Author: Emily Barber

Bob Casper

It may be hard for us as faculty to admit to ourselves that many assignments end up being forgotten—dumped in an actual or virtual trash can—once we’ve graded them. Educator David Wiley has dubbed these assignments “disposable” because they “add no value to the world— after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away.”

Wiley instead encourages faculty to craft “renewable assignments” that add value to the world (in and/or outside of the course) after they are completed. What the students produce through their coursework can be useful to and usable by fellow students, the instructor, and others. Examples include:

• Students write or edit articles for Wikipedia.
• Students conduct a research project (rather than just planning one) and present their findings at a conference or in a publication of some kind.
• History students use primary sources to produce historical research about their local area, which proves useful to community groups.
• Students create learning objects (including videos, PowerPoint slides, and diagrams) to help teach course concepts to others.
• Students in a course on open education put together an Open Education Reader, a collection of readings and commentary on open education. They released it as a free, open, online book that anyone with access to the internet can use.

Why renewable?

Wiley says, “Students tell me that they invest significantly more time and effort in these assignments and enjoy doing them more.” It is understandable that if students are working for a wider audience, and if they think the work is valuable to others, they might have a larger buy-in than disposable assignments. In addition, higher education institutions might be able to connect renewable assignments to the University’s broader learning outcomes. As for improving student learning, if authentic assessments are valuable in that regard, what could be more authentic than actually doing work that one might otherwise be asking students to simulate?

Finally, students must be given a choice as to whether or not they want their work to be public, and if so, whether they wish to give their work an open license. After all, the copyright for their work belongs to them.

Learn more

• What is Open Pedagogy?
• From consumers to creator: Students as producers of content
• Non-disposable assignments in philosophy

Adapted from

Hendricks, C. (2015, Oct. 29). Renewable assignments: Student work adding value to the world. Retrieved July 5, 2018.

Bob Casper is an Instructional Design Consultant at Boise State University’s Center for Teaching and Learning

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Photo by Narcisa Aciko from Pexels

Shawn Simonson, Boise State University

Let’s face it: most of our students just do not do the pre-reading or homework that you want them to do prior to coming to class.  Why?  Those who research this sort of thing would suggest that it is because they do not see the need or value in doing so.  And, they do not have the intrinsic motivation to overcome this perceived lack of value.  Unfortunately, simply telling students that something is important and that they will need it later – either for the test or in the workforce – just does not carry enough weight to increase intrinsic motivation and get them to do the pre-reading and/or other pre-class assignments.  So, how can we help them find a little more motivation?  By creating extrinsic motivation and helping students find value in the assignment by making them routinely accountable for it.

There are many options for increasing accountability and encouraging students to do the pre-reading and many incorporate some sort of assessment – usually at the beginning of the class in which students will need and use the information.  Making these assessments periodic and random is more useful than a routine schedule (Ruscio, 2001).  One such tool that students seem to value and enjoy is Fernald’s Monte Carlo Quiz (MCQ).  Fernald (2004) originally developed the MCQ for upper division undergraduate psychology courses to not only inspire students to do the reading, but to also encourage them to read at a deeper level, to truly try to understand the content, and to enhance retention.

Design

In Fernald’s original iteration of the MCQ, he wrote five standard questions that could be applied to all assigned readings: 1) Knowledge of the content, 2) Comparison of two ideas in a reading, 3) Application of the concepts to the student’s life, 4) Critique of an idea within the reading with a rationale for agreeing or not, and 5) Passion in which students identify some passage from the reading that elicited an emotional response.  Students were routinely assigned six chapters or articles for pre-reading.  The Monte Carlo name of the method comes from the way in which randomness was determined – by up to three rolls of a die.

Implementation

At the beginning of class, a student rolls a die.  An odd number on this first roll means “no quiz” and class proceeds.  If an even number is rolled, there will be a quiz and the student rolls the die a second time to determine over which of the assigned readings the quiz will be.  The student’s third roll of the die then determines which of the five previously mentioned questions students will address, with six being student’s choice.  Student question responses were limited to one paragraph of no more than eight sentences and graded on a four-item scale from Exceptional to Unsatisfactory.

Results

Fernald reported that students reported increased motivation, doing more pre-reading, and preparing more deeply than they might otherwise.  In addition, they liked the format and felt as if they had more control of the process.  He also stated that his teaching transitioned to more active learning and problem solving because the students were better prepared.

Modifications

The MCQ format can be modified to fit almost any instructor’s needs by adjusting the question types and formats, the pre-class assignments, and who generates the questions (students vs. instructor).  Others have found similar student and teaching outcomes.

References

• Carney, Amy G, Sara Winstead Fry, Rosaria V Gabriele, and Michelle Ballard. 2008.  “Reeling in the big fish: changing pedagogy to encourage the completion of reading assignments.”  College Teaching 56 (4):195-200.
• Fernald, Peter S. 2004.  “The Monte Carlo Quiz: encouraging punctual completion and deep processing of assigned readings.”  College Teaching 52 (3):95-99.
• Ruscio, John. 2001. “Administering quizzes at random to increase student reading.”  Teaching of Psychology 28 (3):204-206.
• Simonson, Shawn R. 2017.  “Modifying the Monte Carlo Quiz to increase student motivation, participation, and content retention.”  College Teaching 65(4):158-163.

Shawn Simonson is Professor of Kinesiology at Boise State University.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.  Photo by Gaz,  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

Claudia J. Stanny

Critical thinking is hard. Like other important cognitive skills, critical thinking requires practice.  We don’t learn to think critically by memorizing a set of rules. We must practice these skills in a variety of contexts and learn to think critically about a variety of contents (Nelson, 1999). Moreover, because critical thinking creates intellectual and emotional challenges for students, they may resist adopting critical thinking skills, just as they resist other threshold concepts (Land, 2014).

College students often begin their studies as dualist thinkers, who believe that knowledge is certain and learning is a matter of accumulating the corpus of “facts” which authoritative sources determine to be true (Perry, 1970). These students arrive on campus with experiences and expectations about learning that emphasize memorizing and repeating facts without questioning their credibility.

Some students resist thinking critically because dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty is uncomfortable. The notion that scholars accept knowledge tentatively, depending on the current state of evidence, including criteria such as what “counts” as evidence, can be disconcerting, especially for students accustomed to a culture that expects authority to be believed and followed without question.

Critical thinking requires that students evaluate the quality of evidence based on specific disciplinary contexts. They must learn to apply these criteria to specific models and theories. Moreover, students must develop a tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. Most disconcerting of all, they must determine when to continue using a model known to be “wrong.” For example, Nelson (1999) notes that Newtonian laws of motion make accurate predictions when applied on a small scale but are clearly wrong when applied on a large scale. Students are often puzzled and might even be disturbed when an instructor requires students to learn and apply a model and also tell them that the model is flawed.

Nelson (1999) offers several strategies that instructors can use to overcome these challenges and support student acquisition of critical thinking skills.

• Confront uncertainty head-on. Devote class time and exam questions to the nature and process of reasoning in the discipline. Discuss the evolution of thought about models and what scholars currently believe in terms of how alternative explanations and perspectives have been evaluated and defended. Make the process of critical thinking in the discipline explicit as part of your discussion of content. Discuss why scholars describe the state of the world as they now do rather than just present the current thinking.
• Articulate the disciplinary criteria used to construct an argument and support an interpretation. These discussions may include criteria for evidence, disciplinary values (what are important questions to try to answer), and how scholars in the discipline construct and evaluate arguments.
• Make big ideas accessible to students. Complex material can be daunting to novices. Experts can zero in on key details rapidly, but novices have difficulty deciding which details are important and which ones are marginal. Create outlines or guiding questions that direct student’s attention to the most important concepts.
• Help students learn to appreciate the value of learning from mistakes. Create low-stakes assessments or allow students to retake early exams to enable them to directly experience successful acquisition of a new skill or mastery of a challenging concept after experiencing an initial setback. These experiences promote a “growth” mindset that supports internal motivation (Dweck, 2008).
• Create opportunities to practice through structured small-group discussions.  Create a reading assignment that students complete before the small-group discussion in class. Ask students to summarize the author’s argument, evaluate the support for the argument the author provided, determine criteria for evidence and the amount of proof required, and decide whether the author’s argument was adequate (Rabow, Charness, Kipperman, & Radcliffe-Vaslie, 2000). Structure the small-group discussion around the completed assignment. Grade the work based on student preparation (completeness of the reading assignment) and participation in the discussion. Give students explicit guidelines on expectations for the discussion, which might include assigned roles such as note taker, devil’s advocate, facilitator who ensures that every student contribute.

Resources

• Dweck, C. S. (2008). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.
• Rabow, J., Charness, M. A., Kipperman, J., & Radcliffe-Vaslie, S. (2000). Learning through discussion (3^rd ed). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
• Land, R. (2014). Liminality close-up. Thought paper presented for HECU7 at Lancaster University. [http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/events/hecu7/docs/ThinkPieces/land.pdf]
• Nelson, C. E. (1999). On the persistence of unicorns: The trade-off between content and critical thinking revisited. In B. A. Pescosolido B. A., & Aminzade, R. (Eds.).  The social worlds of higher education: Handbook for teaching in a new century. (pp. 168-184). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
• Perry, W. G., Jr. (1970). Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years: A scheme. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Claudia J. Stanny is Director of the Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment at the University of West Florida.

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Taylor Halverson and Mike Johnson

On the trek of learning, many students have no idea whether they are in the first or the last wagon.  Without practice and feedback, students often are in the dark about how well they are learning—sometimes overestimating their comprehension and skill, sometimes underestimating them.

The Need for Practice and Feedback

According to instructional design expert Barbara Seels (1997), “Practice is the most important ingredient of effective instruction; it speeds up learning, aids long-term retention, and facilitates recall.  Instruction is less effective when there is no opportunity to perform the task or when practice is delayed . . . . Unfortunately, much of the instruction in our classrooms provides little or no opportunity for practice.” The more immediate the opportunity for practice and feedback, the more likely learning will occur.  

Providing Opportunities for Practice:        

• Paired in-class discussion: Pose a problem, question, or issue.  Ask students to turn to a neighbor and discuss.  Then call on a student to share his or her solution with the class. 
• Working problems in class in pairs or small groups: After each group has completed its work, you can invite one group to present its findings and results with the rest of the class, including the process that produced the solution.
• Homework exercises that reflect the skills or knowledge required for course mastery: Provide example problems (practice) and solutions (feedback).
• Low-stakes quizzes: Offer frequent, short quizzes (on-line or in class) worth only a few points, providing both you and your students with a “weather-vane” that indicates the direction of the students’ learning.  Again, the feedback must be rapid to be effective.

Providing Opportunities for Feedback

Feedback is essential to student success and can come in many forms.  But how does an instructor provide valuable feedback without spending every waking hour crafting such feedback? 

• Paired in-class discussion: After having students share their solutions, you should provide immediate feedback.  Other learners can self-assess, basing their judgments on the public modeling of feedback they just saw.
• Online quizzes: If you use online quizzes, feedback can be built directly into the quizzes to explain to students why certain answers are wrong or right, or why some answers are better than others. 
• Grading rubrics: These can also ease the time commitment required to provide substantive feedback. 
• Online Discussion Boards: These tools allow teachers and learners to create video-,  audio-, and text-based discussion boards. This is an excellent way for teachers to provide rich feedback to individual learners, specific groups in the class, or to the entire class. 

Conclusion

Building in multiple opportunities to practice new skills and receive feedback is one way to keep the wagon train moving forward with all members of the company participating, practicing, receiving feedback, learning, and improving.

Resources

• Barkley, E. (2010). Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Barkley, E., Cross, P. K., & Major, C. H. (2005). Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Davis, B. G. (2009). Tools for Teaching, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Seels, B. & Glasgow, Z. (1997). Making Instructional Design Decisions, 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.
• Materials from the Carnegie Mellon University Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence: https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/principles/learning.html#LP04(items 4-7).

Taylor Halverson and Mike Johnson work at Brigham Young University’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

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Brian Thomson, College of Engineering

Have you ever walked into your classroom with the utmost confidence during exam day, thinking “My students are going to do great on this exam.  We covered all the material so they are prepared.” Then, when grading the exam, you are shocked by the poor performance in the class as a whole. You think “Didn’t we cover this?”  I am sure after chatting with some of your colleagues you realize that you are not alone.

Active learning

There are so many skills students are asked to obtain and use during a single course.  In my circuits course, students need to sharpen their critical reading skills, learn how to identify circuit elements in a diagram, determine the desired outcome of each problem, and learn how to accurately use all the tools necessary to solve the problem (software, simulation, calculators, etc.). 

The bottom line is students learn these skills best when applying them with appropriate feedback, or in other words by doing active learning.  There is a wealth of literature that states the benefits of active learning. Even if you haven’t read the literature I think most faculty would agree that those “light bulb” moments typically occur when students are doing active learning.

Flipping your classroom as an active learning solution

There are many effective and simple approaches to active learning.  One particular approach I am using in my circuits course is the flipped classroom.  The concept is simple. I created videos for students to watch before class. These videos prepare students to do active learning in the classroom.  In my case, students were solving their homework problems during class, which makes it easier to sell to students. This model accelerates the student learning process.  They figure out what they don’t know during class time and can ask me questions to get immediate feedback. In the past, students would figure out what they don’t know at home when working on homework.  And if you students are like mine, this tends to be the night before the assignment is due.  

To make navigating this new learning format easier, the schedule for students was shown on the course homepage so they could easily find the videos and associated assignments.

The results have been more learning and better questions during class time.  There are so many small issues (How to find a component in simulation, how to run a simulation, etc) that we address early in the semester that opens the door for more thought provoking questions by the students.  By the end of the first semester, students were working together in groups organically without me organizing them! Click on this link to see my flipped classroom in action.

So what are the challenges?

By this point you may be thinking “Wow this sounds neat, but I can think of a lot that could go wrong with that approach.”  Believe me I was reluctant too, but here are my responses to some of the typical hesitations for implementing a flipped classroom.

1)  What if my students don’t watch the videos?

This was probably my biggest fear.  There is always going to be a crop of students who don’t watch the videos, just like there are some who don’t do assignments properly.  I think students are more likely to watch the videos if you demonstrate its value and hold the students accountable. You can demonstrate value by making sure the videos are important and closely connected to the classroom activities.  You also do not want to do a lecture that repeats information from the videos. Students can be held accountable through some sort of pre-class quiz or another exercise.  

2)  Will this be double the work?

As long as you stick to not lecturing and keep the videos short, the workload can be very similar to a typical course prep.  See my tips below for more information.

3)  But I can’t cover all the material.

Is it better for students to know fewer pieces of information very deeply or know very little about a breadth of information?  If students learn core critical thinking skills, then they are more likely to transfer those skills to new applications or material.  Therefore I trim my course content and focus of teaching students the core fundamentals skills and theories.

Tips for getting started on your flipped classroom.

• Don’t flip your classroom if you have not tried active learning first.  There are plenty of simple and easy activities to try in Teaching and Learning STEM by Felder and Brent.
• Keep the videos short.  I recommend six to ten minutes. If necessary, break up larger concepts into several smaller videos.  Students have been clear that they prefer watching three six minute videos over one eighteen minute video.
• Choose the right recording tool.  For me it is best to use a tool with screen sharing and video editing so I can cut parts where I make a mistake and pick up where I left off.
• Limit your class prep time.  Felder and Brent (link above) recommend two hours of class prep time for each hour of class time.  Do the same with creating videos. Resist the temptation to make the perfect video at the expense of long prep time.  Our lectures aren’t always perfect so videos don’t have to be either.

A flipped classroom may not be for everyone, but I would encourage you to consider some active learning in your classroom.  Even some simple exercises that promotes active learning can really benefit your students. I do believe that regardless of what is done in class, the best learning happens when students (and expert learners) do preparation work prior to class time.  That may take the form of a flipped classroom or some other format.

Thanks for being here.  Feel free to contact me at brian.thomson@temple.edu and I’d be happy to offer any support in your teaching endeavors.

[Editor’s Note: Temple Faculty interested in flipping a course, unit, or even a single lesson are always welcome to contact us at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching.  We’ll be happy to help!]

Acknowledgements

Yael Branscom | Eric Horvath | Jeff Rients

Brian Thomson is Assistant Professor of Instructor at Temple University’s College of Engineering and a recent graduate of the Provost’s Teaching Academy.

Ali Aslam

Frequently, students encounter course work in which writing and revision practices are not integrated into the work of the classroom.  These tasks are left to students to undertake independently and this approach reinforces a belief that writing and revision are separate from learning and understanding content.  The aim of this set of techniques is to forge a stronger connection among writing, revision, and thinking practices so that students see these as continuous across the parts of a class, from lecture, class discussion, writing drafts, revising, and producing final papers.

Here’s how one might integrate writing, revising, and thinking into the class period:

1. Begin by having students write individual responses to a discussion question grounded in the course readings (5 mins). These responses may take the form of a position with or against the author’s argument, statement of doubt about a key claim, question about the reading, or something else.  The important feature is to have students explain why and how they came to their conclusions or questions.
2. Have the students share their individual responses with a partner (5mins).  This move stages the larger class conversation by giving students a chance to test their ideas.
3. Before inviting students to have a larger class discussion, ask them to fine tune their initial response given the conversation they just had with their partner.  Again, ask them to explicitly identify both how they are modifying their initial response and how their conversation prompted the change (3 mins).
4. Facilitate the larger class discussion on the question you posed to students.  Leave time for students to write in their notebooks at the end of class about how their thinking about the reading changed by virtue of listening and taking part in the class discussion (5 mins).  Encourage them to identify specific remarks made by their classmates that nudged them to reconsider their initial responses and/or perspectives they had not considering in their initial evaluation of the reading.  Once again, encourage students to be explicit about how the introduction of new ideas prompted to revise their thinking.

Finally, take a moment to go “meta”—that is, address the meta-learning that these practices are meant to enforce either at the beginning or end of class, or ideally at both the start and end.  The purpose is explicitly connect the thinking, writing, and revising practices in the classroom to how these same practices should be employed by students working independently on writing and reading assignments.

Ali Aslam is Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College.

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Katherine Miscavige

The time commitment necessary to give high quality feedback on drafts can make it seem impossible, especially when papers are long or classes are large. Yet, as Ambrose et al. suggest in How Learning Works, formative feedback is essential to learning.

Try collecting a rough draft, but just before they hand it in, ask students to identify a short passage they are struggling with and would like feedback on. It could be a paragraph or a page or more, depending on the length of the assignment. Confine your comments to that section, but try to make them broadly applicable. More often than not, it will be clear even from a small section what areas need improvement.

In addition to saving you time, charging students with applying your feedback to the rest of their project puts the burden on them to actually learn from your comments as opposed to just mindlessly accepting your corrections.  Furthermore, if a student is seriously struggling, you have the opportunity to intervene. If many students have misunderstood your assignment or there are broader class-wide concerns, you can address them together during class time.

Use this method in conjunction with other forms of feedback, such as peer review or self-reflection, to create even more chances for students to have an audience and receive constructive feedback on their work.

For more on grading and feedback, check out:

• Gottschalk, K & Hjortshoj, K. (2004). The elements of teaching writing: A resource for instructors in all disciplines. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
• Walvoord, B., & Anderson, V. Effective grading: A tool for learning and assessment. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
• Temple CAT resources for Assessment & Feedback

Katherine Miscavige is an Educational Developer at the University Teaching & Learning Center of The George Washington University.

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