Teaching

Hello, and welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Today, Dan tells you how a mechanical-engineering professor changed his course after enlisting social scientists to help him better understand his students. Beckie shares the results of a meta-analysis that suggests there are important nuances when using quizzes to help students learn. Then we close out with some items to consider adding to your calendar, as well as one reader’s memory of his first class.

Asking for Help

Paul Nissenson was troubled by results from the upper-division fluid-dynamics course at his college: Over a seven-year period, about a third of the students got D’s, failed, or withdrew. And other mechanical-engineering courses, like statics and dynamics, also had high rates of DFW’s.

As someone who had tried flipping courses and reading up on active-learning techniques, Nissenson was receptive to the idea that changing his section of the lecture-heavy course could improve it. He also wanted to do so in a thoughtful and rigorous way.

Nissenson knew that data points, like the course’s passing rate, could only tell him so much. He needed to find out more about his students — how they thought and felt.

So he decided to run an experiment — and to look outside his department for help.

“It’s very easy to lie to yourself,” said Nissenson, an associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering at California State Polytechnic University, in Pomona.

His department chair had met Faye Wachs, a professor in the department of psychology and sociology, through the Faculty Senate. Wachs then brought in her colleague Juliana Fuqua, an associate professor.

His social-science colleagues could act as neutral assessors. They also had expertise conducting research on human subjects. “I don’t know the best way to run a survey or a focus group,” Nissenson said.

With the help of a small grant from the Cal State system, the professors administered and analyzed surveys before the first class and on the last day, asking students to rate things like how hopeful, successful, or prepared they generally felt when they thought about the course.

Then, in each quarter for a two-year period, Nissenson made one change at a time to an experimental course. At the same time, he kept teaching a control version of the course, lecture-style, like it had long been done.

The first change involved adding an online assessment and assignment platform. Then came flipped course content, so that students watched video lectures before class and spent time during class doing activities like a “team battle” in which students worked in groups to solve problems.

By the time all the elements had been added, the DFW rate for the course dropped from a third to 11 percent. The students’ ratings of their confidence and understanding of the subject also improved. Nissenson, Wachs, and Fuqua have since presented their research at meetings of the American Society for Engineering Education.

“This whole experiment could have gone horribly wrong,” Nissenson said. “I could have ended up with a 50-percent failure rate. I was willing to experiment and take a chance.” He credited his department chair, Angela Shih, for supporting him in taking a calculated risk.

He also acknowledged that changing the course meant giving up some things he liked, like lecturing. Now the lectures are standardized and available on video. The videos, he says, are “very regimented,” an approach that “may not work with everybody.” Some professors may be uncomfortable letting go of what’s familiar and trying new techniques.

“Teaching,” Nissenson said, “is a very personal thing.”

Readers, when you’ve decided to make a substantial change in your teaching, what kinds of support made it possible? Did you enlist the help of your colleagues or department chair? What made it easier for you to try something new? Email me at dan.berrett@chronicle.com and I may use it in a future newsletter.

How Pausing to Question Students Boosts Learning

Many studies have demonstrated that the act of retrieving previously learned information to answer a question helps facilitate new learning. That’s why using clickers to quiz students during a lecture can be effective. But how does this work? A new meta-analysis of research in this area offers some answers.

After looking at some 150 previously conducted experiments, a research team from Iowa State University considered four theories to explain how retrieval boosts future learning. The theories are not mutually exclusive, but the evidence best supports one known as integration. The idea is that people spontaneously recall previously learned information they have been quizzed on when they learn something related. And that helps them integrate the two sets of material.

This literature has clear implications for instructors. Pausing during a lecture to ask students questions can help them learn the material, said Jason C.K. Chan, an associate professor at Iowa State and lead author of the paper. But it only works, he added, if students must retrieve information to answer the question — and only if all students do so, not just the ones who raise their hands.

Having students answer too many questions, however, may actually hinder new learning. The problem comes when people have to switch back and forth between retrieving old information and learning new information too frequently. One way to avoid that? Having students retrieve information in larger blocks.

And, on a related topic, this study explores how multiple-choice exams can help students learn.

Mark Your Calendar

• The Magna Teaching With Technology Conference will be held in St. Louis, October 5-7.
• The National Social Science Association holds its fall professional-development conference October 14-16 in New Orleans. A reader tells us it offers “excellent presentations in all the social sciences that cover research, teaching, and technology.”
• The Atlantic Center for Learning Communities Curriculum Planning Retreat will be held October 17-19 in West Hartford, Conn. A reader describes it as “an extremely affordable professional development opportunity that offers workshops, opportunities for engagement with others involved with learning communities on their campuses, and time for campus partners/teams to collaborate.”

Do you know of a coming conference — or call for proposals — other newsletter readers may be interested in? Tell us about it here.

Finding the Right Balance

Recently we asked you to share a memory of the toughest challenge you encountered in the first class you taught. Robert Bloom emailed us to say that he still remembers his first class, in 1974 at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. He worried about “making mistakes and feeling inadequate” when he taught introductory accounting. He wanted to be perfect, he wrote, but he has since come to see his mistakes as learning opportunities. Bloom, who is now a professor of accountancy at John Carroll University, has learned to strike the right balance between under- and over-preparing for class. When he used to spend too much time preparing, he wrote, “I would expect too much from the students,” and then end up disappointed. But winging it didn’t work either. “A key lesson that I learned,” he wrote, “was not to overdo the work in advance.”

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.

— Dan and Beckie