I liken the start of the semester to getting on to a treadmill for a long workout. You start off with a good pace, but there are speed and gradient changes coming. This tends to happen for students around test time. The pace picks up and students start to lose the ability to balance their work, often shifting to cramming. And the pace gets faster, and seems to start to go uphill. Students often have that big project and/or a major paper. By the end of the semester it feels like someone is zinging bowling balls down the treadmill. One miss-step and the entire semester could come crashing down.
The question is, "How do we get students to distribute their effort in more meaningful ways so they never run on the edge of critical failure?" I use my own experiences. I failed the first exam in a core chemical engineering class when I was a sophomore. I thought I had figured out how to be successful but I clearly hadn't. So, I accidentally discovered spaced practice. I didn't want to give up dating, didn't want to give up volleyball, and needed to work for spending money. I did two things, actually. The first was that I started spending 15 minutes every day trying to answer a random problem out of the book that was not assigned. If I looked at it and I knew how to solve the problem, I picked a new one I didn't know how to solve. Why 15 minutes? That's what I had. If I wasn't done with the problem after fifteen minutes, I put it away. The next day then created the opportunity for retrieval practice as I tried to remember what I had done. And I did this every day, including weekends.
The other piece that I added that semester to my changing behaviors (Growth Mindset) was to go to office hours. I went with these extra problems I had not been assigned but that I had tried to solve, and in 5-10 minutes, the instructor would lead me through the material and ask me questions. I would then be able to see how I could solve the problems. What was the result? I got a 99, 99, and 100 on the remaining exams.
There are many references that are easy to digest for us as faculty or for students and some are included here: "Distributed practice (also known as spaced repetition or spaced practice) is a learning strategy, where practice is broken up into a number of short sessions – over a longer period of time. Humans and animals learn items in a list more effectively when they are studied in several sessions spread out over a long period of time, rather than studied repeatedly in a short period of time, a phenomenon called the spacing effect. The opposite, massed practice, consists of fewer, longer training sessions. It is generally a less effective method of learning. For example, when studying for an exam dispersing your studying more frequently over a larger period of time will result in more effective learning than intense study the night before."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_practice (last accessed 2-9-17).
"What should you do during these short learning sessions?
It’s important that you don’t just sit down and re-read your notes. Instead, you should use effective learning strategies such as retrieval practice or elaboration."
http://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2016/7/21-1 (last accessed 2-9-17)
"Spaced practice is really the only way human beings move information and/or skills into long-term memory. Instead of the traditional “cramming” method of learning – spending one large chunk of time repeating facts or skills over and over again – spaced practice means revisiting facts or skills in shorter segments of time spaced over a few days, weeks, or months."
http://bowperson.com/2016/12/making-the-time-for-spaced-practice/ (last accessed 2-9-17)
How do we get students to “buy in” to the idea that a little each day is better than “all at once”?
Paul, that’s a great story and a great question. Knowing most of our students are not a driven as us to be super productive and, like everyone else, they want results now, how do we get them to apply interval training to academics? Maybe the question should be how do we show or demonstrate this working in the classroom?
ReplyDeleteThis seems much easier to do in person...I try to always bring back earlier material...But the question is...how do we get our students on board?
DeleteMy students were struggling with the content in chapter three, but I didn't know that until we had skipped chapter four and completed chapters 5-7. I introduced students to spaced practice and retrieval practice by solving three problems from chapter 3 with them now that we were 2.5 weeks later. I asked them to try to not use their notes and asked how much they felt the learned the second time through the content compared to the first time now that there had been time in between the two exposures. We'll find out what they know on the midterm on next Tuesday.
DeleteIn this same class, we crowdsourced a set of quiz questions on the entire book and then I shared tools for using those questions in apps. I suggested they do 10 questions a day and space out their exposure and reexposure.