General issues

 

The Six Ideas course plan assumes that students will actually read the textbook before coming to class, so that one can devote to the kinds of activities that actually build student understanding instead of lecturing the whole class session. (In one contemporary parlance, this allows one to "flip" the classroom, but with the textbook serving the role that video lectures would serve in a more typical "flipped" course design.)

But experienced professors know that students will not read the textbook naturally: they must be given strong incentives to do so. Even the "shaming" that one might expect to occur when students come to class unprepared to participate in peer activities is not sufficient, because most peers are too forgiving.

What does seem to work is some kind of graded task that students find fairly easy to score well on if they have read the assigned material, but hard if they have not. This cannot figure too much in a student's total grade (because this incentivizes cheating), but it also cannot figure too little (because the incentive to avoid reading is pretty strong).

The sections below describe some things we have tried that have proven to be reasonably effective in getting students to read. "Reasonably effective" in this context means that they yield at least an average number of students at Pomona preparing for class is at least 75% of the time, as self-reported on anonymous questionnaires. Something like 90% preparedness seems out of reach at Pomona (where students are very busy, not especially obedient, and pretty confident about their abilities to catch up), though other campus cultures may prove better.

We have tried some other methods, too, including having students write reading summaries and/or submitted questions about what they did not understand (for use in Just-In-Time instruction). But we found that these tasks were too poorly defined to yield good-quality results, were too hard to grade meaningfully, and were too easy to game.

Pre-Class two-Minute Problems

 

In this scheme, we assign (for each class session where reading is required) three two-minute problems selected from from the assigned chapter. Students hand in their answers (with brief explanations) as they come into class. We grade each paper on a three-point scale, one for handing it in on time and in class, and one point for each correct answer (up to two). This means that a student can get one problem wrong on each assignment without penalty. Students who do not attend class may submit answers electronically before class, but will only get the two points for correctness (since the point is being prepared for class).The student's two lowest paper scores during the semester are ignored, and the remaining scores count as about 10% of the student's grade. We discuss the answers in class to provide immediate feedback.

For this to work well, one must select problems that are pretty easy (but only if one has read the chapter) and collectively cover the whole chapter. Requiring only two of the answers to be correct recognizes that even students who have done the reading may not be able to answer all the questions correctly, so this reduces stress. Dropping the two lowest scores greatly reduces the number of students pestering professors with excuses.

Advantages:

• Relatively easy to manage and grade (an undergraduate TA can do it).
• Provides an incentive for attending class as well as for reading.
• Does not require writing new problems.
• Completely even-handed.

Disadvantages:

• It can be tricky in some chapters to find appropriate two-minute questions.
• It is relatively easy to cheat (by getting answers from someone else).
• Average preparedness is acceptable but could be higher.

This is the system we currently use at Pomona. (A variation that also enables "just-in-time" learning involves students handing in the answers electronically enough in advance of the class so that the professor has time to adjust the class design to respond to any weaknesses revealed by the students' responses. This can help students feel they are getting some benefit back.)

DAILY HOMEWORK

 

In this approach, three homework problems are due every class day (instead of seven or eight harder problems due once a week). Two of the problems are B problems or simple M problems from the chapter that students are supposed to have read for that class session, with the remaining problem being a more difficult M or R problem from the previous chapter. We try to choose the two easier problems to be fairly straightforward if the student has read the chapter, and also so that the two problems span the chapter's material. We grade all problems using the Six Ideas recommended scheme.

This scheme has been used successfully at Pomona and at Washington University. It has not been used at Pomona recently primarily because some colleagues are not comfortable assigning homework on material not covered in class.

Advantages:

• No extra effort required compared to assigning normal weekly homework.
• Does not require writing new problems.
• Completely even-handed.
• Cheating and/or gaming the system is difficult.
• Average preparedness is probably the best with this method.

Disadvantages:

• It can be tricky in some chapters to find appropriate problems.
• Work is required constantly from students, and this can be grueling.
• The paper flow is hard to manage in two-pass versions of the grading scheme.
• Does not automatically incentivize actually attending class.
• Students may feel that it is unfair to grade them on material not discussed in class.
• Students may not be exposed to enough more challenging problems.

EXERCISE BOOK

 

In this approach, one creates an exercise book (handed out on the first day of class) with a page for each assigned chapter containing three simple problems (which might be two-minute-type problems or problems involving short calculations) along with space to work the problems. After reading the text assignment but before the class session, students fill out the exercise book page for that session. On the blackboard at the beginning of each class session, the professor posts a list of randomly chosen students who will hand in their exercise book that day. We chose enough students so that each student would be called about 5 to 6 times per semester. The books were collected and then we spend the first few minutes of class going over the exercise answers. After class (sometimes even during class while students were working on activities), the handed in books were graded on a 10-point scale, where 6 of the 10 points is based on the student's effort since the last check and 4 points on effort on the exercises due that day. Students may turn in the book at the next class if not present, but will not get the 4 points for the particular class session (everything will be treated as past effort).

We developed a custom computer program to do the selection. The program was designed to make random selections from a class list and record the number of times that each student was selected. Any student might be selected on any class day, even if selected the previous class session (this was necessary to keep students on their toes). But we designed the program so that the probability of choosing a given student was inversely proportional to 1 plus the number of times that the student had already been selected. Some probability scheme like this is necessary because choosing purely randomly leads to large and unfair differences in the total number of times that students are called.

The huge advantage to this method (especially during the time that we used it during the transition from the 2nd to 3rd editions) was the ability to design exactly the right kind of problems for the  text materials. Most of the problems that we wrote during this time have now been integrated into the texts. Still this method can provide a lot of flexibility for professors.

Advantages:

• Complete freedom in choosing problems.
• Random selection keeps students on their toes, while requiring little grading effort.
• Incentivizes class attendance.

Disadvantages:

• Creating the exercise book requires a lot of effort.
• Random selection (even with shaped probabilities) is not always fair.
• Turn-around time needs to be very short (and grading during class is a distraction)
• The system is complicated and hard for students to understand.
• Average preparedness is not as good as other methods.

RANDOM POP QUIZZES

 

In this approach, we prepared a very short (5-minute) quiz on the reading material for each class day. At the beginning of class, we asked for students to choose two numbers between 1 and 6, and then publicly rolled a die. If either of the numbers came up (for a total probability of 1/3), then we would take the quiz, otherwise, we would not.

Students must be present to get credit for a quiz (but a certain number of lowest quiz scores should be dropped unless one wants to deal with a lot of excuses).

Possible variations include providing a list of questions beforehand from which the quiz questions would be chosen and/or having students take the quiz every day and grading it either every time or 1/3 of the time at random. Grading less often means less grading work, obviously, but does have some negative impact on students' average preparedness.

Advantages:

• Complete freedom in choosing problems.
• Random selection keeps students on their toes, while requiring less grading effort.
• Incentivizes class attendance.
• Very hard to game.
• Average preparedness is good if students are quizzed every time.

Disadvantages:

• Students really do not like quizzes, and found the process stressful.
• Creating the quizzes requires a lot of extra effort.
• Choosing meaningful questions that can be completed in 5 minutes is tricky.
• Takes up valuable class time (about 10 minutes even for a 5-minute quiz).
• Average preparedness is only adequate if quizzes are not graded every time.