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Often our students need help to be systematic about approaching our
courses. Here is one way to help them. For details, scroll down below the
grid for ideas on how to use it. For
a copy of this grid in Word, click on this sentence and it will open in
Microsoft Word 2001 or later, if
that word processor is on your computer.
Study System Planning Grid
TIMING
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Reading Textbooks
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Taking Class Notes
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Taking Tests
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BEFORE
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DURING
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AFTER
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Ways to Have Your Students Use This Grid
Recording Observations: Asking students to fill in the ways they
actually do prepare to read or take notes or take tests would give you baseline
information and may turn up some good ideas. The trick is to train
students how to describe what they do. You might also turn up some bad
information.
 | Many of your students might generally default, if they read a textbook
chapter, to
reading it like a novel or a magazine article--starting at the first word
and looking at all the words and pictures until the end of the chapter,
closing the book believing they are done. Instead, you might encourage
students to consider the chapter summary, sample problems, pictures and
captions, headings and boldface or italic terms as clues to the most
testable concepts in the chapter. |
| Some of your students might default, if they take class notes, to
treating your course as one large vocabulary drill, setting up notes as
terms and perhaps definitions. Asking students to compare notes,
particularly if you saved a model from a previous semester for one segment
of your course that doesn't change much from semester to semester, could be
a real eye opener for students and yield some useful information for
you. Have students characterize each other's notes, the model notes,
and even provide a sample test question that a student studying from the
model notes should be able to answer. |
| Some students, particularly the ones who think of college courses as
vocabulary drills, will study only one chapter at a time when preparing for
a test and never look across chapters to see larger patterns, draw
contrasts, or see the overall sequence that may actually undergird many
questions on your test. Long before your first test, give
students sample test questions that are parallel in difficulty to those you
commonly put on your tests; also provide a range of sample answers,
especially for open-ended, or essay, questions, and ask students to select
the best one or to rank all three (or five). After some discussion,
the class should be able to see many of the criteria you use to grade such
answers; of course, you should articulate any they miss, even explaining the
rationale behind the questions. [FYI: The tutors at my college believe
this exercise would be the single most important way to forestall
"first test shock"; please note that providing sample questions
without answers that show a range of adequacy will not be as useful.] |
| If your students write essays, reports, or other papers rather than tests,
the same exercise should be completed with a sampling of essays that show a
range of writing prowess and content control. |
| If you give only objective tests, ask students to submit questions for
part of a chapter and show them your questions. Discuss the
similarities and particularly the differences. Especially, you need to
help students see ways to relate ideas (terms?) together in a web or network
of meaning, rather than allowing them to treat course concepts as isolated
terms with definitions that rarely overlap. [FYI: At a Fall, 2000,
inter-departmental meeting between English and Allied Health faculty at my
college, one assumption that surfaced was that in order for students to
write well and substantively, as well as concisely, they have to read well,
to separate objective facts from their subjective impressions, and to learn
how course concepts relate.] |
Designing Your Course to Train Your Students for Survival in College:
Fill in the grid yourself to list the tactics you use to get students through
your course. For instance--
| If you do show students sample test questions and answers (or sample
essays and reports) with a range of quality (A to C or A to F) and
inductively or deductively reveal your grading criteria, you might list
something like "sample test questions" in the top right corner of
the grid. |
| If you set up the homework reading with a challenging question or a
situation, you might list "advance organizer" in the top left
blank block of the grid. |
| If you give students 5 minutes in the middle of class (or at the end of a
segment) to compare notes with each other, or if you give students an
incomplete outline for the day's lecture or a printout of your PowerPoint
slides, then you have something to list in the center block of the grid. |
| For other ideas, e.g. mastery testing as it proposed by Craig Nelson of
the University of Chicago, take a look at the summary for Small
Teaching Changes, Big Learning Gains, a
teleconference received by an MRCTE audience a while back. |
Obviously, many of the
suggestions above may lead to methods that you would use to train students in
college ways. For instance, you (or your campus reading faculty) might
show students the importance and the methods commonly used to preview a textbook
chapter or reserve room reading, as well as annotating text or making notes in a
notebook during reading. If your tests are sequential or if your tests use
similar kinds of questions throughout the term, debriefing after the test is
crucial for students who want to do better on the next test. For more
examples, please talk to the reading faculty on your campus, counselors who
teach orientation or study skills, and perhaps psychology faculty about modern
theories of learning and methods of promoting learning.
Advanced: Form or join a group of teachers who
are curious about this grid and/or ways that effective students study.
Agree to get students in all your sections (or just select one per teacher) to
fill in the grid, perhaps based on past experiences or current ones.
Whether the faculty in your group are from the same discipline or different
disciplines may not matter as much as whether they are teaching first-year or
later students. You might work in pairs to analyze sets of grids from your
students, but try to meet as a group to find "best practices" among
your students.
At some point, you will also want your students to report
their time on task for reading out of class, for reviewing class notes, for
preparing for tests. [FYI: Another conclusion--well, mine, actually--from
the ENG and Allied Health faculty meeting mentioned above is that we probably
would like to increase students' time on task AND their efficiency in the use of
that time. For example, which is more effective: Rereading a chapter with
no marks in it and no notes about it in a notebook, or culling a chapter to make
up sample test questions that parallel the format and difficulty that students
know you will use? Well, duh, right? Find out which strategy your
students most commonly use; then tell them about Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive
levels and how you use it to make sure your tests are sufficiently challenging.]
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1999