Three Classroom Techniques that Promote Enhanced Student Learning:

Faculty assume a certain amount of knowledge on the part of students, yet students are often not prepared adequately for class. One method that bridges the gap between the professor's expectations and students' knowledge base is to have them explicitly complete reading and writing assignments before they come to class. A well-structured pre-class assignment should engage students on a number of levels--it should involve reading, some writing, and it should promote acquisition, personalization, application, and synthesis. Also, it should have consequences-- either it is graded, is required for class attendance, etc. Pre-class assignments enhance student learning by:

• Providing a shared cognitive set between the student and instructor.
  • The pre-class assignment informs students about what the professor thinks is important.
  • It provides enough background on the topic to be covered in class that students will have an adequate knowledge base.
  • It ensures that students have carefully read the material, and that they have conceptualized the material at a relatively deep level. A good way of doing this is to ask students to integrate and synthesize large sections of the text.
  • A pre-writing assignment can also provide information on students' current knowledge and interests (formative feedback). For example, questions such as "What did you find particularly difficult in this reading assignment?" can provide feedback on where you and your students do not have a shared cognitive set. The pre-class writing assignment can provide another form of classroom assessment as well: If it is E-mailed before class, the professor goes into class having a good sense of what students know and don't know.

• Motivating students to learn the material.
  • If it contributes to their grade in some way, it provides extrinsic motivation to do the assignment.
  • The pre-class assignment gives them enough information so that they are ready to learn more.
  • It gets them to think about the material in a way that engages them. A way of doing this is to ask students to give personal examples of the material, or tell what the material means to them. This will help ensure that the material is relevant to their interests.

• Ensuring that students construct their own knowledge.
  • The writing assignment helps ensure that students have incorporated the material into long-term memory by having them put the material in their own words.
  • Personal examples and perspectives on the material also contribute to the active construction of the students' knowledge.

Cooperative Learning

Cooperative learning is a highly structured classroom technique designed to promote peer learning. The key to success in cooperative learning, compared to other forms of discussion based learning, is its highly structured nature. A widely used model of cooperative learning, developed by David and Roger Johnson at the University of Minnesota, consists of the following five components (Johnson, Johnson and Smith, 1991):

• Positive Interdependence. Through a variety of ways, and to varying degrees, an individual student's success depends upon the efforts of other students. Joint rewards (all members of the group receive a common grade) and shared resources (each member of the group contributes part of the information) are two examples of positive interdependence.

• Face-to-face Promotive Interaction. All members of the group actively discuss and contribute to the group effort. Members of the group assist, challenge, and provide feedback for each other.

• Individual Accountability. Each student is ultimately individually assessed, and the other members of the group assure that the individual can adequately represent the group. Traditional means of evaluation, such as exams, are examples of individual accountability. An example of a more immediate way to promote individual accountability is to randomly call upon an individual to present the group's work. Typically, a major part of the student's grade is based on their individual work.

• Interpersonal and Small Group Skills. Skills such as leadership, trust-building, and conflict-management are specifically taught to and explicitly reinforced in students.

• Group Processing. Members of the group spend some part of their time together reflecting on and assessing the working relationships among members. A well structured group processing tool will provide formative feedback to the members of the group about their functionality as a group, with the goal being improved group skills in the future.

Cooperative Learning enhances student learning by:

• Providing a shared cognitive set between students.
  • Discussing individual examples and viewpoints on a common question lets students know what their peers think, and gives them a common experience for further understanding of the material.
  • Deciding on a group answer to a question helps ensure that they agree on what components of the material is most important.

• Motivating students to learn the material.
  • If some part of the student's grade depends upon the work of others (Positive Interdependence), they will be more active participants in the group effort.
  • Being personally responsible for their own work (Individual Accountability), either by having to present their own examples/opinions, or by explicit assessment (e.g.-testing), extrinsically reinforces students to work at learning the material.

• Ensuring that students construct their own knowledge.
  • Verbally explaining one's own examples/opinions depends upon the active construction of knowledge on the part of the student.
  • Summarizing the work of others requires the active construction of knowledge obtained from other members of the group.
  • A group written report, during which learners put information in their own words, assures that they are encoding the information in a way that will be accessible to them later, and that they are constructing this information in another modality (written as opposed to verbal).

• Providing Formative Feedback.
  • Students get immediate feedback on their work. By presenting their work to others, and hearing the work of others on the same topic, students get immediate feedback on their work. They also get some immediate feedback from the instructor as she moves from group to group.
  • The instructor gets feedback on what needs to be covered next. By listening to group discussions, the instructor gets immediate feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the students' current understanding of the material, and can act on this information immediately. By reading group answers, the instructor gets a more detailed, systematic assessment of student knowledge, and can adjust future class meetings accordingly.

Other benefits:

• Cooperative Learning develops social and group skills that are invaluable for success outside of the classroom.

• Research has demonstrated that Cooperative Learning is an excellent way of promoting positive interaction between members of different cultural and socio-economic groups.

• For large classes, group written answers save time, in that the instructor reads a fraction of the number of papers that would ordinarily be the case, and those are more thoughtfully constructed, since they are the product of a group effort.

• By reducing competition, Cooperative Learning makes the learning experience less stressful and more enjoyable for both students and the instructor.

• The instructor can learn a great deal about the subject matter from students.

Caveats

• Students need to have worthwhile information/informed opinions to discuss (i.e.-- they need to be prepared), and be motivated, otherwise the discussions will tend to be unproductive.

• Discussion questions and group assignments need to support the goals of the course, or Cooperative Learning groups will not contribute to the overall goals of the course.

Good teaching can only be occurring if students are effectively learning. Effective student learning depends on the instructor having a well developed set of goals for the course and an effective pedagogical plan to meet those goals. Additionally, though, faculty need to know if in fact students are learning as they are presuming they are. The information gathered about student learning in turn affects the direction of future teaching by informing the goals, sequencing, and activities employed by the faculty member. This iterative process, diagrammed below, is what classroom assessment is all about.

Faculty have many techniques at their disposal for gathering information about student learning. The Classroom Assessment Techniques handbook by Tom Angelo and Pat Cross (1993) is an excellent source of information on assessing student learning, motivation, preparation, etc. Much of what the instructor is already doing may be a rich source of information on student learning. For example, the pre-class writing assignments and cooperative learning techniques discussed previously also provide valuable information for the instructor. Any classroom technique, whether it's lecture, small group work, etc. is going to be more effective if it takes into account the state of the learner.

A sample Classroom Assessment Technique (CAT)

Perhaps the most frequently used CAT is "The Muddiest Point." In this technique, students take out a piece of paper at the end of class and write down the one part of class that is still most confusing for them. The instructor picks the papers up as students are leaving, and reads them over after class to determine which points need to be addressed in more detail next time. One major advantage of the technique is that it takes very little time, and provides meaningful feedback on the day's class. The "One Minute Paper," in which you ask students to tell what the most useful and most confusing points were, and the Critical Incident technique developed by Stephen Brookfield (1995), are variants on this technique.

There are many other techniques described in Cross and Angelo, but the main idea is that the instructor is attending to what students are learning, and that knowledge drives future classroom activities.

Using information gathered from formative feedback.

Information obtained from students' pre-class written assignments, cooperative learning group written answers or more structured classroom assessment techniques such as those discussed by Angelo and Cross provide a wealth of information about the current state of student learning. Based on what the instructor has found out through formative feedback, she can:

• Give a mini-lecture addressing the most frequently misunderstood points.
• Conduct a discussion on the topics that students were most interested in discussing.
• Give written feedback to the students based on their feedback. Since this written material is based on what they have submitted,
• They get course material that is tailored to their needs.
• The material is relevant to their interests.
• The material is personalized.
• The instructor's written feedback to the students also promotes a shared cognitive set between the instructor and the students.

Angelo, T. A. and Cross, K. P. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. (2nd ed.) Jossey-Bass, 1993.

Brookfield, Stephen. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. Jossey-Bass, 1995.

Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T. and Smith, K. A. Active Learning: Cooperation in the College Classroom. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company, 1991.

Last modified on October 6, 1998