Engaging Students in Learning

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Summary of our Fall 2017 lunch discussions

At our Opening Workshop in August 2017, hosted by the Teaching Learning Committee, we started a process of reflection on the challenges that we have identified in our teaching, and how to address those challenges. Throughout the fall of 2017, a group of faculty met monthly between September and November, to focus in one set of related challenges from the workshop, which we broadly framed as the challenge of engaging students in the process of learning.

For this group, the motivating questions that we took from the opening workshop included: How do we effectively engage students who enter our classroom with a wide range of preparation, how do we provide feedback in a way that promotes reflection and development, and how do we encourage students to develop the skills to evaluate and improve on their performance in class? How do we support the needs of our international students?

Across our meetings in the fall, our conversation focused on two issues:

  • Strategies for providing feedback in a way that impacts student performance (such as comments on papers which students respond to in a deep way)
  • And, working with students who enter with a wide range of preparation.

Question #1: How do we provide feedback that is useful?

  • Types of assignments we discussed in our monthly meetings: papers, drafts, exams, problem sets.
  • Concerns: Our most effective strategies (one-on-one meetings, extensive written comments) are time-intensive, and students may not respond to that feedback on later assignments.
  • Themes: Some of our discussion focused on specific assignments we use, but general themes that emerged was that these techniques were intended to increase accountability for using feedback, and to provide models for how to respond to feedback.
  • Whatever our technique, our goal seems to be to nurture a metacognitive skill in our students: learners should habitually attend to the results of their efforts and use them to improve.

Accountability: Heavily weight revisions in the final grade for papers, require students to submit a plan for a paper revision before starting, take off points on later problem sets for repeating errors made on earlier problems.

Making the goals of the revision explicit: Providing a rubric for the quality of a revision, discussing how to respond to comments from faculty or peer reviewers.

Potential resources:

 

Question #2: How do we support students who enter
the classroom with a wide range of preparation?

  • How do we help students who struggle with basic skills? Being able to read and interpret a word problem was an area of concern here for some.
  • How do we help students prepare for each class session? Specific techniques that came up here were the use of quizzes (especially ones that had students apply material that they had read before class).
  • Specific concerns for our first-year students: Many students arrive at Wabash having experienced easy success in high school, and we are concerned that many need encouragement to learn to persist when struggling in a course, to get them to make use of office hours, to introduce them more fully into the psychology of learning (that reading is not the same thing as studying, strategies for taking notes, etc.).
  • Services: Can we better partner with the Writing Center and Quantitative Skills Center to support students?

Some of these points are focused on providing students with effective support, but others seems to also focus on helping our students develop better metacognitive skills.

Specific strategies that Wabash faculty have used, or are trying out:

  • Having one-on-one meetings with each student (to discuss exams, papers, etc.): considered effective, but a very time-intensive strategy.
  • Holding a session on note-taking (outside of class), to demonstrate one method for effectively taking notes on readings and course sessions. Providing students with an example of one’s own notes from an undergraduate or graduate course (Eric Olofson).
  • Having students grade themselves using an answer key in class (Eric Olofson, Neil Schmitzer-Torbert), or providing students with the correct solution, and requiring them to work together to identify why their own answers were not correct (if they made an error) (Nate Tompkins).
  • Having students complete a survey on their study strategies when they complete an exam (Katie Ansaldi, Karen Quandt, Nate Tompkins).
  • Having students resubmit one question for an exam (Shamira Gelbman)

Paper revisions:

  • Requiring students to submit resubmission letters (Matt Carlson, Matt Lambert), or a revision plan listing the points the student would address (Shamira Gelbman), or making the revision (the improvements made to the paper since a previous draft) worth half of the final grade, unless somehow the original paper was perfect (Eric Olofson).
  • Make the first version of the paper worth the most. This one is all student work, without peer or my comments.  And they’ll take the initial (not “rough draft”) more seriously. Doesn’t help with taking the revisions seriously, though. (Paul Vasquez, formerly in our Political Science department, described by Karen Gunther)
  • Karen Gunther: On repeat versions of the same type of assignment (mini-lab write-ups, different experiments, not a revised paper, but the same format across multiple papers), I reserve 5% of the grade for their comments/reflections on what they improved on the second (or third) mini-lab, based on my comments from the first (or second) mini-lab. This is explicitly requested in the syllabus.   Not all students read the syllabus, and thus miss this part of the assignment.  But usually after receiving mini-lab #2 back, with 0 on 5% of the assignment for reflection, they do the reflection on the 3rd mini-lab.