Early in my career as a professor, a student asked for a study guide before the final exam. This was in a chemistry for non-science majors course. I obliged by creating a three-page document with bullet points of what the students should know and be able to do. I used action verbs (e.g. explain, define, solve) to make each point clear and simple; this was before they became the standard practice for “learning outcomes”. As an aside, I think the use of action verbs is useful for small and specific chunks of information, but NOT so useful when it comes to complex concepts. To quote H. L. Mencken: “For every complex problem, there is a clear and simple solution that is wrong.” But that’s another story.
I devote the last day of class (before the Final) to answering questions about the final exam and any course content we’ve covered. The students, armed with the study guide, essentially wanted me to go over the guide point-by-point. There’s no way to cram a semester’s worth of material into a single class session. But I tried to oblige by briefly hitting each major point. Within 30 minutes, everyone was exhausted, and it was unclear if I helped the students or just made them more stressed out.
The following year (in the same course) I included the study guide at the beginning of the semester, and encouraged student to use it as a guide throughout the semester. The vast majority of them did not. Very close to finals, students finally started looking at the guide, and got stressed out at what they perceived as a mountain of material. My perspective had been “look at how much you’ve learned!” but theirs was “look at how much I don’t know, I’m going to fail.” Waiting until the last minute and attempting to cram does NOT work well in chemistry. Despite my exhortations, my study guide was a bust, at least for many of the students. (There are always a number of students who ace the class but they might have still done so without my provided study guide. Maybe they have good study practices?)
I scrapped having these “final exam study guides” and pivoted to a different approach that I’ve used for many years. For each class, I tell them what to read, what to pay attention to, the main points we’ll cover in class. There’s often a statement akin to “you should be able to…” followed by some action verbs relating to course material. (I also did this for my general chemistry for science majors course.) Occasionally, close to finals, a student would ask if there was a study guide for the final exam. I would respond by pointing back to the information I gave for each class session, and that it essentially functions as a study guide. The student was usually disappointed by this, clearly it was not the answer they were looking for. I should also say that since I started teaching, I always spend the first few minutes of every class highlighting “here’s what was important from last time” and write keywords on the board.
This semester I’m piloting something new in my G-Chem class. I’m retaining the same setup of telling students how to prepare for each class meeting and what the key points will be. In class, I still have my regular low-stakes short quizzes, and highlight what was important from last time. But I’ve now added a half-page “Study Guide” for each class that includes some bullet points with action verbs, and a “Test Yourself” practice question or two that weaves a numerical problem with conceptual material. Why am I doing this? A decade ago we transitioned to online homework problems (this is now standard in introductory college chemistry) that are bundled with the e-textbook. There are a number of advantages to the online homework system for both students and instructors. But I want to highlight two challenges: (1) these systems do not handle conceptual questions sufficiently well, and (2) the way questions are phrased do not match how I would ask questions on an exam.
What I’m hoping that my study guide will do (if the students take them seriously) is to remind them, if they pay attention to it, of the conceptual parts of the course. Being able to solve numerical problems is important, and the ability to solve such problems on an exam indicates some conceptual knowledge. But my experience of grading exams over the years and helping students in office hours is that a lack of conceptual understanding trips students up in solving the numerical problems. And the numerical problem isn’t the end-all. It should lead to a conceptual point of knowledge. One might say that concepts are the bookends of numerical problems, the introduction and the conclusion – both very important parts! Furthermore, there is also much about chemical knowledge and understanding that is conceptual that does not translate into numerical problems.
Students also need to be prepared for their knowledge to be assessed through my exams, and that means getting them used to the way I phrase my questions and what I’m looking to see that they can demonstrate knowledge-wise. The online-homework-textbook isn’t sufficient; I daresay it has glaring holes in some areas. So students need to see how I ask questions and work problems. This is much of what takes place in class. They see questions that I ask and how I answer them. They take many of those low-stakes quizzes at the beginning of class. I used to provide previous year exams for practice, and then I pivoted to required self-tests essentially to make sure every student gets practice, not just the conscientious ones. The new “study guides for each class” are my latest experiment. I just sent an e-mail to my class yesterday reminding them to go through them after each class, while it’s still early in the semester. I keep trying new things. But at the end of the day, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t force it to drink.
No comments:
Post a Comment