When faculty see students missing information from a reading, they generally assume that the student did not read the article carefully. However, it might be that the student does not know how to read an academic work. Faculty know how to read because they would
This past November, all subscribers to The New York Times received a Google Cardboard Virtual Reality Viewer in the mail. Puzzled looks quickly turned to awe as recipients took 3-D virtual reality tours of a variety of locations through the viewers and their cell phones.
Diversity is becoming common in our college classrooms. Not just diversity of race and ethnicity, but diversity of developmental levels and cognitive abilities. With our students’ diverse skills and experiences, faculty members find themselves teaching varied groups of students within one course.
After teaching online for a number of years, I grew weary of the normal “make an initial post, then respond to two others” discussions. Was there another way to engage students? How could I make discussions more meaningful and in-depth? Were there ways to ensure
Discussion is a critical component of any online course, but instructors are often puzzled about what makes some discussions lively and others dead. To fill this gap, He and Gunter examined the factors that lead to participation in virtual teams and came up with some
We run across excellent online content all the time. Instructional designers are always finding new tools and applications that would be of interest to faculty and course designers. Librarians also frequently have a wealth of information on systems that would benefit those involved in developing
Many online courses still use static content such as readings, PowerPoint presentations, and the like. Students are not “doing” anything other than consuming the information. We wanted to buck this trend by providing more interactive and engaging content. We did so by creating the
Adaptive learning has drawn growing interest in education. The premise makes perfect sense. Instead of giving students of all knowledge and abilities the same content, the student is first assessed on his or her knowledge, then provided the content appropriate to that knowledge. The student
Online faculty often assume that all student collaboration should go through the LMS discussion board, but there are other methods of hosting discussion. Yanyan Sun of Ohio University and Fei Gao of Bowling Green State University experimented with Web annotations as an alternative to traditional
How do you inspire your online students to move beyond making status quo postings in your discussion component and lackluster responses to their peers? Is there a way to get students engaged in meaningful group work in the online classroom? Consider using problem-based learning (PBL)
Magna Publications © 2023 All rights reserved
When faculty see students missing information from a reading, they generally assume that the student did not read the article carefully. However, it might be that the student does not know how to read an academic work. Faculty know how to read because they would not have otherwise succeeded in academia, and consequently, they often assume that students must know how to read academic work as well. But reading academic work for the proper information is a skill developed like any other skill, one which students often lack.
Students have been shown to read articles differently from faculty. Faculty read an academic work for underlying concepts, whereas students often read for facts (Rhem, 2009). In addition, faculty read actively by asking questions, whereas students are just trying to remember information. Thus, teachers can improve their students' work considerably by teaching them how to read academic work.
Erika G. Offerdahl and Lisa Montplaisir used student-generated reading questions (SGRQs) in their biochemistry course to teach academic reading skills. They asked students to submit one question they had after each reading, focusing on conceptual issues over factual issues. This exercise forced the students to read actively by asking questions and to read for the right types of information. Moreover, it helped the students think like scientists, which is one of the skills the course taught.
The exercises also helped faculty decide what to cover in class. If the faculty member is teaching a hybrid course, handling the course content online and spending in-class time on student engagement, the questions could be used to choose which topics to go over in class. Moreover, students' questions could be used to create problems for other students to solve in class.
This in-class exercise can easily be applied to a fully online course using discussion boards. The faculty member sets up a discussion board for each reading, with each student posting a question and answering another student's question. The questions can also be used to inform course revisions by demonstrating areas in which students commonly have difficulty. Faculty often believe that their assessments are sufficient to identify student problem areas, but students often have problems in areas that circle around the assessments and can be found only with open-ended questions.
The researchers further refined the diagnostic instrument by dividing the questions students raised into three levels of thinking skills: those that demonstrated conceptual understanding, those that demonstrated questioning skills, and those that demonstrated metacognition skills—the ability to evaluate the level of one's own understanding. With this rubric, a teacher can use the student-created questions to evaluate the students' general level of scientific thinking.
As this was an introductory class, most students scored in the lowest thinking skills category. One would expect that students would move up the spectrum as they progress into later courses, and so by applying the method in different courses, departments can use it to measure the development of thinking skills across a program. Thus, the instrument can be used for program-level assessment of learning outcomes.
Although this study focused on a hard science class, one can easily imagine applying it to other courses. It also fits the online format, because the LMS can host an unlimited number of questions that the instructor can segment by reading, topic, and other categories.
Consider ways to incorporate student-generated readings questions into your courses.
References
Offerdahl, E. & Montplaisir, L. 2015. Student-Generated Reading Questions: Diagnosing Student Thinking with Diverse Formative Assessments, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, 42 (1), 29–38.
Rhem, J. 2009. Deep/Surface Approaches to Learning in Higher Education: A Research Update. Essays on Teaching Excellence Toward the Best in the Academy. v. 21, n. 8
