Formative Assessment

In lectures getting formative feedback is challenging. When asking students if they understand or if they are following, the difficulty lies in knowing whether the feedback you are getting is accurate.

People are reluctant to appear foolish by admitting they don’t understand or their culture or personality makes it difficult to challenge an authority figure. Rod, a colleague from a different department, shared a method he used in a maths class he was teaching. To assess how well his students were understanding he asked them a question and they had to write their answer on a sheet of paper and hold it up.

This allowed him to see their answers and modify his teaching accordingly. The students couldn't see each others answers so they weren't afraid of being wrong and being judged by their peers. Also it forced students to give an answer so they couldn't say 'yes I understand' when they didn't or remain silent when asked "Are there any questions?".

Rod said this went really well but he went through a ream of paper. I think this was a great idea and I wound like to use this in my lectures without needing an excessive amount of paper. If I laminated 3 or 4 sheets of paper with different colours, letters or numbers then I could ask multi choice questions and reuse the sheets.

Someone else suggested Quizdom which is an electronic version of the above. I am going to have to have a play with this.

Heart rate calculations

In a recent class there was a timetable mix up so many students were late. There was a component of the class that involved numeracy. Many students struggled with this whilst others found it quite easy and the class became talkative and off task. Students who finished early would have been bored and therefore talked and students who couldn’t understand may have got confused and therefore talked.

On reflection I can see there are ways I could have taught it better. Next time I will need to slow down and dedicate more time to that part of the lesson and not rush to get through the planned content. I will have to use more repetition of concepts and processes and go through more worked examples. I will have to find some engaging real world examples and use students’ data as an example.

A technique that I could try would be the folded line. The students would line up in order of how competent they feel they are after they have attempted the first activity. I would then fold the two ends of the line together bringing the most competent and the least competent students together. The students could then work in pairs to complete further exercises thereby utilising the expertise of the more ‘competent student’ to help the student who is struggling.

The students who finished early would have a task to carry on with and the students who were struggling would have a tutor. Hopefully the talking in class would then remain on task and we would get a better result.

Some of the students appeared to have the preconception that they wouldn’t be able to complete the numeracy aspect of the task before they even saw it. Samson, a colleague from a different department who teaches Maths told us he took over a class that was struggling and underachieving. He told them that he expects that they all will pass if they do what he tells them. He found that his expectations have positively changed the results his students are obtaining. Next time this is a technique I could also use.

Fear in the Classroom

We had a discussion in class using the 'Post-its ranking frame' technique as a starting point. We had to think about who had an impact on our learning and what did they do. Then we had to write words on a post-it and form a ranking frame within our group of most effective and least effective techniques.

Interestingly fear came out at the top and bottom of our ranking frame. The top 2 learning experiences involved fear of letting the teacher down , not knowing the answer and the consequences that would occur. This lead to excellent learning outcomes. So high expectations and demands from the teacher lead to academic success.

The worst learning experience also involved fear. The student was so scarred and intimidated by the teacher she wouldn't engage or ask questions so she failed.

The challenge for us as lecturers is to create a climate that demands excellence without scaring students and stopping their learning.

Some good tips were
- when asking if there are any questions if there is silence ask if there are any comments or what questions aren't they asking.
- Use hangman to encourage students to voice an answer
- Give the first letter of an answer to get students started.
- Ask the question and pause before naming someone to answer it. This forces everyone to actively think rather than just the person you name before asking the question.
- If someone can't answer then give them the option of phoning a friend
- Emailing students after a good class praising how well they went and reinforcing key points and good behaviours.

Design and Delivery Jigsaw Reading 2

Last night at the literacy class I found out that what I described in my previous post was called "Expert Groups". Students are divided into a group (eg colour-Pink, Green, Blue) then each member is also given a number. A larger reading is broken into parts and is assigned to each group. When your colour group has become expert in that one part then the class is broken into its number groups and they teach each other their expert topics.
This exercise utlises what we learnt about how people learn (see above). Hopefully instead of remembering 10% of what they read they will remember 70-95% of what they talk about with others and teach each other.

Design and Delivery Jigsaw reading

Kate set up a Jigsaw reading exercise for us in class. There was a piece of information for us to read but instead of everyone reading the whole paper we were broken into groups and told to feedback on one section to the class.

We used this technique in Exercise perscription with descriptions of program design. There were 5 concepts so each group took 1 and had to be ready to teach the rest of the class. The class was quite large so you could see there were some students doing the work and others that weren't engaged. To rectify this, the next time we used this activity the groups were told they would be broken up into twos to form new groups so that each member of the group was going to have to explain/teach their concept to their new group. This worked well to ensure every student was engaged.

Design and Delivery

We did a 'Quick Write' in our 'Design and Delivery' class. We were given 5 minutes to write as much as we could remember about a topic. This was a good tool to link concepts or previous classes together and to get formative feedback on your teaching and how much your students have retained and understood.

I tried this in my own teaching and found holes in student's knowledge that I was able to correct. This is a valuable tool that I will use again.

Another vartiation of this is the KWL. This stands for what do I KNOW, what do I WANT to know and what have I LEARNT. Formative feedback is given to add reflective practice and focus on student's needs.