3-minute thesis

This week, my university is running the 3-Minute Thesis Competition. This requires participants to provide a 3-minute summary of their research thesis. The presenters have no guarantee that members of their audience know anything about their discipline or their topic. It’s tricky – and many of them can’t do it.

My advice to them is to imagine that they have only a few minutes to describe their project to a friend of their grandmother’s at the Christmas Party.

This is a technique that could work as a classroom activity for large assignments or projects. It will force students to be very clear about what they are writing about.

For more information about the 3-minute thesis competition, go here: http://cbe.anu.edu.au/news-events/cbe/news/2013/3mt/. 

Group work in unsuitable spaces

Quite often, I hear my academic colleagues say that it is too difficult to run learning activities in a tiered lecture theatre or some other horrible teaching space foisted upon them. This strategy requires only that each person is within earshot of three other people.

Try this one: Think, Pair, Square, Share.

1. Pose a question.
2. Give students 2-3 minutes to think about their answers (think).
3. Get students to turn to the person next to them to talk about their conclusions (pair) for 5 minutes.
4. Get each pair to join another pair to continue the discussion (square).
5. Have each square report on their discussions (share).

 Don’t let each square report everything they said. Start with one group of four: “Report on one thing you discussed”. Ask each subsequent group to report on something from their conversation which has not already been mentioned. Once there are no groups with any new points to mention (or you have run out of interesting points to report), end the sharing part of the activity.

Korpi’s Rules

Today, in a discussion about engaging learning activities in the university classroom, an academic colleague introduced me to Korpi’s Rules. Walter Korpi is a Norwegian academic and past president of the Research Committee for the International Sociological Association. He developed a workshop-style meeting format for his peers which forces the presenter of new research to be very clear about the work.

It works like this:

1. A paper for discussion at the conference is selected and circulated.
2. A member of the group other than the author of paper (the discussant) presents the paper, based only on written material supplied by the author. No oral briefing or interaction between presenter/discussant and author precedes the presentation to the group.
3. Following the presentation, the author takes questions about the paper.
4. Finally, the group engages in a general discussion about the paper.

“… accepting a place on the [conference] program entails a commitment to complete the paper in time for others to read it and to come prepared to discuss papers. Equally, participants may expect to serve as discussant for another paper, and to open the floor with an incisive and fair assessment of its strengths and weaknesses.”

I can see this technique working as a classroom learning event. Not only does it force good, clear writing, it introduces social science students to a practice used by their more senior discipline-based colleagues.

Web-based tools for teaching

Here are a few free applications that might be of interest.

Padlet (http://padlet.com/): This provides users with a blank “wall” to which anyone logged in at the same time can post comments – “digital post-its”. It’s good for collaborative brainstorming and the like.

Voicethread (http://voicethread.com): This is a fantastic tool, but it isn’t free. The company sells Single Instructor, Department, and Site Licences. It allows users to upload, share, and discuss documents, presentations, images, audio files, and videos. Comments can be made (recorded and shared) using a microphone, a webcam, in a text file, by phone, or as an audio-file upload.

mQlicker (http://www.mqlicker): This is a web-based audience response application that provides “clicker” functionality in the classroom. Rather than using hand-held audience response devices, participants use their mobile devices (phones, tablets, laptops). Participants do need to be able to log on to the Web in the teaching space for the system to work.

Poll Everywhere (http://www.polleverywhere.com/): This is another audience survey tool. The lecturer asks students a question using the Poll Everywhere app, students answer in real time using their phones, Twitter, or web browsers, and the responses are reported graphically on the web or in a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation.

Infographics: The web loves infographics. Sources for good infographics are becoming easier to find: one such source is http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/teaching-with-infographics-places-to-start/. Tools to create infographics abound (e.g. any graphic design program). Here are a couple of other useful tools to create simple infographics: Tagxedo (http://www.tagxedo.com) is a tool that allows you to create word cloud in a certain shape and SimpleDiagrams (http://www.simplediagrams.com) is a tool that helps the user create … well, simple diagrams. It’s nice.

Edmodo (https://www.edmodo.com/): This is a secure micro-blogging tool.

Presentation tools: I’ve mentioned Prezi (an alternative to PowerPoint and Keynote, found at http://prezi.com/) in a previous post. I’ve come across two others since then: Glogster (http://www.glogster.com/), LiveBinders (http://www.livebinders.com/), and SimpleBooklet (http://simplebooklet.com/) all useful sites/tools.

Of course, these tools are only as useful as you make them ... and that takes imagination.

Exam wrappers

This description of "exam wrappers" is taken from an online newsletter hosted by Stanford University and edited by Rick Reis: Tomorrow's Professor. For more information, visit http://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/tomorrows-professor. 

What are Exam Wrappers?

Exam wrappers are short activities that direct students to review their performance (and the instructor's feedback) on an exam with an eye toward adapting their future learning. Exam wrappers ask students three kinds of questions: How did they prepare for the exam? What kind of errors did they make on the exam? What could they do differently next time? Each of the question types is discussed next.

1. How students prepare for the exam. Asking students to reflect on how they prepared for the exam forces them to confront the choices, explicit or implicit, they made about their studying. This prompts students to consider issues such as whether they studied enough or sufficiently in advance. Similarly, asking students which of various study strategies they employed (e.g., reviewing notes, solving practice problems, rereading the textbook) highlights that there are many options they could have taken. It also presents various study strategies that students might not have even considered and thus suggests some new possibilities for how they might prepare differently next time.

2. What kind of errors students made. Once they have received a grade, students do not always think carefully about their performance on an exam. If they did well, they might mark it as a success without much further thought; if they did poorly, there's strong temptation to leave the painful event behind. Thus, the second set of questions posed in exam wrappers is designed to encourage students to analyze their performance in greater depth, giving students something constructive to do with feedback and graded exam offers. One way to do this is to identify the critical components or stages of the tasks on the exam and have students estimate their degree of difficulty (e.g., how many points they lost) with each component. For example, did they read the question carefully, did they have trouble "setting up" the problem, did they fail to understand the concepts involved, or did they make mistakes on the required arithmetic or algebra? Focusing students' reflection at this level informs their analysis of their own performance. Moreover, the labels for the different possibilities provide a concrete language for students to use when assessing their own performance. Note that this part of the exam wrapper is a natural place for instructors to tailor the questions to their own needs. Instructors may also want to adapt these labels to include specific misconceptions or difficulties that have been revealed in their course by past students. Or, they may want to include more general issues that impact students' exam performance. For instance, an instructor I worked with recently was concerned about test anxiety adversely affecting her students' exam performance, so she incorporated this issue into her exam wrapper.

3. How students should study for the next exam. Students can use their responses to the first and second types of exam-wrapper questions to think about how they should approach the next exam. A key goal of the third type of question exam-wrapper question is to help students see the association between their study choices and their exam performance so they can better predict what study strategies will be effective in the future. One way to do this task is to ask students to look back at their responses to the first two parts of the wrapper and then to list specific ways they might prepare differently for the next exam to improve their performance. Another option is to prompt students to attribute their various difficulties (from part two of the wrapper) to specific study strategies (from part one) they did or did not employ. Rather than merely telling students to "study harder" or "do more practice problems before the exam", this third type of exam-wrapper question helps students discover effective study strategies on their own. In effect, exam wrappers are asking students to give their future selves advice.

Why Exam Wrappers Work

The earlier section on design considerations described five constraints that a metacognitive intervention should satisfy to be practical and effective. Understanding the ways in which exam wrappers satisfy these constraints helps explain why they work.

1. Impinge minimally on class time. Exam wrappers require only a few minutes and are completed at a time when students arguably are somewhat distracted anyway. Moreover, instructors can eliminate even this minimal impact on class time by giving exam wrappers as part of homework.

2. Be as easily completed by students within the time they are willing to invest. With typically only one page of questions, none of which requires much writing, exam wrappers take relatively little student time.

3. Be easily adaptable. As we have seen, exam wrappers include three main question types, and these question types can be applied to almost any course, as long as it has exams. In addition, this general approach can be applied to any type of graded assignment.
4. Be repeatable yet flexible. The core questions being in an exam wrapper do not diminish in value when asked repeatedly. At the same time, it is easy to adjust the details of exam wrappers so as to keep the exercise fresh. Instructors can easily vary the specific content of exam wrapper questions, add new questions, and tailor the questions to their particular instructional situation.

5. Exercise the skills instructors want their students to learn. The reflections required to complete an exam wrapper leads students to assess their own strengths and weaknesses, evaluate their performance, identify which strategies work for them, and generate appropriate adjustments. These are key metacognitive skills that many instructors want to promote.

How to Use Exam Wrappers

Here I describe a basic recipe for how to use exam wrappers, along with variations and options instructors may find useful.

Step1: Students prepare for and take the exam using their typical study strategies. No special intervention is need for this first exam.

Step 2: The instructor gives students the exam wrapper instrument when the graded exams are returned and asks students to complete the exam wrapper as soon as possible upon seeing their exam performance. Ideally, this is done right then in class and need only take 10 minutes of class time. But there are other possibilities. Students can complete the exam wrapper as homework, submitting their responses by a specified deadline. Or students can complete the exam wrappers online as a nongraded assignment (e.g., within a course management system or online instructional environment or with an online survey system).

Step 3: The instructor collects the exam wrappers. Although exam wrappers are not graded activities, it is important to collect them because (a) the exam wrapper will need to be returned to students at a later point (see Step 4) and this prevents them from getting lost, and (b) the instructional team may want to review students' responses to gain insight into their students' learning that they otherwise might not be able to obtain. In particular, the instructor or teaching assistants can skim students' responses to see whether there are patterns in how students analyzed their strengths and weaknesses or in how students described their approach to studying for the exam. For example, instructors may be surprised to learn the amount of time students spent studying (either how much or how little), when students chose to start their studying (e.g., 2 a.m. the night before), or how students spent their study time (e.g., memorizing formulae rather than solving practice problems). The instructional team can also consider the additional instructional support students said they would like to receive and possibly provide something along these lines. A wide variety of adjustments may be suggested based on what the instructional team learns from the exam wrappers about students? strengths and weaknesses, and study strategies.

Step 4: At the time when students should begin studying for the next exam, the instructor returns the completed exam wrappers (from the previous exam) to students. The idea here is that students review their own recommendations for how to study more effectively, given their own past experiences, strengths, and weaknesses. Depending on the class format and the time available, there are many variations on this step that instructors can use.

Step 5 (optional, but desirable): Repeat steps 2 through 4 for subsequent exams.

When an instructor provides exam wrappers regularly across multiple exams, students get repeated practice in applying the skills of self-regulated learning. This helps students build a habit of mind to monitor their own learning, reflect on their study strategies, and make appropriate adjustments. For reasons mentioned earlier, it can be useful to include nontrivial variation in the structure of subsequent wrappers while still prompting the desired metacognitive processes. For example, an exam wrapper used for an exam later in the semester can be streamlined compared to the first exam wrapper. Having the wrapper still gets students to engage in reflection and analysis, but fading the scaffolding encourages students to take on more of the responsibility for this process.

These five steps are easy to implement, take relatively little time, and are very flexible. The metacognitive practice from using wrappers in a course offers substantial benefits. And when multiple instructors do this across different courses, students can learn metacognitive skills in multiple contexts, thereby increasing their likelihood of transferring the skills to new learning situations in the future. This is exactly what we did at Carnegie Mellon University, implementing wrappers in several introductory math and science courses, as described in the next section.