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:

• Weimer. (2017). How should I study for the exam?
• Tanner. (2012). Promoting student metacognition. – Highlights the importance of metacognition for students in the context of an undergraduate biology course. Identifies a range of strategies that could be useful in a wide range of courses.
• Pezdek. (2009). Grading Student Papers: Reducing Faculty Workload While Improving Feedback to Students
• Rae and Cochrane. 2008. Listening to students: How to make written assessment feedback useful. – Presents a model for written assessment based on how students describe their perceptions of feedback (the kinds of feedback students feel are helpful). This may be useful for thinking about how to structure feedback, but we should be careful to determine if giving feedback in the way students say that they would prefer to receive it will actually impact performance.

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.

• Potential resources: Lolita Paff: Questioning the Two-Hour Rule for Studying

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.

In our October Teacher Talk, Drs. Crystal Benedicks and Jill Lamberton described their work with the Wabash Liberal Arts Immersion Program (WLAIP), a summer program which brings a group of entering Wabash freshmen to campus for four weeks during the summer, to get a head start on their Wabash experience. As part of the program, the students complete an immersive composition course, in which the final assignment, designed by Jill Lamberton, is a reflective audio essay.

The assignment was motivated by the observation that in the real world, our students will be writing in multi-modal ways, and Jill was interested in creating an assignment that helped students practice this type of writing. Students also had the opportunity to solidify their learning as they reflected on what they had learned in the course, stating what their beliefs about writing are, and the types of writers they wanted to be. The use of an audio assignment also leveled the playing field in some ways, as those students who excelled in creating audio content were not always those who had written the strongest papers. And, the assignment also involved peer evaluation, to give students more experience in looking critically at the work of others, and using that feedback to improve their own work.

In the Teacher Talk, we listened to a 9 minute audio piece, which featured parts of the audio essays of several of this year’s WLAIP students. The clip is available to Wabash faculty on the Teaching and Learning Canvas page (Look under the 2016-17 information, under the heading: Teacher Talk – What first-year students really think about college learning (Oct. 19, 2016)).

In the clip, we heard students describe being overwhelmed in school, “fact after fact smack me in the face without knowing what it meant.” Others described how they felt they had not understood the purpose of school, how it translated to being successful, and how they now wanted to claim an education.  How they had felt that “creativity was a crime” in high school, and they were never expected to succeed in college, or treated as a person with potential. Students spoke about being self-conscious about their accent, feeling that they were judged as less able, and their words as less valuable, because of their speech. Others spoke about how they had dreaded reading in school, and had never really read a passage or essay before the summer course.

After listening to the audio, faculty and staff shared their reactions. We noted that it must be very different to come into college from backgrounds where they were not expected to go on to college, compared to those students who were always expected to go to college. We were also impressed that the students featured were all very eloquent and reflective, citing sources well.

We noted that students reported seeing the feedback on their writing (getting a paper back marked up in red) as a reflection of who they were (a bad writer) and not as feedback intended to help them improve their work. Related, students did not really think of drafting as a process of thinking, and this was something they had to learn.

Helen Hudson, who had also taught in the summer course, described her conversations with students, who said “I had no idea anyone was interested in hearing my ideas” when they reflected on class discussion.

Some of the points that we took away from the audio clip and our own conversation were:

• We can all promote students talking directly to each other.
• We can also promote the idea that you CAN work on your writing and improve as a writer.
• The importance of encouraging annotations – in the summer course, students were required to print and write all over their readings; students received points based on how much they wrote
• The importance of helping students understand strategies for annotations: to see this as a key part of engaging with a text.
  • To encourage students to summarize, react, to ask questions in the margin
  • To see this work as the ideas that will be important in their later paper drafts, and a key step in the writing process.

November’s Teacher Talk focused on continuing our conversation from the August Opening Workshop (on Community Engagement). Neil Schmitzer-Torbert welcomed attendees, and highlighted upcoming Teaching and Learning events, including:

• Oct 19^th – Campus visit by Greg Wegner, GLCA
  • GLCA Teaching & Learning Center (virtual) roll-out
  • email announcement/RSVP to follow
• Oct 26 – Follow up lunch on the ethics of community-engaged learning
  • Potential topics: developing community relationships, working with religious/political orgs, IRB approval, etc.
• Feb 12^th, 2016 – Joe Favazza returns to campus
  • Joe is available for small group workshops/conversations for those seeking to implement community-engaged learning in upcoming courses
  • Interested faculty should RSVP to upcoming TLC email

Neil continued by asking each invited speaker to briefly introduce their community engagement resource.  The introductions were followed by a group Q&A/discussion. Continue reading →

Teacher Talk: Should We Assign Research Papers to Freshmen?

At the Opening Workshop in August (2011), Sandra Jamieson presented data from the Citation Project (http://citationproject.net/) showing that freshman were doing a poor job of engaging critically with sources in their research papers (samples of which were taken from writing courses at a variety of colleges, including Wabash).

In our September Teacher Talk, we returned to this question from a new direction, and posed the question:  What is our purpose in assigning freshman research papers/projects?

And, secondly: How is that going for you? 

The conversation clustered around the following ideas: If we don’t start teaching research skills in the freshman year (because the students are not ready), why do we expect they will be ready later (say in the sophomore year)?

If our goal is simply to help them learn what research is, compared to offering one’s opinion, then starting in the freshman year would seem to be critical.

If, however, our goal is to help students engage critically with sources (to analyze arguments, summarize them in their own words, to marshal evidence in support of their position), it may be that the research paper is not well suited to that task. Maybe we should focus on slowing down and scaffolding for the specific skills we expect: library literacy, evaluation of sources, unbiased summary, analysis of arguments, etc.

Students’ abilities to engage with sources are only as good as their abilities to read sources thoroughly.

We should remember that we don’t have to send students to the library or assign a classic research paper in order to prompt engagement with sources. Teaching them to summarize and analyze the class texts can also be useful.

If we are disappointed in the pattern of citations seen in the citation project (because students are not meeting our expectations), how much of this data indicates that we are not making our expectations clear?

We must remember that the things we are asking students to do—find, understand, and assimilate a range of written work—are hard (even for us) and take a lot of time. Many students also face time management issues that exacerbate the difficulties of research.