Test to Gauge Potential for Success

The SmarterMeasure Learning Readiness Indicator is a web-based tool which assesses an undergraduate learner's likelihood for succeeding in an online and/or technology rich learning program. SmarterMeasure indicates the degree to which an individual student possesses attributes, skills and knowledge that contribute to success including:

 - Self-motivation
 - Time-management skills
  - Self-discipline
 - On-screen Reading Rate and Recall
 - Persistence
 - Availability of time
 - Ability to use a laptop, printer, software, and the Internet
 - Typing speed and accuracy

SmarterMeasure is a tool that allows self-assessment of strengths and weaknesses. The report also generates a list of resources to help students improve their study skills; however, SmarterMeasure is not intended to be used as a screening tool for admission or enrollment.

Backward Design Process

Teachers have traditionally used lesson planning to prepare for teaching. Many of the lesson planning approaches lean heavily on a sequential planning process. This process may include components such as:

1. the title of the lesson
2. the time required to complete the lesson
3. a list of materials needed for the lesson
4.  objectives
5.  the set up (anticipatory set)
6.  instructional approaches (often a combination of presentation and guided practice)
7.  independent practice activities
8.  assessment

We often find that these planning approaches depend heavily on the stated objectives for the lesson. Currently, the phrase "student learning outcomes" is often used interchangeably with objectives. Objectives typically list what students should know and be able to do at the conclusion of a lesson. In most lesson planning, objectives are generated very early in the planning process and used to focus the planning process.

The Backward Design process (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) places a slightly different spin on lesson planning. Rather than using the objectives to drive the development of the other parts of the lesson, the Backward Design model uses these other components to drive the development of the written objectives. In other words, rather than writing the objectives first, they are written at the end of the process. In the backward design process, the instructor defines the end results of the lesson first. What students should know and be able to do is important but these are defined within the context of what successful products and processes will look like upon completion. Knowing how successful products and processes will look helps to define the assessments that will be used for evaluation. Defining how the products and processes will yield evidence to support how well students demonstrated their learning. This leads to learning activities that can be customized to support students' needs.

Instructional, behavioral, and performance objectives have been around for a long while. Robert Mager has argued for the use of objectives to drive instruction for over thirty-five years. Those in the Performance Improvement and Education fields have known for a long time that objectives serve to focus instruction.

However, these same experts also realize that objectives must be supported by sound instructional and assessment strategies. It is important to realize that objectives will not improve learning by themselves. Merely inserting objectives into a course to meet various general goals (i.e., IE, Quality Matters, departmental, College, etc.) rarely changes instruction. Objectives are only one tool in the lesson planning or design process.

The problem with objective-driven design is that it should have worked by now. With almost 35 years to perfect the system, one would think that almost all public school teachers and higher education faculty would have adopted the system long before now. They have not. Objective-driven design assumes the instructor knows exactly where they are going with their instruction. Working in the real world indicates that this type of planning efficiency is rare. Most instructors have a general idea about the direction of instruction but do not systematically plan a lesson so rigidly that flexibility is lost.

The use of a general direction for instruction fits well with the backward design approach. Instructors define the expected products and processes as the outcome of the course. Working backward from these outcomes, instructors can more easily plan specific activities to support success on these final products and processes.

http://nhlrc.ucla.edu/events/startalkworkshop/readings/backward-design.pdf

The Importance of Goal-Directed Practice

If you do the same things over and over, you will get the same results. General practice strategies may increase the number of repetitions on some skills and tasks but rarely do little to change mastery. Deliberate practice on specific skills serves as a predictor of continued learning in a field or hobby. Focus the practice sessions on the improvement of a specific goal, skill, or criterion. The amount of time spent in deliberate practice predicts continued learning in a field.

To begin, clearly communicate the learning goals to students. These goals should support students in what they need to do to learn. It is also important to identify an appropriate level of challenge for students. Practice that is too easy or too hard appears to do little to alter mastery.

Feedback to alter practice is important. Three important features (content, timing, and practice) seem to govern the effective use of feedback. Feedback on content should clearly and specifically focus on the knowledge and skills you want students to learn. You also want to provide some indication on their status toward the stated goals or objectives for the lesson or course. You should clearly indicate what the student needs to do to improve their performance. Time your feedback to when it will do the most good. It is usually more useful to have feedback sooner rather than later to help students progress toward a goal or objective. Provide additional practice opportunities for students while communicating progress and directing subsequent efforts. Always communicate specific aspects of a students' performance related to a goal or objective.

TWU Online Instructor's Quote of the Week

“Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.” -- Umberto Eco

Identify the Important Things to Learn for Student Success

Students need to know what parts of your instruction are most important. It is very easy for students to get lost in the details of your instruction. If you consciously identify the important elements for the students, you are providing the structure to which they will attach details. Students need you to provide this structure, identify the connection between these elements and the big picture view of the content, and to provide the rationale for why they should focus on these elements. Helping students to understand the overall structure and the important pieces of that structure allows you to discuss with students how you expect them to progress in regard to skill and knowledge development.

Most instructors are very good at delivering oral cues to identify the most important parts of their instruction. You will hear phrases such as “The first major point is…”, “Note this point…”, “This point is very important for understanding…”and “This point will be on the test.” These oral cues help focus student attention on the important elements. Distance educators should be more intentional about writing cues and directional language in their courses. This should help focus attention on major points while excluding details.

Some additional ways to identify important elements in a distance course include:

1. Use bold text to identify important elements
2. Use numbered lists
3. Use headings to identify important elements
4. Provide an outline of the material to give a big picture view
5. Insert intentional pauses in the material to allow the student to process information

References:

Svinicki, M. (2004). Learning and motivation in the postsecondary classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Less May Actually be More

There has been an explosion in the amount of content that is seen in courses. More and more content is being pushed to students at all educational levels. Talk to almost any parent with school aged children and they will tell you about encountering content that is entirely new to them or that they did not see until college. As new information becomes available in disciplines, this information is almost immediately available on the Web. New information forces textbook publishers to redistribute content to keep textbooks from becoming too large for use. Supplemental content, learning activities, and test banks regularly accompany college textbooks. It is rare when there is not enough available content for a particular course. In fact, it is far more likely that too much content is readily available for students.

With all of this available content, it is logical that content experts saturate their courses with content. The content expert, almost by definition, knows a great deal of content and loves to expose others to the content. Content experts often come from doctoral programs that are rich in content. In some programs, reading one or two books a week is the norm. Almost all of these programs feature copious amounts of readings. In many of these "content saturated" environments, there is an almost singular focus on the acquisition of content. Participants often receive little or no instruction on how to teach others this content. Although we try to stay away from general statements, it is fairly safe to say "content experts routinely create other content experts. Content experts do not routinely develop and create experts on teaching the content."

Content experts, with little grounding in teaching methodologies, often cram courses with content. Unfortunately, they often expose others to so much content that learning may be impacted. In many cases, it is possible that vast amounts of content come at unsuspecting students at breakneck speed because there is so much content and only so many weeks in the semester. The phrase "an inch deep and a mile wide" accurately describes this superficial coverage of vast amounts of content. Almost no content is covered in a great amount of detail. You might also heare this discussed as a "coverage" approach, implying that the intent is to cover as much material as possible. As instructors, we all seek some level of transfer. We want students to learn something and then be able to apply this knowledge to other situations. The ability to transfer concepts and skills learned in one setting to a novel setting demonstrates a more sophisticated level of understanding than the ability to regurgitate factoids for a test. To take what we know and use it creatively in another setting or for another purpose is the type of learning we want for all students. Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (2000, p. 58) state "...attempts to cover too many topics too quickly may hinder learning and subsequent transfer." Whitehead (1929) mentioned "...let the main ideas which are introduced be few and important, and let them be thrown in every combination possible (p. 2).

Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (2000, p. 31) stated:

An understanding of fundamental principles and ideas appears to be the main road to adequate transfer of training. To understand something as a specific instance of a more general case -- which is what understanding a more fundamental structure means -- is to have learned not only a specific thing but also a model for understanding other things like it that one may encounter.

Bruner (1960, p. 31) observed that teaching specific skills or topics without grounding them into the larger context of a field was uneconomical. He went on to say that such teaching made it difficult for students to generalize from what was learned to what might be encountered. He also suggested that information learned in this manner would not be retained.

30 Seconds to Determine if an Instructor is Helpful

In a study done in 1993 (Ambady & Rosenthal) 13 college teachers were videotaped and then these tapes were edited into one master videotape. Each teacher was presented multiple times for very brief exposures (approximately 10 seconds) on the master videotape. A panel of judges reviewed this master and rated each teacher for teaching effectiveness. These ratings were compared to the end-of-semester student evaluations. “On the basis of observations of video clips just half a minute in length, complete strangers were able to predict quite accurately the ratings of teachers by students who interacted with them over the course of a whole semester (p. 435).

In a replication of the original study, the authors used 13 high school teachers. One master videotape was developed in each instance with multiple very short clips of the teachers. Researchers were able to replicate the results of the previous study with this different sample of teachers.

In a third study, the time each teacher appeared on videotape was adjusted. On one master videotape, each teacher appeared 3 times for five seconds. One the other master, each teacher appeared three times for two seconds. “These analyses show that there were no significant differences in the accuracy of judgments based on video clips 10s, 5s, and 2s in length. In addition, there were no significant differences in the accuracy of judgments for the two samples of teachers” (p. 438).

Researchers found “that the ratings of complete strangers based on very thin slices of teachers’ nonverbal behaviors (video clips from 2s to 10s long) predicted with surprising accuracy the ratings of the same teachers by people who had substantial interactions with the teachers (students and supervisors, for example)” (p. 438).

In discussing the significance of the study, Ken Bain (1994) suggests “…students, with long histories of dealing with both highly stimulating and discouraging teachers, may develop an ability to guess quite accurately, even after only a few seconds of exposure, which professor will advance their education and which will not” (p. 14).

If students form impressions of teaching effectiveness based on very brief exposures, distance educators should pay particular attention to the tone and design of all initial activities in the course.

References:

Ambady, N. & Rosenthal, R. (1993). Half a minute: Predicting teacher evaluations from thin slices of nonverbal behavior and physical attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64. P. 431-441.

Bain, K, (2004). What the best college teachers do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.