Active Student Engagement in Online Classes

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Virtual teamwork

When the Covid-19 pandemic swept in last spring, most teachers in the world from kindergarten through graduate school found themselves teaching online classes, whether they wanted to or not. You may be one of them. Relatively few had done it before, and even fewer had ever received formal instruction on how to do it. Out of necessity they learned from experience, but many troublesome issues remain for many of them. One of the most common goes something like “I always had major problems getting my students actively engaged in my face-to-face classes. It seems pretty much impossible to do it online.”

You stand on solid ground if one of your goals is to get your online students actively engaged in their learning, because a ton of research has shown that engagement promotes almost every conceivable learning outcome other than rote memorization. This post summarizes an article in the December 2020 issue of Advances in Engineering Education (https://tinyurl.com/ALonline-AEE) that surveys techniques to establish online active student engagement. The emphasis in the article is on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education, but most of the conclusions are generalizable to other fields.

You could transfer many of the activities described in the article directly from a traditional face-to-face (F2F) course to any online course. Activities that would be done in F2F courses as out-of-class assignments and projects would be done asynchronously online, and in-class F2F activities (traditional active learning) can be carried out synchronously online using tools in Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, or an equivalent program. For example, if you invite students in a synchronous class session to ask you a question or to answer one you ask, you may have them raise hands physically in a small class or with a raise hands tool in any class and call on them, or submit their questions and answers in a chat window, or vote yes or thumbs up if you are simply seeking their level of agreement with something, or vote for one or more of several multiple-choice options in a poll. For a synchronous problem-solving or document generation or other extended activity, (a) tell the students what you want them to do, whether they will be working individually or in groups, and how long you will give them to do it; (b) for individual activities, tell the students to start working, and for group activities, have the program sort them into groups of any size you designate and send them to virtual breakout rooms; (c) when the allotted time has elapsed, stop the activity, call on individuals or groups to report on what they came up with, and provide affirming or corrective feedback on their responses.

Meta-analyses of the effectiveness of active student engagement strategies show that even if a strategy works well on average, how well it works may vary dramatically from one implementation to another, and sometimes the strategy may even be counterproductive. For example, if you assign online group projects in your class without providing guidance on how to deal with common problems like interpersonal conflicts and irresponsible or dominant team members, many students might have been better off working individually. In other words, how well you carry out active engagement strategies may be more important than which strategies you choose. The following general recommendations are proposed in the concluding section of the article:

  • Establish teaching presence (students’ sense that their online instructors are real people who are personally involved in their instruction) and social presence (students’ sense of being with real classmates in a virtual environment) early in an online course and maintain them throughout the course. Research shows that both presences correlate positively with online students’ motivation to learn, academic performance, persistence to course completion, satisfaction with online courses and instructors, and intention to enroll in future online courses. Implementing only a few of the measures to establish them suggested in the article can be sufficient to realize those benefits.
  • Make your expectations clear to the students. A common complaint of students in online courses is their difficulty understanding exactly what their instructors want them to do, especially if the students are new to online instruction or if the assignments and exams require skills unfamiliar to many of them. In F2F classes, they can easily get clarifications directly from the instructors and from one another, while doing so online is much less straightforward. You can make your expectations clear by (for example) writing clear learning objectives and sharing them with the students, interspersing online presentations (lecture clips, videos, slide shows, screencasts, etc.) with low-stakes online quizzes that provide immediate feedback, and conducting and debriefing synchronous small-group activities.
  • Take a gradual approach to adopting new engagement strategies. The article presents a broad range of strategies for actively engaging students online, and the total number of strategies would be enormous if all their variations were listed. The idea is not to adopt every conceivable engagement strategy starting next Monday, which could overwhelm both your students and you. Instead, select one or two strategies that look reasonable and try them. Don’t just try them once—especially if the strategies are unfamiliar to you or likely to be unfamiliar to many students—but do them enough for both you and the students to get accustomed to them. If a strategy seems to be working well, keep using it; if it doesn’t, have someone knowledgeable check how you are implementing it, try their suggestions, and if doing so fails to help, stop using it. Next course you teach, try another one or two strategies. It should not take more than two or three course offerings for you to reach a level and quality of student engagement that meets your expectations.

P.S. Some of you are struggling to plan for socially distanced face-to-face, synchronous, and asynchronous classes in every possible combination. Derek Bruff, director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching, has put together a blog post with lots of concrete ideas for getting students engaged in that challenging environment. Click here to read it.

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A Webinar on Active Engagement in Online Classes

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The pandemic of 2020 threw most faculty and teachers into teaching online in the spring with very little chance to prepare. Now that we’ve made it to the summer, uncertainty about the fall is keeping everyone on edge trying to plan for all sorts of possible situations. In our workshops, faculty have been asking about how to get students actively engaged in their learning when classes are online (synchronous and asynchronous). This summer we’ll be offering webinars on this topic in several venues and we want to share our handout with ideas and some of the research that backs them up. Click here to get to our handout, which you can read or download.

Some of you are struggling to plan for socially distanced face-to-face, synchronous, and asynchronous classes in every possible combination. Derek Bruff, director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching, has put together a blog post with lots of concrete ideas for getting students engaged in that challenging environment. Click here to read it.

 

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Personal devices in class: A blessing and a curse (RB)

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I don’t know a single instructor who is not perplexed about how to deal with students using laptop and tablet computers, smart phones, and other electronic devices during class.  True, technology can be used to enhance learning as students respond to concept tests, look up information, and take notes, but they are much more often distractions as students go down the rabbit hole of apps and social media that block deep thinking and learning. What can instructors do about them?

Here are two resources that may provide some ideas.

The University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching has an excellent short article called, “Choosing your Classroom Technology Policy.” It offers some research suitable for sharing with students about how technology affects their learning along with questions instructors can ask themselves as they decide on appropriate policies for their classrooms. I like the practical ideas and common sense tone of the piece.

If you want to consider the topic in greater depth, I suggest reading a four-article series by James M. Lang from March 13, 2017 in the Chronicle of Higher Education called, “The Distracted Classroom.”  These links take you to the introductory article and the other three pieces:

The last article gives some practical strategies and their pros and cons for dealing with technology in the classroom ranging from banning devices altogether to involving students in setting a policy for the kind of classroom environment they want to have.

If you have any strategies that have worked for you, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

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Helping New STEM Faculty Members Get Their Careers Off to a Good Start (RB & RF)

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Brain surgeons, electricians, accountants, chemical engineers, and members of all other skilled professions, have one thing in common: they all received training before they were allowed to practice professionally. All but one skilled profession, that is—being a college faculty member. Graduate school prepares future faculty members to work on research projects someone else defined; however, it generally does not prepare most of them to plan research independently, get it funded, recruit good graduate students in competition with more experienced colleagues, set up a lab, build a research team, publish in top journals, plan courses, design and deliver effective instruction, make up good assignments and tests, and deal with dozens of research, teaching, and time management crises that routinely occur in the lives of all faculty members.

People are not born knowing all those things, and trial-and-error is not an efficient way to learn them. The work of psychologist Robert Boice (see reference below) has shown that most new faculty members take four to five years to become as productive in research and effective in teaching as they need to be to meet their institutions’ standards for tenure and promotion. About 5%, however (“quick starters”) do it in one to two years. Boice also showed that the 95% routinely make certain mistakes that limit their productivity and effectiveness and that the mistakes are avoidable. With the proper guidance, new faculty members can be turned into quick starters.

That possibility is just one of several important benefits of providing new faculty members with training and mentoring in teaching. It can be difficult to persuade experienced professors that they have been using ineffective teaching strategies throughout their careers and they will need to change their approach to equip their students with the knowledge and skills we all want them to have. Most new faculty members, on the other hand, know that they don’t really know how to teach–especially when they run into serious problems in their first few weeks. They are consequently receptive to suggestions early in their careers, and are much more likely than their more experienced colleagues to become effective teachers in a relatively short period of time. In addition, if the training helps them avoid many of the difficulties most new teachers commonly experience, it can also give them more time and energy to start building their research programs and to attend to their personal health and well-being.

This post briefly outlines measures that deans, department heads, and senior faculty members can take to help new STEM faculty members reach quick-starter status, and points to online resources that provide details on the design and implementation of the measures.

  • Boice, R. (2000). Advice for new faculty members. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. A practical book for new faculty members based on Boice’s experience with hundreds of them. Sections deal with teaching, research, and fitting into the university culture.

New faculty orientation and ongoing faculty development

            Two general approaches to new faculty orientation are campus-wide and discipline-specific workshops. Discipline-specific programs for STEM faculty members are recommended because (unlike most campus-wide programs) they can provide extensive coverage of teaching and research methods and illustrate all recommended methods with STEM-related examples. As a consequence, they tend to get much better attendance and reception from STEM faculty than campus-wide programs generally experience.

Mentoring New Faculty

            Mentoring programs for new faculty members in their home departments effectively complement faculty development programs at the school, college, and university levels. There are many different mentoring models, all of which may involve experienced faculty members helping their new faculty colleagues succeed in teaching, research, learning about and integrating into their campus cultures, and achieving a healthy work-life balance.

We’d love to hear about efforts to help new faculty on your campus get off to a good start. Leave comments to share your ideas!

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Making connections with students to enhance learning (RB)

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Truman State University

Several years ago, one of my colleagues told me this. He had been working on his teaching and had incorporated many of the strategies known to lead to better learning in class—writing objectives and sharing them with students, using active learning exercises in class to get students engaged with the material, grounding each new topic in real-world applications, and making sure his tests were fair. Despite all that, he was not satisfied with his student evaluations. He looked at the comments and found that many students didn’t feel that he cared about them or their learning. He really did care, and he wanted to make sure they knew it. Next semester, he made a point to (1) learn their names, (2) be available to them right before and after each class session and during office hours, and (3) let them know he was enthusiastic about the course subject and eager to help them learn it. Those were the only changes he made, but they made a huge difference. At the end of the semester, his evaluations went up a full point on a 5-point scale.

That result may be surprising but it turns out to be completely consistent with cognitive science and extensive educational research, both of which have shown that students learn better when they feel a sense of personal connection with their instructors.

  • There is a distinct network in the brain for social thinking, and we default to it when we are not concentrating on something. Whenever we pause for a moment during or after a cognitive activity, our brain turns its attention to people and our relationships to them. We are in essence hard-wired for connection to others. (Lieberman, 2013)
  • In a landmark longitudinal study, Astin (1993) identified factors strongly and positively associated with students’ learning outcomes and their attitudes regarding their college experience. The most important factor was high quality student-faculty interactions. That finding makes sense. Strong positive interactions with teachers make students comfortable about asking questions and seeking help. They also motivate students to learn from those teachers, and motivation strongly correlates with adult learning (Wlodkowski & Ginsberg, 2017).
  • Further empirical support for the importance of connections is provided by Komarraju, Musulkin, and Bhattacharya (2010), who found that first-year students who perceived their teachers as being approachable, respectful, and available for interactions outside of class were particularly likely to be motivated to learn and confident about their academic skills.

So if learning is promoted by motivation and our students’ perception of our caring about them strongly promotes their motivation to learn in our classes, what can we do to communicate caring to them? Following are a few suggestions. There’s no need to do all of them: just pick a couple that look reasonable to you that you’re not already doing.

  • Take time to introduce yourself early in the course. The first day is the most natural time to make sure students get to know you and perceive your enthusiasm for teaching them. Include some personal details (family, pets, travels) along with information about what excites you about what you’ll be teaching. In online courses, post a short video to introduce yourself.
  • Learn student names. Being able to call your students by name tells them that you care enough about them to make the effort to learn who they are, and research has shown that your knowing their names has a strong impact on their motivation to work hard in your class (BYU, website; Cooper, Haney, Krieg, & Brownell, 2017). Even in big classes, you can learn most names if you use strategies like making a seating chart and using it to call on students, or having the students make tent cards with what they want to be called and display the cards in each class session until you’ve learned most of the names. For more ideas, take a look at https://ctl.byu.edu/learning-student-names
  • Give an autobiography assignment. During the first week of class, have the students write brief (½–1 page) autobiographies including anything they’d like you to know about them. Use the autobiographies to help you learn their names. Try to connect course content to some of their interests.
  • Early in the course, require each student to make a 5-minute visit to your office. Use that time to find out where they’re from and what interests them. It will help you learn their names and more about them, and it will also help them find your office and discover that you want to help them be successful. They will then be much more likely to come during your office hours and seek out your help when they need it. In online classes, schedule a chat or online call to accomplish the same goal.
  • In face-to-face classes, come to class early and stay late. Those informal moments before and after class are when many students will come up and ask a question, and in the pre-class conversations you may discover something on their minds that you can integrate into the class. Ask about how they are doing and listen when they tell you.
  • Consider having some office hours in the student lounge and/or online in Google Hangouts or a chat room. Going to where the students are is a powerful technique to communicate caring about their learning.
  • Be proactive when you think there may be a problem. If students do poorly on an assignment or exam or stop coming to class, reach out to them via email or text message, letting them know you’re concerned and want to help.
  • Keep a list of campus resources handy. When you discover a student is having a personal or academic problem, you’ll be ready to help them get to the campus services that could make a difference.

Do you have other ideas about how to show students you care about them and their learning? Leave them in the comments—I’d really like to hear them!

References

Astin, A.W. (1993). What matters in college: Four critical years revisited. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

BYU Center for Teaching and Learning. (website). Learning student names.

Cooper, K. M.; Haney, B.; Krieg, A.; & Brownell, S. E. (2017). What’s in a name? The importance of students perceiving that an instructor knows their names in a high-enrollment biology classroom. CBE Life Science Education, 16(1).

Komarraju, M., Musulkin, S., & Bhattacharya, G. (2010). Role of student-faculty interactions in developing college students’ academic self-concept, motivation, and achievement, Journal of College Student Development, 51(3), pp. 332-334.

Lieberman, M. D. (2013). Social: Why our brains are wired to connect. Crown Publishers: New York.

Wlodkowski, R. J. & Ginsberg, M. B. (2017). Enhancing adult motivation to learn: A comprehensive guide for teaching all adults, 4th ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

For more information on these topics, see Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent’s book, Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, Section 3.6.1, pp.52-56.

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Teaching a New Course: Good Enough is Good Enough! (RF)

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Doing a great job of teaching a course for the first time—or even just a decent job—isn’t easy. It takes a major effort and a ridiculous amount of time to identify your course learning outcomes (the knowledge and skills you want your students to develop) and learning objectives (the things they should be able to do—define, describe, calculate, analyze, evaluate, create, etc.—that show how well they achieved the outcomes), plan your syllabus and lessons, and make up your assignments, projects, tests, and schedule. Doing all that for just one new course can be a full-time job or more. On top of that you may have a research program and (hopefully) a life outside of your job to attend to. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the stress level for faculty members teaching new courses tends to go through the roof—especially  relatively new faculty members, who often have to teach several new courses at a time.

I’m not going to tell you that designing and teaching a new course can be made fast and easy; if there’s a way to do that, no one has found it yet. I am going to tell you that you can make it much faster and easier than it usually is. This post suggests three ways to do it.

Don’t go for perfection: good enough is good enough [1]

You can only be certain of one thing when you teach a new course. No matter how much work you put into preparing it, you won’t get it right the first time. Just give it your best shot—keeping in mind the next two suggestions—and accept that even if it doesn’t go as well as you’d like it to (it won’t), the sky won’t fall (it won’t). Immediately after each class session and each graded assignment and test, spend a few minutes jotting down notes on what worked well and what you wish you had done differently, and make the required changes while they’re fresh in your mind. When you teach the course again, you can again be certain of one thing: it will be better. When you’ve taught it three times, it will be pretty much the way you want it, and after that your preparation time should be minimal.

Don’t reinvent the wheel [2]

Even though a course you’re getting ready to teach may be new to you, you’re probably not the first one who ever taught it. If a colleague in your department or a friend at another university—preferably a good teacher—has taught it, ask if you can use some of her or his course materials (syllabus, schedule, lecture notes and slides, handouts, assignments, tests) as a starting point for yours. If the answer is yes (it probably will be), go ahead and use the materials, making changes when you think they’re necessary and leaving the parts that suit you alone. Doing this will save you tons of time and the course will probably be better than it would have been if you had spent more preparing it. To find out why, keep reading.

Don’t try to stuff everything known about the course subject into the course [3]

If you’re like most instructors, when you’re teaching a new course your office looks like a tornado blew through a library and dumped a large amount of what it swept up onto your desk. The course textbook is of course there, along with other books on the same subject, journals, photocopies of articles, and possibly your notes and exams from when you took that course. Just assembling that stuff took you a whole lot of time. You then spend a large portion of your life pulling information from all those sources and integrating it into your lecture notes. It’s an endless task, because there’s always more information out there and every time you add some you have to reorganize what you had previously assembled.

Yet despite all that hard labor, it’s likely to be a bad course. You’ve crammed so much material into your lectures that the only way you can get through it all is to put it on slides and flash them at a subliminal rate, leaving little time for questions, discussions, interesting digressions, and activities. Most students can’t absorb the course content at the rate you’re fire-hosing them with it and so they’re bored in class, many bomb the tests, and your end-of-course evaluations may be mediocre or disastrous. Meanwhile you have little time for everything else in your life, including writing proposals and papers if you’re involved in research, and your anxiety level steadily climbs.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Information presented in a course falls into two broad categories: “need-to-know and nice-to-know.” Need-to-know information directly addresses the instructor’s learning objectives and has a good chance of showing up on assignments and tests. Nice-to-know information is only slightly or not at all related to the objectives and unlikely to appear on assignments and tests but it’s in the course anyway, either because it’s always been in the course or the instructor believes that all students taking the course should be “exposed” to it.

It turns out that exposure is overrated. If you talk about something in an information-packed lecture and don’t give the students an opportunity to do something with it and don’t test them on it, most won’t absorb it and you’ve wasted valuable class time. Sadly, if you look at the content of most courses, you’ll find that a large percentage of it falls into the nice-to-know category, which means the time and effort the instructor spent preparing it was also wasted.

So don’t do that. Before you start to pull a large slug of material from those books and articles on your desk into your course, ask yourself if the students really need to know it. If the answer is no or probably not, put it aside. If the answer is yes, then put it in your lecture notes and slides, make sure to create plenty of opportunities for the students to work with it in and out of class, and include it on your study guides and tests. Only when you’re sure you can effectively cover all of your need-to-know material and there’s still room in the course, choose some (not much) of your favorite nice-to-know material and put it in. If you take that approach, your course preparation time may drop by an order of magnitude, the course and your ratings will be better, and you’ll enjoy much more of your life outside the course.

References

  1. Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2016). Teaching and learning STEM: A practical guide. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 41‒43.
  2. Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2007). How to prepare new courses while keeping your sanity. Chemical Engineering Education, 41(2), 121‒122. See also Reference 1, pp. 41‒46.
  3. Felder, R.M. (2014). Why are you teaching that? Chemical Engineering Education, 48(3), 131‒132. See also Reference 1, p. 44.

If you have any comments or questions about this post or any suggestions of your own for streamlining new course preparations, please scroll down and enter them in the Comment box.

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My students vary all over the place in background and skills, and there’s just one of me. What am I supposed to do? (RF)

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I’m writing this from 37,000 feet on what feels like an endless flight from Doha to New York. If you’re like 100% of the people I told where I was going before the trip, you’ve probably just thought “From where???”

Glad you asked. Doha is the capital of Qatar, a small country on a peninsula growing out of Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf. Rebecca and I were there to give a new workshop for faculty at Texas A&M University‒Qatar (TAMUQ) on how to teach effectively in courses filled with students who stretch the limits of the term “diversity.” To most of us academics, diversity means mainly variations in race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. To the faculty members at the workshop, it means all those things plus massive variations in math and science backgrounds, command of course prerequisites and of English (the language of instruction in all TAMUQ courses), and interest in the course subject. Designing a workshop to address all that was an interesting challenge for us, made even more interesting by our having only 3½ hours to present it.

We love a good challenge, and a colleague of ours who had given a workshop in Qatar told us that the staff members of the TAMUQ Center for Teaching and Learning (our host) were competent and friendly and treated their guests royally, so we accepted their invitation. (All of what our colleague told us turned out to be true.) We gave the workshop once on each of two successive days. The first time we had to just wave at some of the content, since we had been much too optimistic about how much we could cover in 3½ hours. We did some ruthless cutting that night, and the second offering was better but still too ambitious. When we give this workshop again, we expect to get it right.

So, out of the almost limitless array of topics we might have covered, what did we settle on? Here are the questions we addressed and some of our suggested answers, along with citations of where in our book [Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide] you can find details on the answers. You can find even more details in references cited in the book and in papers archived on my website.

  1. How can I identify and correct gaps in my students’ prior knowledge and understanding without spending a lot of class time reteaching course prerequisites?
  • Give a test on the prerequisites about a week into the course after handing out a study guide on Day 1 and holding one or two review sessions. (TLS, pp. 60‒61)
  • Give ConcepTests (in-class multiple-choice quizzes on important course concepts) and use them to correct common student misconceptions. (TLS, pp. 162‒163)
  1. How can I specify what the students should be able to do if they have learned what I am trying to teach? How can I maximize the chances that those with the necessary study habits and skills will meet my expectations?
  • Write learning objectives—clear statements of observable tasks the students should be able to complete if they have mastered the knowledge and skills the course teaches. The objectives should include some tasks that require high-level thinking and problem-solving skills and—for programs accredited by ABET—address specified ABET outcomes. Share the objectives with the students as study guides for exams. (TLS, pp. 19‒34)
  • Be sure that assessments of students’ mastery of the learning objectives (assignments, projects, quizzes, and exams) are both rigorous and fair. (TLS, Ch. 8)
  1. How can I motivate the students to work hard to learn what I am teaching?
  • At the beginning of the course, try to establish personal rapport with them (TLS, pp. 54‒56). Then preview the course content and outline how it relates to students’ goals, interests, and prior knowledge and to important authentic (real-world) problems. (TLS, pp. 58‒59)
  • Consider using inquiry-based learning, preceding coverage of each topic with a relevant authentic problem and presenting the course content in the context of solving the problem. (TLS, pp. 59‒60)
  1. How does active learning help students who span the full range of diversity? How can I get my students actively engaged in class, no matter how many are in the room?
  • Define active learning (interspersing lecture segments with brief course-related student activities) and review the research that shows how well it works. Describe mistakes instructors commonly make that limit its effectiveness and outline how to avoid them. (TLS, Ch. 6)

Rebecca and I were pleased with the workshop content, as were the participants judging from their end-of-workshop evaluations. We have added the workshop to the list of programs we offer.

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What does “balanced instruction” mean in the context of learning styles? Why is it important? (RF)

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Good day Dr Felder,
I hope this finds you well. I’m a graduate student conducting research into learning styles and blended learning. A question was raised in my discussion group and I thought I could ask you for your thoughts.
Throughout literature there is an abundance of articles that state that learning styles are about balance; however, none define what balance really is, and I was wondering if you’d be able to shed some light on this for me. Is a balance a completely equal distribution among techniques that might address different learning styles, or is it mainly about teaching each student in a way that matches his or her learning style? If  I’m teaching a class of students in which, say, 80% of the time I present facts and data (sensing) and 20% of the time I discuss fundamental principles and theories (intuitive), would this be considered balanced instruction? If so, under what circumstances? Any information would be greatly appreciated.
Have a good day.
Regards, 
Steven

I wrote some of the articles Steven mentioned, and so his questions weren’t a total surprise. I don’t remember ever getting them quite that directly, though, and they forced me to clarify the concept of balance in my own mind. I’ll pass along my response to him in a minute, but first here’s a little background.
Learning styles are students’ preferences for different types of instruction, usually expressed as opposing categories. For example, one learning style dimension Steven mentioned is sensing/intuitive. Intuitive learners tend to prefer teaching that stresses general principles, theories, and mathematical analysis, and sensing learners prefer concrete facts and observations, hands-on experiments, and real-world applications. The preferences are just that—preferences, which may be strong, moderate, or almost non-existent, not either-or labels. While certain skills tend to characterize sensing learners and others are more linked to intuitors, knowing that students prefer sensing tells you nothing about their intuitive skills, or for that matter, about their sensing skills.
For reasons I’ve never understood, some academic psychologists are hostile to the concept of learning styles. Every year or two they publish papers announcing that teaching to match students’ learning styles has never been shown to improve learning, so learning styles should never be taken into account when designing instruction.
As I pointed out a few years ago in a short article [“Are learning styles invalid? (Hint: No)”],  there are several flaws in that proclamation. Most of them are off the topic of this post, and if you’re interested you can check them out by clicking on that link. The one relevant one is that modern proponents of learning styles don’t propose matching teaching to students’ learning styles. In fact, they explicitly advise against trying to do so (for one thing, it’s impossible in a class of more than about two), suggesting instead that the goal should be to teach in a way that balances style preferences rather than matching them for individual students.
And that gets us back to Steven and my response to his questions.

Dear Steven,
The point of seeking balance among learning styles when designing instruction is to avoid heavily favoring any category of a learning style dimension. In balanced instruction, students are taught sometimes in ways that match their preferences and sometimes in ways that don’t. When that approach is taken, the students are not too uncomfortable to learn, as some would be if they were never taught in the ways they prefer. At the same time, they’re all sometimes taught against their preferences, which helps them build important skills they might never develop if they were only taught as they prefer.
Balancing instruction doesn’t mean distributing it equally between opposite categories of learning style dimensions. There’s no simple recipe: the appropriate balance in a course depends on the course subject and level. For example, if I’m teaching an introductory undergraduate course in a STEM subject, I’d be inclined to put a heavy emphasis on real-world applications and basic computational methods (sensing), and a lower emphasis on abstract theories and mathematical modeling (intuitive). On the other hand, if I’m teaching an advanced undergraduate or graduate course on the same subject, where I can presume that the entering students have a pretty good understanding of the basics and now I want them to dig deeper into theory and high-level analysis, I’d flip the balance—heavy on intuition, light on sensing. I still need some sensing, though: every body of knowledge, no matter how abstract, is in the curriculum because it’s ultimately needed to address real-world problems. Also, I always have some sensors in the class who are helped by the real-world anchoring to learn the theory.
The need for balance applies equally well to other learning style dimensions. If all you normally do is lecture in class sessions (ineffective for most learners but possibly more so for active learners than for reflective learners), your teaching effectiveness can be increased by adding some individual activities (reflective) and small-group activities (active) to your classes. Knowing that about 80% of the students in most classes are visual learners (see “Applications, Validity, and Reliability of the Index of Learning Styles”), to whom a picture is worth a thousand words, should prompt you to replace a lot of those bullet-point lists in your slides with visuals—diagrams, plots, photos, videos, animations, simulations, etc. And so on.
So how can you determine the right balance for a class you teach? The way you learn to do almost everything in teaching—trial and error. The first time you teach a course, pick a learning styles model (such as the one at the web link in the last paragraph) and take your best shot at striking the right balance for each dimension. What happens in that offering will give you good clues about how to modify the balances next time you teach that course. By the third time you teach it, you’ll probably have it pretty much where you want it.
Finally, when you make changes in a course, make them gradually. If you abruptly try to switch an entire course from, say, mostly intuitive to mostly sensing and mostly verbal to more evenly balanced between visual and verbal, you’re likely to be overwhelmed by the amount of work it takes and the challenges of teaching a whole course in a new way. Make the changes in more gradual steps, never going too far out of your comfort zone, and your teaching will steadily improve, which is all you really need.
Good luck.
Richard Felder

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Use a Prerequisite Exam to Help Get your Course Off to a Good Start (RF & RB)

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When you teach a course that builds heavily on previously-taught material, you have a dilemma. Should you assume that all of the enrolled students start out with a solid grasp of the prerequisites? You’d better not! Some students may have taken the prerequisite courses years ago and have long since forgotten what they learned, or some of the prerequisite content may be really hard or was rushed through so few students really understood it. On the other hand, you don’t want to spend the first three weeks of the course re-teaching material the students are supposed to know. The question is, how can you help your students quickly pick up whatever they’re missing without spending a lot of valuable class time on it?

An effective way to achieve that goal is to give an early exam on the prerequisites. Here’s the process.

  • Before the first day of class, write out a set of learning objectives that specify what the students should be able to do—define, explain, calculate, derive, critique, design,…—if they have the prerequisite knowledge and skills you plan to build on in your course. That last phrase (“you plan to build on in your course”) is critical: if you announce that the students need to know everything covered in the prerequisite courses, you’ll just overwhelm them and the exam won’t serve its intended function. Put the objectives in the form of a study guide for an exam (“To do well on this exam, you should be able to.…”). Except for facts and definitions the students should be prepared to reproduce from memory, the items on the study guide should be generic, not specific questions that might appear verbatim on the exam.
  • On the first day of class, announce that the first midterm exam will be given on ___ (about a week from that day) and will cover only prerequisite material. Hand out the study guide and briefly review it, assuring the students that every question and problem on the exam will be based on items in the study guide.
  • Hold a review session before the test date at which students can ask questions about anything in the study guide. Alternatively, tell the students that they are free to raise questions in class or during your office hours.
  • Give and grade the exam. Count the grade toward the final course grade. (We’ll say more about this later.)
  • (Optional) Give the students a take-home retest to regain up to, say, half the points they lost the first time.

When you adopt this strategy, most students will do whatever it takes to get the specified material into their heads by the exam, and you won’t have to spend more than one class session reviewing prerequisites. Students who do poorly on the exam will be on notice that unless they do something dramatic to relearn material they missed, such as getting some tutoring, they are likely to struggle throughout much of your course and are at risk for failing. If many students have problems with a particular topic on the exam, then consider additional review of that topic.

The idea of testing on course prerequisites at the beginning of a course is not new, but instructors who do it commonly make one or both of two mistakes: (1) they make the test purely diagnostic and give it on the first day of the course, and (2) they don’t count the test grades toward the course grade. What’s wrong with those practices? If the test is given on the first day, the students have no time to remedy deficiencies in their knowledge of the prerequisites and not much incentive to do so after the test. Even if the test is given after the first day, if the grades don’t count many students will spend little or no time studying for it. Either way the grades are likely to be low, indicating that extensive review is required, and the instructor has little basis for knowing what to review and what to leave for the students to relearn on their own. If you use the procedure suggested here you avoid both mistakes; your students will have time to learn or relearn prerequisite material on their own and will have a strong incentive to do so; the study guide will enable them to concentrate their studying on the material you will be building on; and you’ll easily find the sweet spot between insufficient and excessive review at the beginning of your course.

Drawn from R.M. Felder and R. Brent, Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, pp. 60–61. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (2016).

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How to determine course grades fairly (RF & RB)

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Note: The material that follows is drawn from pp. 49–51 of Teaching and Learning STEM:
A Practical Guide.

It’s headache time again.

The semester (or quarter or summer session) is over at last. You gave and graded your final exam and entered the grades in the spreadsheet, right next to the ones for the midterm exams and assignments and whatever else counts toward the final course grade. The spreadsheet instantly calculated the weighted-average numerical grade for each student, and you sorted the sheet to put the numbers in that column in descending order. You’re now looking glumly (no one likes grading) at a column of weighted-average numerical grades, with a student’s name next to each number. Your only remaining task is to put a letter—A, B, C, D, or F—next to each name, possibly (depending on where you teach) followed by plusses and minuses next to some of the letters. That may sound simple to a non-educator, but as all educators know, it’s anything but.

There are two ways to assign course grades: curving (or norm-referenced grading), in which the primary basis for a student’s letter grade is the ranking of her numerical (weighted-average) grade in the column, and absolute grading (criterion-referenced grading), in which the numerical grade itself is the primary basis.

Curving also comes in two flavors: (a) the top 10% of the weighted-average numerical grades get A’s, the next 25% get B’s, the next 35% get C’s the next 20% get D’s, and the bottom 10% get F’s (those percentages are just illustrative), and more commonly, (b) the numerical grades from the top of the column to the first moderately-sized gap between grades get A’s, those from that gap to the next one get B’s, and so on down to F’s. In contrast, the letter grades in absolute grading are determined entirely from the numerical grades. For example, the letter grades and their corresponding ranges of numerical grades might be A(90–100), B(80–89.9), C(70–79.9), D(60–69.9), and F(<60). If pluses and minuses are given, there would be a larger number of narrower ranges.

This blog post (more accurately, this series of linked posts) addresses three questions:

  1. Should I curve or not? (Spoiler alert: Not!)
  2. Suppose I use absolute grading and one of my students gets a weighted-average grade of 70 (which gets a C in the course) and another gets a 69.9 (which gets a D). I know the performances of those two students in the course are virtually identical. Do I still have to give them different course grades? (Spoiler #2: No!)
  3. Suppose I use absolute grading and I give a test on which most of the students get failing marks, bad enough to lower most of their course grades by one or two letters and to cause many of them to fail the course. Do I have to give them those grades? (Spoiler #3: No, especially if you decide the test wasn’t fair.)

OK, let’s look at the detailed responses to those questions. You can view them in any order you choose.

There are of course other important questions related to course grades, including these:

  • How much should I count midterm exam and quiz grades toward the final course grade?
  • Should I drop the lowest exam grade?
  • How much should I count the final exam grade?
  • How much should I count homework assignments? Should I count them less if students work on the homework in teams?
  • What else should count, and how much? Lab and project grades? Attendance? Class participation?
  • When and why should I give an incomplete?
  • What, if anything, should I do about seniors who failed my course and would graduate if they passed it?

We may devote blog posts to these questions in the future, but in the meanwhile you can find suggested answers on pp. 47–49 of Teaching and Learning STEM.

 

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