Growth Mindset

Personally, I never really realized how much one’s attitude about learning could actually impact the extent of learning. When I read about the work of Carol Dweck on Growth Mindset, I was blown away.  As an educational researcher, I know that it is very rare to find such a clear, reproducible impact of an educational intervention, especially such a small intervention. Dweck’s team showed that just by telling students “wow you must be really smart at this” or “wow you must have worked really hard at this” completely changed how students thought about learning and eventually what they were able to learn. Why would this be so? It turns out that if someone thinks they are “smart” they just want to continue appearing smart, which often involves avoiding challenges. However, if someone thinks that they can learn (or get “smarter”) with reasonable effort, they will be much more likely to tackle learning challenges head on. 

Dr. Dweck's work is consistent with other research on student motivation. It is essential that students can see the connection between their own efforts and growth of their understanding. As instructors (and parents!) we have an important role in helping students understand this relationship. This is how I often explain to my students (and my own children) about the growth mindset (borrowing heavily from Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development:

What you know now is like a small circle inside a much larger circle of what you want to eventually know. If you learn something new, your small circle grows larger. This can only happen when you try something (with help) that you can’t easily do already. If you only practice things that you can already do (inside your small circle), your circle can’t grow.  If you try to do something that is all the way at the edge of the big circle, you won’t learn, because it is too hard. However, if you try something challenging, just outside of your small circle, your circle will grow as you learn more!

I find this visualization can be helpful for senior undergraduate students and elementary age children. We all need to be encouraged and reminded that learning is a journey and challenges are opportunities!

Metacognition and Peer Assessment

In my FLC today we discussed metacognition, and Donald Rumsfeld's quote, "...there are things we don't know that we don't know". As John mentioned in his post, students may complete an exam confident that they will do well, and are shocked when they don't.

How about us instructors? We may teach our students, and are confident that they received the information, only to find that their exam scores don't reflect this. This is where peer observation can be valuable.

The connection we perceive we have with our students may not necessarily be the connection we actually have. A peer observing us has a perspective we lack by being able to see the connection from a distance, and share with us any disconnect that she/he can identify.

For example, it is very important to be passionate about what we teach. Students pick up on our enthusiasm, and it can be inspiring. But this very passion may blind us: swept up in the moment, we can assume the students are connecting the dots just like we do, and they may be nodding their heads and even smiling, while still not making the connection. It's easy to forge ahead without waiting for student feedback, so we miss the opportunity for assessment.

Thinking about thinking

There once was a teacher who said though,
It seems that I know that I know,
What I'd like to see,
Is that the students are like me,
That they know that they know that they know.
- adaptation from a Zen master

Getting students to think about thinking might be one of the most important aspects of creating opportunities for learning.  For me, this is a central goal for my active learning classrooms and also one of the most challenging.  One of the important outcomes of practicing metacognition is an increase in what is called metacognitive accuracy; the ability to know what you know and use that to predict an outcome.  We all know that our students are, in general, very poor at doing this.  How many times have you had a student come to your office claiming that they knew everything only to bomb an exam.  Research in this area shows that the less a person knows, the worse they are at predicting any outcome on an assessment in that particular area.  In addition, it turns out the more you know, the worse you are at predicting how others will do on assessments.  Sound familiar?....our classes.  Here are a few things I do to try to promote metacognition through group activities in my classroom.

1-  Ask students to share and assess each others work.  I will ask students to solve a problem on their own, then exchange their work with a partner.  Each student then "grades" each others work and provides feedback.  Then, they are asked to reflect on the feedback they received and if they feel they were assessed correctly based on their answers.  These type of activities take time but are worth it.

2-  I think using the whiteboards in various ways can be effective to stimulate metacognition.  For example, the students can generate work on the boards, which can then be shown to the entire class for a reflection.  The nice thing about this is that in the larger classes, the work can have an anonymous feel to it which helps students to share their work.

What ideas do you have for in class or out of class activities?
John

Thinking about Interleaving

Of all the learning practices we have discussed in this forum, I think interleaving is one of the most counter-intuitive to students. So many of our "practice" structures are based around grouped or massed practice: lots of problems that emphasize one content area or one skill, and then a lot of problems addressing another content area or skill, and so on. I know I have tended to think about students' development of concepts and skills as a directional arrow, starting at "beginning" and ending at "more expert." So it is not too surprising that students have this idea as well.

One example from my non-work life helped me to appreciate the wisdom of interleaved practice. Two of my children used a middle-school mathematics curriculum that intentionally utilized interleaved practice: each problem set consisted of 15 questions that were relevant to that section of the chapter, with 15 additional questions that were taken from any of the previous sections or chapters. I saw first-hand the effect of this structure when my kids started recognizing that they had to go back to previous sections of the book to remind themselves about a kind of problem they hadn't seen for a while. Oh, the complaints! But I was amazed at the growth in my kids' ability to recognize different types of problems, to characterize them, and to explain how two seemingly unrelated math topics were actually very related. That is the strength of interleaving.

My kids' experiences in math, my reading about learning, and the encouragement of a departmental colleague prompted me to make some changes in my own teaching. I had been dismayed at the tendency of students not to make connections between different biology topics taught in the same class. The mental model I had was that they practiced and mastered one topic (for this example, some aspects of protein structure) but then "put away" that understanding after taking an exam on it, in the same way you might pack up holiday decorations after the holiday has passed. I realized that my actions were promoting this disconnect. 

So, I borrowed from the math model and redesigned my course. Each weekly quiz and each exam in my Introductory Biology course is now cumulative. For each assessment, I try to choose or design problems that promote connections between topics that might not seem related to a novice. I don't yet have a feeling about whether this has improved students' understanding of the material, but several of them told me they were not as intimidated by the looming cumulative final exam as they might have been, because they have been working with all the concepts and skills, all semester. In my experience, that alone is a win.

Revisiting Learning Outcomes Mid-Semester

I really like transparency in the way we teach students. In particular, and this relates to Zoe's post of "Why", I like to share with my classes what motivates me to teach a course: the learning outcomes. We all have them in our syllabi, but these mostly don't get revisited with the students after the first day of class. Today I dedicated part of my HNRS 170 class to sharing the learning outcomes again with my students, then reviewing which outcome we've reinforced so far with a given class activity.

Now, from an assessment standpoint I don't yet have a metric to go by for evaluating this, but I believe it is a good practice for aligning where we are as a class in the semester with the syllabus, and giving the students a sense of progress. What is your perspective?

Why?

Why?

 It’s a question that seems both too simple and amazingly complex. Children start asking “why?” as soon as they start noticing their surroundings. “Why is the sky blue?”, “Why is that man fat?”, “Why do I need to eat Brussel sprouts?”.  So, what happens during young adulthood (and beyond) that stops this? And why?

Elaboration is the “why” in making connections between material students are learning in the classroom and the world around them. These questions encourages them to think more deeply about the material, and explore connections. This increases learning of the material, retrieval, as well as the knowledge that “stuff covered in class” has greater meaning.

Many of us work under the illusion that students are doing this on their own. It seems as if any student would ask “why is my professor telling me this?”…but perhaps that is an artifact of our knowledge of the subject. It’s easy for us to see the connections between what we are sharing and the bigger picture.

But ask your students (either in class or during office hours) “why did we cover ________ in class”, and you might get a very different response.

How do we model Elaboration in the classroom? How do we train students to do this on their own? Why???

Application Exercise

Application of laws and concepts to "Murder Scenes"

For two classes prior to the practical exercise the students are taken through the "Degrees of Murder" and the 5 stages or states of bodies "Post Mortem."  Then power point scenarios are provided where students as a "team of four detectives" read a scenario, look at the picture of a deceased individual and determine stage of death, estimated time of death and upon solving of the case the level of intent associated with the killing and the degree of murder to be charged.

The next week the students as a team are tasked with "investigating" four murder scenes.  This helps to reinforce new concepts and ideas through a practical application exercise. This simulates real world, showing call out of detectives, response to the scene of the crime, receiving limited information up front, preserving, observing, evaluating evidence and predicting aspects about the murder based on their observations and the limited information.

The following week they will receive a low stakes quiz on the concepts and hopefully before the end of the semester they will revisit some scenes in one final application exercise and very limited quiz about the scene.

                                  The Practical Application Exercise

 At the start of class students are advised they are to investigate some murder scenes, given some directions that are posted on the board and in a handout and are sent out of the room while I set up the scenes.  They return to the classroom and are dispatched (via 3 X 5 card) as teams to "investigate" four different "murder" scenes.

Their task involves observing and making detailed notes about the scene and the body found there.  Then based on those observations predict the how or manner of death, the post-mortem stage of death that gives them an approximate time element, to evaluate how long the individual may have been deceased. The students continue their observations to determine what evidence may be present at the scene and decide what is relevant and why this would be important to solving the case. Then as part of the in-class writing exercise I ask them to think about what more information they need to solve the case and develop a plan once the crime scene has been cleared.  The importance of preservation of evidence, observation, analysis, evaluation of the crime scene is critical since once the scene is cleared it may soon after be cleaned up, or contaminated post incident.  Thus students photograph the scene in situ.  In the out of class portion of the assignment the students are given time to make a thorough incident report along with photos to document their crime scene investigation.  This is then graded.  A few weeks later the students will receive a low stakes quiz related to identifying the stages of post mortem bodies and the degree of murder based on the information.  Then a final exercise before the end of the semester spaced over time.

WORKING TOGETHER AS A TEAM, WORKING WITHOUT SUPERVISION

DRIVEN BY EXCELLENCE AND A PURSUIT OF THE FACTS