“Is Ohm’s Law a lie?” Using provocative questions to promote critical thinking

Do your students know how to study? (RB)

Every semester after teachers have given their first test, a wave of dismay comes over them. They lament to each other about how poorly many of their students did on material they covered explicitly in class sessions and assignments. Their pain can be particularly acute in first-year and departmental gateway courses, and they wonder if their students have a clue about how to study.

The sad fact is many of the students don’t! They got A’s in high school just by looking over their class notes and graded homework before the test and repeating it all on the test. As we know and they learn the hard way, rote memorization falls woefully short in college courses—at least in the good ones, which hopefully include yours.

So if students don’t know how to study, how can you help them without regressing to pure memorization tests? Here are a few strategies you might consider.

1. Use study guides to make your expectations clear. It’s hard for students to prepare effectively for tests when they aren’t sure what kinds of thinking they’ll be expected to do. Clear learning objectives can help a lot. If you give objectives to students in the form of a study guide a week or so before an exam (To do well on this test, you should be able to define…, explain…, calculate…, derive…, critique…, formulate…, design…), students can make sure they’re studying the right things.
  You may worry that giving students study guides is spoon-feeding them. It isn’t—not if it’s done right. Study guides just clarify instructors’ expectations, including expectations of high-level thinking and problem-solving, and make it clear that rote memorization won’t be enough. You can make your expectations as high as you want (within reason); when you make them clear to the students, you’ll maximize the chances that the students capable of meeting them will do it. For ideas about to write learning objectives and use them as study guides, click here.
2. Tell students explicitly about study strategies supported by cognitive science. Tell them about retrieval practice (self-tests) for material they may need to recall, spacing out their study sessions instead of cramming at the last minute, and setting up problem solutions from memory to be sure they really understand how to solve the kinds of problems you may ask on the test. Warn them against just re-reading lecture notes and old problem solutions, which can lead to “illusions of competence” and disappointing exam grades. For more details, click here.
3. Give spaced retrieval practice in class. All of the strategies listed in the previous suggestion can and should be modeled in class. Give students periodic short quizzes so they can test their understanding of the material before a higher-stakes mid-term exam. Use individual and small-group active learning exercises in class so they can practice the skills you’re teaching and get immediate feedback on their attempts. A step-by-step process for using partially worked-out problem solutions effectively to promote learning can be found here. For a brief tutorial on active learning exercises, click here, and to see narrated videos that illustrate active learning in STEM classes, click here (12 minutes) and here (35 minutes).
4. Help students think about their study practices (metacognition) by using exam wrappers after each test. When you hand back the tests, have students reflect on the results and ask themselves: (1) How did I prepare for this test? (2) Am I happy with my performance? (3) What might I do to prepare more effectively for the next test? For more details on exam wrappers, click here.
5. Promote a growth mindset. When students have a growth mindset, they believe that they can improve their performance with hard work. This attitude contrasts with a fixed mindset, a belief that performance is based on a talent you either have or you don’t, as in “I’m just bad at math.” Research has shown that compared to a fixed mindset, a growth mindset generally leads to a better academic performance. You can have a profound influence on your students by regularly suggesting that even if the material you’re teaching seems difficult, they can master it by working hard and using the strategies you’ve taught them. You might also note that some of the same material was also hard for you when you first encountered it. For more information on helping students develop a growth mindset and on the supporting research, take a look here.
To find out more about these strategies and many more you can use to help your students’ performance, check out Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide (Ch. 2 on objectives, Ch. 6 on active learning, and Chapters 9 and 10 on helping students develop high-level thinking and problem-solving skills). Another good resource is Teach Students How to Learn (McGuire, S.A., 2015).

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Ten Habits of Highly Ineffective STEM Instructors (RF)

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Does your class frequently look like the one on the left? If it does, some of the ideas in this post may be worth thinking about.

There are no recipes for good teaching. For almost every teaching tip you can find in our book and other references on effective pedagogy, you can find someone well known as a good teacher who doesn’t do things in the recommended way. The same thing is true of bad teaching: we can strongly caution our readers not to do something and you can find excellent teachers who do it with no evil consequences. There are, however, certain teaching practices that may not guarantee poor learning or low student evaluations but definitely push classes in that direction. Here are ten of them.

On Day 1 of a course, assume the students remember and understand everything in the prerequisite courses and jump directly into material brand new to them. Whenever you start a new topic, again plunge right in, without bothering to mention what it has to do with anything the students are likely to care about, be interested in, or know anything about from previous coursework.
Devote most of your course to theoretical principles and mathematical abstractions. If students ask why they need to know all that, tell them that they need to master the “fundamentals” before they get to the practical applications later in the curriculum or after they graduate.
Put your lecture notes on PowerPoint slides and spend all of each class session reading the slides to the students, word for word. No activities—assume the students will learn how to perform complex analyses or solve tough problems just by watching you do it.
Occasionally ask questions during class and either call on individual students immediately or give the answers yourself if no one answers in two seconds or less. Ridicule students who give “dumb” answers.
Assign homework infrequently or not at all. If you assign it, make sure it takes a lot more than two hours out of class for each class hour, and let many weeks elapse before you grade and return it.
Give straightforward problems on assignments and complex or tricky problems on tests. If students complain, tell them (a) they have to learn how to think for themselves, or (b) you’re curving grades so it doesn’t matter.
Make up your tests the night before you give them and don’t bother working out the solutions. If you or the students discover a glitch during a test, tell the class (a) to correct the problem statement and start over, or (b) you’re curving grades so it doesn’t matter.
Give tests that only the top students in the class have time to finish. If students complain, tell them (a) if they really knew the material they wouldn’t have had any trouble finishing, or (b) you’re curving grades so it doesn’t matter.
When your class average on a test is 43 (out of 100), take it as proof that the students are incompetent or lazy or both. Share that opinion with them. Never consider the possibilities that either you did a poor job of covering the test content in class or it was a poorly written test.
If you get dismal course evaluations, assure yourself that it’s because (1) you set higher standards than your colleagues, or (2) you’re not an “entertainer,” or (3) students don’t know enough to evaluate teaching. Add that even though they don’t like you now, in a few years they’ll recognize how good you really were. (Note: Research says that’s possible but highly unlikely.) Never consider the possibility that the evaluations may be justified.

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Eight Ways to Defuse Student Resistance (RF, RB)

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When learner-centered teaching (LCT) methods, such as active, cooperative, and problem-based learning are well done, strong student resistance is uncommon and usually short-lived when it occurs. Here are some strategies that minimize or eliminate it [DeMonbrun et al., 2017; Felder & Brent , 1996; Nguyen et al., 2017; Seidel & Tanner, 2013; Tolman & Kremling, 2016; Weimer, 2013].

Ease into LCT.

If you’re new to active learning, start with one or two brief (10 s – 3 min) active learning exercises in each class session, and continue doing it until both the students and you become accustomed to the approach. Gradually increase the frequency of activities until you get to a level you’re happy with. After a semester or two of that, you may choose to move into other LCT methods such as inquiry-based and cooperative learning. When you feel comfortable with those approaches, if you want to do full-scale problem-based learning (nothing says you have to), go for it. If you jump directly into PBL without getting experience with gentler methods, the student resistance could overwhelm you and you might decide never to try LCT again, which would be a loss for both you and them.

Before you start to use an LCT method, learn about it.

All LCT methods have pitfalls—common mistakes instructors make that limit the effectiveness of the methods and aggravate student resistance to them. The education literature offers lots of guidance on what those mistakes are and how to avoid them. Weimer [2013] provides an excellent general discussion, active learning is addressed by Felder & Brent [2016, pp. 122–127, 243–244], cooperative learning by Felder & Brent [2016, Ch. 11] and Oakley et al. [2007], and inductive teaching and learning by Prince & Felder [2006, 2007]. Find out about the mistakes before you make them rather than learning about them by trial-and-error.

Form good relations with the students and motivate them to learn, starting Day 1.

Felder & Brent [2016, pp. 52–62] suggest a number of techniques for the first week of a course that serve those purposes. They include learning as many of your students’ names as possible, setting up mechanisms for easy and effective communication with them, and helping them understand the connections between your course and their interests and career goals. If students believe that you care about them and their learning and they feel motivated to learn in your course, they’ll be less likely to rebel against a teaching practice they don’t like at first [Weimer, 2013].

Explain what you’re doing, why, and what’s in it for the students.

When you start doing something in a class that makes students more responsible for their own learning than they are used to, they are likely to push back, thinking that you are either avoiding your teaching obligations or running an experiment with them as the guinea pigs. Explaining what you’ll be doing and how it’s in their interests before you start doing it can lower their resistance long enough for them to see that you’re telling them the truth. Part of the explanation should be an offer to show them research demonstrating that students taught the way you’ll be teaching get higher grades. See Felder (n.d.) for an illustrative Day 1 sermonette that introduces active learning to a class and cites Freeman et al. (2014) for the research, and Felder & Brent (2016, pp. 243–244) for sermonettes aimed at students working on assigned project teams.

Model and give practice in unfamiliar methods.

If you assign students to do high-level analytical or critical or creative thinking or technical writing or oral reporting, or to tackle a problem before they’ve been taught how (which is what happens in inductive teaching and learning), there’s a good chance that many of them won’t understand what you’re looking for. Their frustration can be intense when that happens, and resistance is a likely outcome.

To avoid it, first show some concrete examples of the kind of thinking you’re looking for, and then have the students critique other examples and try to do similar things in active learning exercises. Then, and only then, give them assignments and tests on the targeted skills. For some concrete examples of tasks that call for a variety of high-level skills, see Felder & Brent [2016, Ch. 9–10].

Interact with students while they are engaged in LCT activities.

If your students are working on activities in class that take more than a few seconds, circulate among them and be ready to provide help and encouragement. If several students raise a question or point of confusion, share your response with all of them, either in class, by email, or by posting it on the course website or a discussion forum. Encourage students to contact you in live or virtual office hours.

After several weeks, survey students regarding their LCT experience.

After enough time has elapsed for the students to get used to an LCT method (say, 2–4 weeks), given them an anonymous survey that asks whether they believe the method is helping them learn, hindering their learning, or having little effect on their learning, and solicit their comments about what they do and don’t like about the method.

A probable outcome is that many students will believe that the LCT method is helping them learn, many others will be neutral, and a handful will think they are learning less than they would if you taught traditionally. If that is indeed what happens, report the results in the next class session. As a rule, students who are hostile to LCT after a few weeks of it believe that they are the vanguard of a mass movement. When they discover that most of their classmates are either enthusiastic about it or could take it or leave it, their overt resistance usually fades away. On the other hand, if the survey shows that many students are still hostile to LCT, look back at the literature, see if you were violating any recommendations for how to do it, and look for patterns in the students’ comments about what in particular bothers them about it. Decide what, if anything, you’ll change in the future, and announce it in the next class session.

Learn from your first try, and try again.

The first time you teach a course traditionally, you can be sure that you won’t get it right. You’ll learn from that experience, make changes, and the course will be much better the second time. By the third time, it will start to look like what you initially had in mind.

It’s no different with learner-centered teaching. Give it your best shot the first time, figure out how you could have done it better, and do it that way the second time. It may take longer than three iterations to get it where you want it, especially with a challenging method such as problem-based learning, but if you have patience and an open mind you’ll eventually start to see the learning benefits that the LCT literature promises.

References

DeMonbrun, M., Finelli, C.J., Prince, M., Borrego, M., Shekhar, P., Henderson, C., and Waters, C. (2017). Creating an instrument to measure student response to instructional practices. Journal of Engineering Education, 106 (2), 273–298.

Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (1996). “Navigating the bumpy road to student–centered instruction.” College Teaching, 44 (2), 43–47.

Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2016). Teaching and learning STEM: A practical guide. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Felder, R.M. (n.d.). Sell active learning to your students before doing it [Blog post].

Nguyen, K., Husman, J., Borrego, M., Shekhar, P., Prince, M., DeMonbrun, M., Finelli, C. Henderson, C., and Waters, C. (2017). Students’ expectations, types of instruction, and instructor strategies predicting student response to active learning. International Journal of Engineering Education, 33 (1A), 2–18.

Oakley, B.A., Hanna, D.M., Kuzmyn, Z., and Felder, R.M. (2007). “Best practices involving teamwork in the classroom: Results from a survey of 6435 engineering student respondents. IEEE Transactions in Education, 50(3), 266–272 (2007).

Prince, M.J., and Felder, R.M. (2006). Inductive teaching and learning methods: Definitions, comparisons, and research bases. J. Engr. Education, 95(2), 123–138 (2006).

Prince, M.J., and Felder, R.M. (2007). The many faces of inductive teaching and learning. J. Coll. Sci. Teaching, 36(5), 14–20.

Seidel, S.B., and Tanner, K.D. (2013). “What if students revolt?”—Considering Student Resistance: Origins, Options, and Opportunities for Investigation. CBE Life Sci Educ, 12(4), 586–595.

Tolman, A.O., and Kremling, A. (2016). Why students resist learning: A practical model for understanding and helping students. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Weimer, M. (2013). Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice (2^nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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How can I do all this new stuff and still cover my syllabus? (RB & RF)

Selling active learning to your students (RF)

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When Instructors start using active learning in a class of students who aren’t used to it, the students generally don’t all welcome it, and some may be resistant or downright hostile to it. A key to defusing the resistance is to give them some advance preparation.

At the beginning of a class in which you’ll be using active learning, explain to the students what you’ll be doing, why you’re doing it, and what’s in it for them.

Before I retired from full-time teaching, my first-day sermonette about active learning went something like this:

Here’s how this class is going to work. Every so often I’ll stop my lecture and give you something to do—sometimes individually, more often in small groups—related to what I’ve been talking about. You’ll have a short time—as little as 10 seconds, as much as three minutes—to answer a question, begin a problem solution, carry out the next step in a derivation, or whatever it may be. I’ll stop you and call on one or more of you to share what you came up with, and then resume my lecture when I’ve gotten what I’m looking for or something even better.

So why am I doing this? I’m doing it for your benefit. The things I’ll ask you to do in these short activities will be the same things I’ll ask you to do on your assignments and exams…the hard parts. I have a stack of research proving that students taught this way have an easier time on homework and get better grades on exams than students taught with traditional nonstop lecturing. If any of you would like to see that research, let me know—I’d be happy to share it with you. Any questions?

You’ll probably never have a student who asks to examine the research, but offering to show it generally convinces all of them that you’re serious, and they’ll sit still for active learning long enough to see that you’re telling the truth about its benefits. If anyone ever does ask to examine it, refer them to:

Freeman, S., Eddy, S.L., McDonough, M., Smith, M.K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., and Wenderoth, M.P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410–8415.

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Give Sketchnotes a Try! (RB)

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Sketchnotes of our 1-day teaching workshop by Margot Vigeant

Rich Felder and I presented a 1-day teaching institute at the ASEE Chemical Engineering Division Summer School at North Carolina State University recently to nearly 200 new faculty. One of our longtime colleagues, Margot Vigeant from Bucknell, sat in on the workshop and prepared a set of graphic notes, or sketchnotes. As soon as we saw them, we knew we wanted to share them here, and Margot kindly agreed. As you can see, the notes don’t include everything important, but they are a visual representation of the ideas and take-away messages that most struck Margot.

It seems to me that graphic notes or sketchnotes could be a great way to identify and capture key ideas in a presentation and create something you’ll return to again and again. It could be an effective way to takes notes for students who just can’t seem to get into the dry outline format they’ve been taught.

To get ideas about how to start making graphic notes, check out How to Get Started with Sketchnotes by Elisabeth Irgens. Another free resource is Sketchnoting for Teaching and Learning! For more examples, see 10 Brilliant Examples of Sketchnotes: Notetaking for the 21st Century. Happy notetaking!!

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Get new instructors off to a great start with mentoring (RF)

College instructors are generally taught nothing about teaching before they step into their first class. The result is that most of them either end up learning to teach well (or at least adequately) by trial-and-error or they never learn at all. If you’re like most college graduates you should have no trouble thinking of some of your teachers–maybe lots of them–who were clearly in the second category.

There are better approaches to teaching new college teachers how to teach.[1] One is instructional development, in which guidance is provided to groups of new faculty in teaching workshops and learning communities. Another is mentoring, in which experienced faculty members provide individual guidance to new ones.

For many years, my department (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at N.C. State University) has introduced its new faculty members to teaching using both instructional development and mentoring. It starts between one and two weeks before the fall term, when the new CBE faculty member attends a four-day orientation workshop given by and for the combined faculties of the Colleges of Engineering and Sciences. The workshop is facilitated by outstanding teachers and researchers in both colleges, and covers effective teaching (2 days) and starting and building a research program and balancing the competing time demands of research, teaching, and personal life (2 days). Information about the workshop is given in references cited below.[2] The rest of this post describes the mentoring.

During the fall or spring term following the orientation, the CBE newbie co-teaches the introductory chemical engineering course with one of a cadre of the best teachers in the department. That course is very well developed, so the burden of creating new course notes and assignments is considerably lower than it would be for a brand-new course preparation. The mentor and mentee teach either one section of the course together or separate sections that meet at different times.

Early in the course the mentor takes the lead, planning lectures, assignments, and tests and doing the lecturing. After several weeks, the mentee gradually takes on more of those responsibilities, so that by the end of the term the teaching is well distributed between the two instructors. The mentor and mentee observe each others’ class sessions throughout the semester, and once every week they meet for a debriefing session that may last anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, depending on how much they have to talk about that week. The mentor never intervenes during class sessions taught by the mentee, even if the mentee gets into trouble and looks pleadingly at the mentor in hopes of being rescued. Compliments, critiques, and suggestions are shared only in the debriefings.

The formal mentoring relationship ends when the course does, after which the mentee is fully responsible for his or her own courses. However, the mentor frequently serves informally for at least one more term, occasionally observing and commenting on the mentee’s lectures and providing consulting advice on request.

Participation in the orientation workshop and the mentoring are voluntary, but virtually all new CBE Department faculty members for the last decade or so have gone through both. Many of them have won outstanding teacher awards in their first few years on the faculty and they have also been extraordinarily successful with their NSF CAREER Award proposals, which often rise or fall on the strength of their education components. Mentoring has consequently come to be considered a valuable service to the department, and mentors are given lighter course loads and/or relieved from other responsibilities like serving on a committee. Several mentees have gone on to subsequently become mentors.

This approach to helping new faculty members get their teaching off to a good start really works! It’s probably not a coincidence that several years after it was adopted, the CBE department was selected as the best teaching department in the university.

The references below provide additional information on new faculty support programs, including mentoring. (The list isn’t comprehensive–it includes only programs I’ve been directly involved with.) Glance through them, and consider whether the approach described might give your department the same benefits that the N.C. State CBE Department has enjoyed.

References
[1] New faculty support programs

“New STEM Faculty Support: Why Aren’t We Providing It?” A challenge of the traditional university assumption that all new faculty hires already know how to teach effectively, start and build a successful research program, and meet the time demands imposed by teaching, research, and trying to have a life outside their job.
“Helping New Faculty Get Off to a Good Start.” An article that suggests things administrators and senior faculty can do to help new faculty members become productive in research and effective in teaching early in their careers.
“Preparing New Faculty Members to be Successful: A No-Brainer and yet a Radical Concept.” A multifaceted program at North Carolina State University to help prepare new and future faculty members for successful academic careers.
“Mentoring: A Personal Perspective.” An article describing a mentoring relationship between an experienced faculty member and a relatively new one as viewed from both perspectives.

[2]. The N.C. State new faculty orientation workshop for engineering and the sciences

“New Faculty 101: An Orientation to the Profession.” Detailed description of a four-day workshop that provides guidance to new faculty members on starting and managing a research program, planning and teaching courses, balancing time demands imposed by research, teaching, and the rest of a faculty member’s life, and becoming an effective participant in the campus community.
“Just-in-Time vs. Just-in-Case: Orientation for New Faculty in STEM Disciplines.” A more recent but less detailed description of the workshop and some evidence of its effectiveness.
“Turning New Faculty Members into Quick Starters.” Still more details about the workshop and suggestions for making similar programs effective.

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Tell Your Story (RF)

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Everybody—ok, almost everybody—loves a good story. Parents learn quickly that if they want to entertain their children or settle them down, reading them a story is a surefire way to do it, even if (and sometimes especially if) the children have heard the story often enough to have it memorized word for word. Teachers in early childhood education all know that too, and they use it in their classes. They may have trouble getting their students to pay attention to multiplication tables and spelling, but let them start telling a good story and bang, those kids are with them!

The power of stories to capture attention continues into adulthood. Once when Rebecca was an education professor, I sat in on her class on children’s literature. I arrived a little late, getting there while she was reading “Owl Moon” to her class of third-year college students. I looked in the doorway and saw a class of five-year-old children in 21-year-old bodies. They were leaning forward in their seats, all eyes on Rebecca, many with mouths open, hanging on every word. It was fascinating. Then I found a seat in the back and in a couple of minutes I was just another five-year-old.

I’ve told lots of stories in my teaching, using them either to illustrate things I was teaching or to motivate the students’ interest in learning those things. The stories got high marks in my ratings and I always felt that they were helping the students learn, but it was just that—a feeling. Until recently, if you asked me for proof I might have mumbled something vague about links between active engagement and learning, but I wouldn’t have been able to produce explicit support for the educational value of stories.

A few days ago, however, I found some. First, a little oversimplified cognitive science. “Learning” involves transferring perceived information (such as lecture content) from working memory to long-term memory, from which it can later be retrieved and used. The primary basis for the brain’s decision to either store something in long-term memory or discard it is the learner’s prior associations with the information, especially emotional associations. The stronger and more numerous the associations, the more likely the new information is to be stored [1, pp. 2–3; 2, Ch. 3].

So what does all that have to do with stories? A recent blog post (“Write and don’t stop”) by the neurosurgeon Dr. David Hanscom has the answer. It cites research showing that presentation of information either directly (such as in readings and lectures) or in stories activates two centers in the brain that help make meaning out of words (the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas), but stories also stimulate other areas of the brain that would be active if the listener were actually experiencing the events the stories describe. If a story refers to an action like kicking or running, the brain’s motor cortex lights up, and if the story mentions a visual image or sound or physical sensation, the corresponding sensory processing area of the brain is activated. Scientists have also found that a story can plant ideas, feelings, and emotions into listeners’ brains. In one study, the brains of a woman telling a story and of her listener were monitored, and as the story progressed the two brains went into sync with each other!

Those results don’t prove that if you go into your class and tell random stories you’ll see the learning you’re looking for. Reciting Owl Moon in your computational fluid dynamics class, for example, would probably not help the students make sense of the Navier-Stokes equations. The research suggests, though, that if you tell a story linking something you plan to teach to things the students are likely to know and—more importantly—care about, their physical, sensory, and emotional responses to the story can increase the odds that they will store what you teach in their long-term memories…which is to say, they’ll learn it!

OK, if Owl Moon is out, what kind of stories can you tell in a STEM course that might facilitate learning? The possibilities are infinite. Tell about important inventions or discoveries or familiar phenomena or devices that your course will explain. Tell about mistakes and lessons learned the hard way that what you’re getting ready to teach may help your students avoid— course-related stories of bridges and buildings collapsing, environmental catastrophes, satellites crashing on planets instead of going smoothly into orbit around them, ethical dilemmas, multibillion dollar lawsuits, and so on. You can find such stories in newspapers and journals like Scientific American, case study collections like the one at the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science, YouTube videos, and websites like How stuff works, How everything works, and Everyday engineering examples.

Besides helping students learn technical course content, stories can be used to steer them toward behaviors and attitudes that can help them succeed both in school and after they graduate. Rebecca and I put stories like that aimed at both students and instructors in Teaching and learning STEM [1, pp. 13, 17, 107, 131, 151, 187, 213, and 243]. Many of the stories include dialogues among hypothetical students that illustrate different strengths, weaknesses, and behavior patterns we want our readers to know about. If the readers recognize themselves and/or (if they are teachers) their students in the stories, we hope—and believe—that some will be motivated to consider the recommendations that follow the stories. You are welcome to share any of the stories with colleagues and students or to use them as models for stories of your own.

When possible, draw stories from your own experience, especially if you ever worked on projects and problems like the ones your students are likely to encounter after they graduate. Most students are worried that when they get out in the real world they’ll find that they haven’t been adequately prepared by school. If you can occasionally say, “Look, what it says in the book is ok as far as it goes, but let me tell you about something I once ran into that’s not in the book,” they’ll be all ears and grateful to you for the inside information.

In short, a well-chosen story is a pedagogical triple threat. It has the potential to promote technical knowledge acquisition and skill development, foster attitudes that favor academic and professional success, and provide practical career guidance well beyond what students normally get from conventional lectures and textbooks. Seems worth trying, doesn’t it?

References
1. Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2016). Teaching and learning STEM: A practical guide. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass).
2. Sousa, D.A. (2011). How the brain learns (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

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Can I just capture my whole lecture and put it online for my students? (RB)

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In a word, no! (Well, technically you can, but it’s a bad idea.) A well-established guideline related to students’ attention span says that for online lecture clips and screencasts, shorter is better and about six minutes is a good target.

Marketing gurus at Wistia Blog have analyzed 564,710 videos with more than 1.3 billion plays and have found that (as you would expect) the longer the video, the less likely people are to complete it. Very short videos of less than two minutes hold a viewer’s attention best, but videos that short are generally not that useful for covering the amount of content we want to present. You can see the data here.

Okay, I hear you say—that’s well and good for marketing. Surely, I can use longer videos than THAT when I’m teaching college students.

Well, again, let’s look at the evidence. In a 2014 study, some MIT professors studied viewer persistence data from 6.9 million video sessions in four EdX MOOC offerings (Guo, et. al, 2014). They found that video length was “by far the most significant indicator of engagement” as measured by the length of time students watched the video and whether they attempted embedded assessment questions. Median engagement time was six minutes regardless of video length, leading to the authors’ recommendation that videos should be edited into short chunks of less than six minutes in length.

So what should you do in your short videos? The MIT folks have answers for that one, too. It turns out that tutorials in which you do step-by-step problem solving (think Khan Academy) are more effective than PowerPoint slides. (Then again, what isn’t, except for showing pictures, diagrams, and charts with minimal verbiage?) Filming in a more informal setting where you can make eye contact, such as with a laptop webcam in your office, may be more effective than a fancy professional studio production. Finally, it works better to plan these videos specifically for the online format instead of just videotaping a class and hoping for natural stopping points.

The next big question, of course, is how do I get students to watch the videos and truly engage with the material? There are answers aplenty for that question, which we’ll take up in a future blog. In the meantime, whatever you do, make those online videos short!

Guo, P.J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. Proceedings of the first ACM Conference on Learning@Scale.

References on online and hybrid classes

Boettcher, J.V., & Conrad, R.M. (2010). The online teaching survival guide: Simple and practical pedagogical tips. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2016). Teaching and learning STEM: A practical guide, Chapter 7. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Felder, R.M., & Brent, R. (2015). To flip or not to flip. Chemical Engineering Education, 4(3), 191-192.
Means, B, Toyama, Y., Murphy, R., Bakia, M., and Jones, K. (2010). Evaluation of evidence-based practices in online learning: A meta-analysis and review of online learning studies. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

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Resources for Teaching and Learning STEM

Rebecca Brent and Richard Felder's Website

“Is Ohm’s Law a lie?” Using provocative questions to promote critical thinking

Do your students know how to study? (RB)

Ten Habits of Highly Ineffective STEM Instructors (RF)

Eight Ways to Defuse Student Resistance (RF, RB)

How can I do all this new stuff and still cover my syllabus? (RB & RF)

Selling active learning to your students (RF)

Give Sketchnotes a Try! (RB)

Get new instructors off to a great start with mentoring (RF)

Tell Your Story (RF)

Can I just capture my whole lecture and put it online for my students? (RB)