A foundational step for engaging students in coursework is to ensure that instructors create clear and transparent guideposts for students in a course. This clarity in foundational design provides the framework from which the other elements addressed in the blog series build.
The most crucial point of this first step in creating guideposts is to never leave information on the table. In many cases, I haven’t seen any structure that has stressed the importance of gathering information when working with students. I’ve seen the effects of this in many of my math courses, and from others taking math courses, that their real teacher was a YouTuber called The Organic Chemistry Tutor. I want to talk about this YouTuber in future steps, but at the moment, I want to focus on the point that many students feel like there’s not enough support in their classes to the point where they look for third-party help. The information gathered in this first step is crucial in constructing the support system students feel helps them on a deeper, more fundamental level than these third-party sources can provide.
How might this look in a course?
- Review the weekly topics – If using a textbook with chapters, instructors can go through each chapter and take note of the concepts and techniques needed for students to be successful that week. Calling out to students what knowledge and skills they will be practicing in a given week can help increase student motiviation to participate as well as helps students understand why they are being asked to do what they are asked to do for that week.
- Make a list of required prior knowledge – Make clear to students what knowledge or skills they may need to use from prior courses or prior experiences including techniques and rules needed to interact with the course material.
- Take note of essential information while teaching – From the information gathered on weekly topics and required prior knowledge, create a system to log the concepts and steps where students struggle. The system intended for this is discussed in the second blog in this series. The system should have a primary focus on spaced-out tests and exams. While weekly quizzes or homework may paint a picture of how a student experiences the initial introduction of a concept, it does not paint a great picture of students’ struggles. Spaced-out tests and exams give the best understanding of their struggles due to the time students have to study the topics, and become comfortable with them – where students continue to struggle after longer engagement with a topic or idea is where additional focus should be spent.
If instructors experience difficulty breaking down specific chapters or determining required prior knowledge, one suggestion may be to complete the related homework and note the steps, concepts, or techniques needed to complete it. Ideally, this information is available to students at the start of a course.
If instructors are not sure where to focus in a specific course, start with the sections where students often struggle the most. Review prior data on student performance related to the topics covered in the class to pinpoint areas of concern. If other instructors are teaching the same course, they can all help with this point to ensure a supportive student experience with each instructor. Another idea may be that when taking notes, write the initial question and tally how many students got it wrong. Then you can use your discretion when deciding that a significant number of students getting it wrong is a genuine call for concern. You can entice students with the hope of raising their grade on the assignment to attract them to office hours to discuss where they may be struggling with concepts.
Written by Rick, an undergraduate student at UWM.
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Relevant CETL Teaching and Learning Resources and Research
The points raised in this initial blog post align with transparency in teaching and learning including assignment design clarity in TILT and John Hattie’s (2023) work on making visible the learning and intentional design of a course. Further, formative assessments that are frequent and provide ongoing feedback that drive towards larger assessments of student learning are proven beneficial to student learning (William, 2010). Additionally, the use of short videos can provide a further means to reinforce guideposts and allow students to understand what you expect of them in your course(s) (Brame et al., 2017).