7 principles in action: Over action

Reading 1

The authors present no evidence to support the statement that the typical student is apathetic. Giving up on your students and saying they are apathetic is just a poor excuse. However, saying that student only do what they can to pass, is usually more of a workload and life-study balance issue. Not realising that they need to spend 10-12 hours per course per week is what leads to unrealistic expectations that they can do more courses, or work more hours and that’s where they are pressured for time. The authors even go on to list such things in the “Barriers to High Student Achievement at the Undergraduate Level”. But apathetic!?! The authors say that “the first step for the instructor is to overcome student apathy and motivate them…” I believe that students wouldn’t be there if they weren’t actually in some way motivated. The trouble is more that instructors tend to de-motivate them or teach by death by powerpoint and turn the students off. There really is no apathy to overcome, just don’t make them tune out by poor teaching practices.

Saying that mans that the requirements to pass the course are actually too low if the outcome is not useful to anyone.

Interesting that the comment about number 6. communicating high expectations, is that, “students need to feel that the instructors believe their students can achieve the high goals set for the class”, kind of is exactly opposite to the authors saying that students are typically apathetic. What could communicate lower expectations??

Er, perhaps there is another reason they have a great deal of trepidation? It couldn’t be because they have seen students struggle with it previously or they are aware of things such as high cognitive loads, intrinsic and extrinsic, and they have seen previous students shut down due to poor teaching?

Dumbing down the assessment has never been an answer to increasing student motivation. Wow, they can do well on something really basic… woo hoo! How is that really assessing content knowledge? Is that really what you want them to get out of the course? How about more appropriate and guided teaching activities that build them up result in them having confidence to know that they can even do the hard questions? The easy questions need not be part of the assessment for the sake of taking away their fear and boosting confidence. Easy questions are incorporated into a scaled quiz or question paper to assess the level at which their learning is at, but focuses on the difficult questions.

Group work is inherently difficult to assess and in general, students do not like group assignments where their mark depends on other students’ work. So taking this approach is a good idea. To know something well, teach it to someone else.

The authors go on to peer review and it does seem like it is closely monitored, which I believe is good, as peer review simply for assessment can create animosity between students especially in a group work situation.

Active and relevant learning activities are important, such as the authors' example of, “assigning classes to classrooms on the university campus”. Often, however, the more authentic problems are too complex and may need to be introduced later. Something like: in the end we will be able to analyse the motion of a rollercoaster, but first we need a few basic principles, such as I drive 30km in 20 minutes, what speed am I doing. While the basic problem is still real life, it is not a particularly riveting example, but they will build up to the roller coaster, which is – especially if you can take the students to a theme park! (We did for Grade 11 Physics.)

I definitely agree with the authors that, “to pass on… information in lecture format could prove immensely dry”.

The option to resubmit after feedback are a recurring theme in the courses this paper talks about and this is a good idea. It means that the students do have an option to learn from their mistakes and not necessarily have a bad grade because they have not yet learnt the concept.

I found the time on task discussion interesting. The “very important” material received the most time on task and the students did really well in it. The “to be covered material” had the least time and the students did not do so well in it. What I find strange, is that there are still assessment questions on this material, so why isn’t there more time spent on them? Because it is less important as a concept overall, does that mean that it is less important to the student? Aren’t marks still marks?

Is this an optimum way of spending instructor time? This is not feasible for a large class. Is there a way, such as using a lesson in moodle to give the weaker students more time on the task in a constructive way, and therefore use the instructor time for examples and demonstrations that benefit everyone?

I can see that many of the options for implementing the seven principles in action have actually increased the instructors time commitment. There might be more efficient means with the same ends if instructors think outside of the box and utilise technology. Yes, it might have more of a preparation time initially, but over the course of the term or several years, it might be able to lessen the teaching load and only require small preparations in future terms.