Learning beyond exams

If I asked “Are exams a necessary part of college education?”, chances are that many of you would answer yes. As educators we haven’t come up with a better way of measuring student learning, and after all, how would we give grades if we didn’t have exams? But do students learn much from exams? We know that our students often cram in order to pass an exam or quiz, and I hear constant complaints that they do not retain knowledge or that they are unable to apply knowledge learned in one class to projects in another class. While I’m not suggesting that we should blame the lack of learning on exams, I wonder if there are creative ways to use exams to enhance learning beyond the traditional studying that takes place before the exam. What do you do after the exam?

I must admit that akin to this week’s Faculty Focus blogger, I am guilty of often keeping exam debriefs very short; most often I don’t feel like I have the luxury of spending precious classroom time reviewing exams, especially as most students seem to have very little interest in revisiting their exam mistakes. However, if I really want to focus on learning, I know I should take the time – or require the students to take the time – to reflect on their learning through the mistakes they made on the exam. In her blog post, Maryellen Weimer summarizes a few published strategies to enhance learning from exams:

1. Allow students to correct their own questions; this can be done individually or in groups and immediately after the students take the exam (before they know their score) or once the exam has been returned.
2. Require students to reflect on why they made exam mistakes and have them look for patterns that reveal holes in studying strategies, skill mastery, or content knowledge with the goal of improving study techniques for future exams.

I used the first strategy a few times when an entire class performed horribly on an exam; instead of reviewing the exam with the students, I gave them the opportunity to work in groups to correct their mistakes using all available resources including the book and electronic devices. I then re-graded the exams and bumped everybody’s test score with a number of points that was equal to half the difference of the class average of the first and second exam score. This I felt was fair, as the adjusted score still reflected the initial study effort that each student had put in, but also gave everybody the opportunity to raise their scores. Surprisingly, the scores on the re-graded exams were far from perfect, which told me that there were major concepts that the students had not grasped, or the majority of the class had completely misunderstood. This gave me an opportunity to go back and correct misconceptions. In hindsight, I wish I had asked the students to reflect on their learning after the exam and the re-grading exercise, but that will have to wait for a future exam.

How do you handle exam debriefs or retakes? Do you let students take an exam over? How do you deal with exam scores and grades if you allow any kind of re-take? Do you incorporate reflection after exams and, if you do, have you found that it helps students become better learners?

Remembering to Breathe

I found myself nodding in recognition as I read Aimée Morrison’s article in which she described how she used to teach:

When I began teaching, and for some time after, I used to try to assuage...anxieties [about not succeeding at the hard job of teaching well] by crowding them out with activity. I would prepare 15 pages of lecture notes for an 80-minute class session. I would assign 70 pages of reading for every class meeting so we wouldn’t run out of material. I would cover over any pauses in the discussion with more lecturing, more PowerPoints, more handouts. I had students write research papers and exams and bibliographies and presentations and blog posts and quizzes — just so that it would be clear that I had a plan, and I was in charge, and I was well-prepared, and I knew what I was doing.

Morrison’s article uses yoga as a metaphor, explaining how we often try so hard to teach well --the yoga term is “over-efforting”--that we forget to breathe as we go along. She makes a plea for more breathing space for both teacher and student, more time in which students can learn.  She argues for being “less busy but more mindful” in our teaching, so that our classes can be more student-centered and our students more interested and more active, covering less perhaps but learning what is covered in more depth.

That makes sense to me even if it goes against the grain of my built-in need to be 110% prepared for what will happen each moment of each class and each class of the semester.  But it seems like an appropriate note on which to end my final Teaching Matters blog. As I enter retirement and work on breathing deeply and evenly--on some nice tropical beach if there is any justice in this universe--I will be thinking of you all, comforted in the knowledge that Lincoln students are flourishing in your capable and caring hands.

Getting Engaged

The premise of Engaging Imagination: Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers by Alison James and Stephen D. Brookfield, one of the new CETL books available in the library, is that reflective thinking is essential for learning, and engagement is essential for reflection.

The authors begin with “Three Axioms of Student Engagement” (pp. 6-7):

1. Student learning is deepest when the content or skills being learned are personally meaningful, and this happens when students see connections and applications of learning. 
2. Student learning “sticks” more when the same content or skills are learned through multiple methods.
3. The most memorable critical incidents students experience in their learning are those when they are required to “come at” their learning in a new way, when they are “jerked out” of the humdrum by some unexpected challenge or unanticipated task.  We naturally remember the surprising rather that the routine, the unpredictable rather than the expected.

The rest of the book explains why and how to get students involved in the following 14 reflection-encouraging activities:

• Check the assumptions that inform their actions and judgments;
• Seek to open themselves to new and unfamiliar perspectives;
• Attempt intersubjective understanding and perspective taking—trying to understand how another person reasons, understands content, or views knowledge;
• Make their intuitions and “gut” feelings the focus of study;
• Study the effects of their actions with a view to changing them;
• Look for blind spots and omissions in their thinking;
• Identify what is justified and well grounded in their thinking;
• Accept and experiment with multiple learning modalities;
• Value emotional dimensions of their learning as much as the purely cognitive;
• Try to upend their  habitual ways of understanding something;
• Connect their thinking conducted in one domain to thinking in another;
• Become more aware of their habitual epistematic cognition—the typical ways they judge something to be true;
• Apply reflective protocols in contextually appropriate ways;
• Alternate cognitive analysis with an acceptance of an unregulated, unmediated flow of emotions, impulses, intuitions, and images.

What sorts of activities have you tried to encourage student reflection and engage them in multiple ways of knowing your subject matter?  Any creative teaching tips to share?

Teaching Actively

One of the books in the “New CETL Books Available” section of our library is Mel Silberman’s Teaching Actively: Eight Steps and 32 Strategies.  Since I am always a sucker for things that promise I only have to do a specific number of things to be successful, I opened that one quickly. 

Silberman’s eight steps are logical, basically the things any good teacher tries to do: 

1. Engage your students from the start 
2. Be a brain-friendly teacher 
3. Encourage lively and focused discussions 
4. Urge students to ask questions 
5. Let your students learn from each other 
6. Enhance learning with experiencing and doing 
7. Blend in technology wisely
8. Make the end unforgettable

It was interesting, though, to consider the specific strategies described for each step and consider some new options.  For example, one of the strategies for “making the end unforgettable” --in other words, for helping students to extend their learning beyond the course itself-- was asking students to create an action plan saying how/when/where they plan to use their new skills and knowledge in the future.  Students submit these plans to the teacher, who in turn returns them to the students via email a month or so later, at which point students can revisit the plan, check which actions they have taken, and hopefully reinforce some of the course content. 

Have you ever tried something like that to reach beyond the end of the semester?  Did it work?  If you've had a chance to look at the other 31 strategies, are there any that stand out as particularly useful to you?