don’t know, don’t understand, or cannot yet do. Where would you look? What resources are available to you? From what you do know, can you make an educated guess? Can you phone a friend?

Not knowing the answer to a student question once in a while is very different from not preparing well. You risk your credibility when you are poorly prepared and unable to facilitate the class well.

When you have prepared well and students are having a productive learning experience with you, they will accept that you don’t have answers for everything. They will appreciate your efforts to improve their skills in finding answers for themselves.

- University of Oregon Teaching Effectiveness Program

How to deal with apathetic students

How do I deal with apathetic students?

* Try to build a relationship with these students. Take an interest in them to find out what is at the bottom of the perceived apathy. Learning students' names and using names in class can help students understand that you are interested in them and in their success in your course. Consider emailing a student who seems uninterested or unresponsive and let him/her know that you would like to help in any way that you can. Oftentimes their apparent apathy has nothing to do with the course. There may be personal matters that are dominating their attention. Some students are going through a period of depression which disconnects them from their studies. Showing a little concern can be very helpful.

* Measure the students' progress early and regularly, so they have a clear idea about where they stand academically. This may involve quizzes, short response papers, or some kind of weekly assignment which gives you some indication of their level of understanding. Your "apathetic" students may also be the students who are struggling with the class. They could also be students for whom the class is inappropriate. In either case, it would be good to find this out early, so you can arrange an appointment with the student to talk about how things are going and to possibly recommend dropping the class. Take some initiative here. Just saying— "Drop by my office if you need to see me"—as a general comment to the whole group may not be enough to get them in there (especially freshmen).

*Promote good will. Let students know when they have done well. This can be an occasional group email that says something like—“In looking over your homework last night I was pleased to see that so many of you are now understanding the connection between _____________ and ____________. If you are still confused about this, look over the examples I have included in this message.” It can also be an individual email that says—“ I really appreciated your comments in class today. They led to a very productive discussion.”

- University of Oregon Teaching Effectiveness Program

How to develop discussion questions

What makes a question effective?
A good question is relatively short, clear, and unambiguous. Ask only one question at a time. Pouring out a string of questions (even if they are on the same topic) is likely to confuse students, who often won't know where to begin an answer.


Pay attention to the responses you get because they will tell you much about how effectively you have phrased the question. Sometimes when students don't respond or respond poorly, it's because the question has been worded either too vaguely or too broadly. It may help to think backwards: Begin with the answer you want to get and then devise a question that will lead to that answer.


What are the different kinds of questions I can use?
Researchers and teaching experts have devised a number of different "typologies of questions," but perhaps the best way to categorize questions for science and engineering classes is to think of them along a continuum of relatively closed or relatively open questions.

Closed questions ask for a very specific answer. In the Torch of the Firehose?, Arthur Mattuck describes "Are-you-with-me?" questions (relatively closed) that ask the students to supply some detail of a problem that is being discussed ("and the derivative of sin x is?").

Open questions require more thought. ("What would happen if the force were reversed?") There may even be a range of potentially good answers--you can ask students to judge which ones are better than others or which one is best . Then ask them to justify their choices. If you are asking a more complex question that requires calculations, write key elements on the blackboard or prepare an overhead transparency that provides necessary information.

One general piece of advice: Be careful about asking a question that is too easy. At best, your students may feel it's not worth answering; at worst, they may feel insulted at having been asked a question with an obvious answer.


Should I let the course of the class dictate the questions I ask, or should I plan out questions ahead of time?
Both. While you need to be flexible enough to allow questions to emerge spontaneously during discussion, you should also prepare questions ahead of time based on the key points you want to make in that class.


Think, too, about the range of answers you are likely to get to your questions and plan your response to each. This will help guarantee the answers you get wion't take you off on a tangent. Having anticipated the responses, you can determine how to get back to the business at hand in the most efficient way possible.
Should I "cold call" students?

When you "cold call," you ask students to answer a question even if they haven't volunteered. While cold calling can increase the level of anxiety in a classroom, one of its benefits is that it gives students the chance to practice speaking while under pressure, a skill that will be important to them in their professional lives. You can also "warm call" by asking a question of one or two students and then giving them five minutes to frame a response while you discuss something else.
Each of these techniques has its strengths and drawbacks. However, their success will be enhanced if you:


* Establish a norm early in the semester and stick to it. (In other words, don't start cold calling students after midterms!)

* Keep track of which students you have called on when so that you can be fair in your calling pattern. Ideally, you will come to know some of the strengths and weaknesses of each of your students (e.g., Sally is good at calculations; Mark tends to think intuitively and globally), so that you can play to their strengths when calling on them.

* Help students save face by responding to wrong answers with tact and generosity.

- UO Teaching Effectiveness Program

Motivating Students to Excel

* Establish high and reachable standards of excellence and provide the time and resources to help your students reach the standards you set.

* Be clear about your expectations by telling your students, having this in writing in the syllabus and on your website, and providing sample/models of work that meets the standards you expect. Use rubrics

* Give your students frequent opportunities to provide evidence through small, weekly assignments that demonstrate their understanding, problem-solving ability, writing skills, etc. The assignments don’t need to be graded. They can contribute to a portion of the grade assigned as participation. They can be short online quizzes through Blackboard’s survey feature or half page response papers, paraphrases of key concepts and examples that illustrate understanding of the concept. Consider letting students work in pairs or small groups on these assignments. This can result in some excellent peer teaching.

*The feedback on these small assignments doesn't necessarily have to be individual. You can give general feedback at the beginning of class or through a group email. For example—"I've been noticing a few common mistakes that people are making and want to give you some tips on how to avoid them in the future." Or, “Based on Tuesday’s response paper I want to clear up some confusion on the difference between ___________ and _____________.”

* Design weekly (and less grade-damaging) assignments in formats similar to what they can expect in other more important assessments (formal papers, midterms, finals). Have these assignments demonstrate the level of critical thinking you expect in student responses to questions and problems and short answer identifications.

* These smaller, frequent, and less threatening assignments keep students accountable for staying current in the course. They allow you and your students to gauge progress in understanding. They prepare students for the level of rigor in your benchmark assessments.

* As often as possible relate the course material to something which is meaningful for your students, something to which they can relate. Use metaphors and analogies that help anchor important concepts for them.

How to get students to pay attention in class

How can I keep students from getting bored and not paying attention during my lecture?

Students can become bored for many reasons.

* The instructor has not established good rapport with the class.

* The instructor fails to use relevant examples.

* Students may have no interest in the subject matter.

* The instructor has weak and ineffective presentation skills.

* The instructor reads from a scripted lecture with little or no contact with the audience.

1. The instructor has not established good rapport with the class.

The first day of class is an important time to begin building a relationship with your students. Tell them a little about yourself and about your research interests in this field--where your passion lies. Tell them why you think this course is important and how it will add value to their lives.

* Learn as many names as possible and use students' names in class whenever you can. For example, ask a student's name when you call on him/her. Refer back to students' comments when appropriate, ("That's in line with what Margaret said earlier, Jeff.")

* Be clear and fair about your expectations for students. Set high standards and provide the support and resources students need to reach those standards.

* Be friendly. Try to arrive early and stay a few minutes after class so that students can ask questions. Be in your office ready for students during your designated office hours.

* Provide a website for the course with useful resources--handouts, study guides, sample test questions, virtual office hours, a course FAQ etc.

* Demonstrate in as many ways as you can that you care about your students' success in your course.

2. The instructor fails to use relevant examples.

As often as possible center important ideas and concepts on something to which your students can relate. If you are explaining something about business practices, pick a local campus business as an example. Check area newspapers for events, editorials and other news stories that might tie in with the material you are exploring.

Use metaphors and analogies which tie difficult concepts to something that students more readily understand.

3. Students may have no interest in the subject matter.

At the outset, convince students that there is a good reason they should be studying and learning about this subject matter. Tell them how knowing this will make a difference in their lives. Be sure to be clear (in your syllabus and on your first day with students) about what students will know and be able to do as a result of this course and why that matters.

Use examples and illustrations which are relevant to your students' lives whenever possible.

Do not overload your students with content. Give them an opportunity to reflect, to apply what they have learned to other situations, to solve a problem and think critically about the material in the course.

4. The instructor has weak and ineffective presentation skills.

Consider being videotaped with a follow-up viewing and consultation with a member of the Teaching Effectiveness Program to assess the strengths and areas of improvement of your presentation style.

Pay attention to your pacing, the use and quality of your voice and gestures, your movement in the room, eye contact with your students, the amount of interaction you have with your audience, the variety of tools you use to present material: video, slides, overheads, visuals, music, storytelling, metaphors and analogies.

Examine the organization of the presentation, the use of multiple examples and illustrations to clarify concepts, how connections are made, the periodic use of internal summaries to help students understand the most important points you are trying to make.

TEP has an excellent video on how to lecture and speak effectively— How to Speak with Patrick Winston from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching Excellence at Harvard. Please contact Georgeanne Cooper ( gcooper@uoregon.edu ) if you are interested in viewing these tapes. They are now streamed on the Teaching Effectiveness Program Hub. If you have a current UO account, you can be added to this site to view several good teaching films.

5. The instructor reads from a scripted lecture with little or no contact with the audience.

Try to work from a good outline (using PowerPoint or Keynote) or present this as an overhead so that students can use it as an outline for your presentation. Make sure you use a 24 pt. type size and a readable font (simple serif fonts are best).

Don't make the entire focus of the class session a lecture. This puts all the pressure on you to perform. Think of ways to work with the material you want your students to learn in a variety of formats--presentation, small group work, individual reflective writing, video clips, slides, or appropriate web sites.

Classroom Etiquette

Classroom Etiquette: A Guide for the Well-Intentioned Instructor
Alison Bailey and Maura Toro-Morn, Illinois State University

Even the most well-intentioned people make mistakes. As instructors, one of our jobs is to make the classroom a place where all learners feel confident enough to participate. This involves challenging our own assumptions as well as those of our students. One way to do this is to be aware of subtle behaviors that make some students feel unwelcome or excluded. Keep the following in mind when you interact with students.

1. Everyone has race, ethnicity, gender and nationality. Hillary Clinton is just as ethnic as Maya Angelou. To think of persons who are not of European descent as exotic or ethnic reinforces the idea that whites are the norm and all others are defined in comparison to this standard.
2. Don't mention a student's race unless it is relevant to what you're talking about. Unless you are making a point in which race is relevant, think about whether or not racially labeling is necessary.
3. Don't ask African-American, Latina/o, Jewish, Gay/Lesbian, Italian-American etc. students to speak for the people of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or nationality. No one wants the responsibility of having what they say being taken to be representative of the entire race, religion, or ethnic group. Students may also be uncomfortable having to defend their race, class, or sexual orientation.
4. Don't assume racial-ethnic students know their history. You wouldn't call on a white woman and ask her to tell you about Susan B. Anthony because she is a white woman. Don't assume that Black students would know biographical information about Malcolm X. (It does not follow that racial-ethnic students are not knowledgeable about their own lives and conditions. Instructors should not try to speak for them on these grounds).
5. Don't ask students of color to educate the class on racism. Don't ask women to educate the class on sexism. Don't ask gay/lesbian or bi-sexual students to educate straight students on homophobia, unless they volunteer, or unless you know the student well enough to ask them. These are everyone's issues.
6. Avoid stereotypes in hypothetical examples, unless you make it clear that you are using this example as a pedagogical tool. Not all African-Americans are on welfare, live in Ghettos, or work in the service industries. Not all Arabs are terrorists. Not all Doctors are "he". Not all single parents are "she." Not all Latinas/os speak Spanish. Not all whites are privileged or rich. HIV and AIDS are not confined to the gay/lesbian community.
7. Learn student's names and how to pronounce them. Don't Anglicize names unless the student does also. You might ask students if they Anglicize their name.
8. Keep your audience in mind when preparing lectures and assignments. Don't assume that you will be speaking to a homogeneous group of people. Not all students live in dorms, are supported by their parents , or own computers. Some students work, some have children, some come from single parent households, and some commute. Don't assume that a student's college experience is a reflection of your own. Check your assumptions about students. You may want to consider this when you plan projects or assign extra credit.
9. Be aware of non-verbal behavior between students and yourself. Are you calling on men more than women? Do you/other students tune out, or talk when students of color/returning students speak? Who is talking in the class? Do you feel that students silence themselves in your class? Are students rolling their eyes when one of their classmates speaks? Failure to address these behaviors contributes to a chilly classroom climate for some students.
10. Don't let racist, sexist, or homophobic language and comments in the class discussion or essays go unnoticed. Do comments of students have racist/sexist/homophobic undertones? Ask students what evidence they have for their beliefs and to question their presumptions. No name calling.
11. If you classes are small, spread your eye contact around At the same time, don't just address Black students during discussion about slavery or civil rights. Don't focus on the Jewish students if you are speaking about the Holocaust or Pogroms. Don't address comments on reproductive rights and sexual harassment only to women. Don't address questions of immigration to Latinos, Haitians, etc.
12. People are not hermaphrodites. Individuals are not he/she. Vary your examples using "he" and "she". If sex/gender is ambiguous, then use the plural.
13. When possible integrate questions of difference into your course content and class discussions. This does not mean adding a few authors of color, or women writers/scientists. Putting issues of diversity in separate units on the syllabus sends a message to students that issues of race, class, and sex separable from the main course content and have no place in discussions of the American Revolution, moral theory, Realist paintings, or scientific revolutions. If possible try to integrate issues of diversity into your main course content.
14. If you take attendance don't just notice that the students with disabilities, or students of color are absent.
15. Make it clear that your classroom is a place where all voices can be heard and that you make mistakes too.