Increasing Students’ Understanding and Retention of Classroom Material

Posted by 5x5 on August 4, 2009 under Geek Talk | 2 Comments to Read

How many instructors have you run into that believe their lack of good teaching skills proves they are not spoon feeding their students? There is a clear difference between spoon feeding and teaching for retention. Spoon feeding is teaching for the test. Making information easy to obtain and understand is plain, old, good teaching.

Students are in a classroom to learn, yet many leave in frustration with incomplete information and a general lack of understanding. As a teacher, professor or presenter of any material, there are things you can do to improve students’ understanding and have them leave your classroom with a monumental amount of knowledge they will retain for years.

Here are a number of suggestions:

Summarize

• When asking a question to the group at large, not everyone can hear the person who called out the answer. Sometimes, open questions lead to several people contributing to the answer. Summarizing the final result, loud and clear, so the entire class can hear will make sure everyone is on the same page.
• On occasion, you as an instructor might misstate something. Instead of saying, “Switch the two.” or some other modification of correction, fully state, “Correction. I jumped ahead in my notes. Mitosis is … and meiosis is …”
• Use the key word before providing the definition, rather than saying it after the definition.  This gives students something to attach the definition to right away, rather than wondering what you are trying to get at and trying to attach one word to a long rambling series of sentences.  It makes more sense to attach the long series of sentences to one word.
• When explaining a process with a series of steps, show an overview of the steps before you begin the explanation of stages and follow up with a summarizing slide.  Overall picture, specific details, overall picture. (Forest, trees, forest.) Keep in mind, it is very important to talk about these specific steps in the order they happen, without skipping around.  If you jump around, the information is going to be stored in the order you covered it.

Improve visualizations

• If you use a pen tool that enables you to make annotations on your computer project to the screen, enable your mouse cursor to be visible and a different color than the slide background or text color. This will allow students to see the full path of where you are going and where you end up. Otherwise, students have to constantly scan the entire slide to see where a new mark shows up, in a slide that might already have several annotations.
• In addition, when making any type of annotation on a slide, consider students who are color blind. If you are using a green or red marker on a slide with black text, they will see a shade of gray. This can make locating your added annotation difficult to find.
• Reduce the amount of information on slides.  It is hard to project a slide large enough so everyone can see it if there is a lot of detail on it.  Having handouts or referring to a specific page in the textbook can assist with these troublesome slides.  Be sure you tell the students to correct page number to look on, otherwise they will be flipping around looking for the diagram rather than listening.
• Use a laser pointer or other device that helps students to see what part of a slide you are referring to.  Even color blind students should be able to differentiate the bright spot moving around on the screen.
• When going over a fill in chart, first introduce it and help students to understand what type of answers you are looking for in each column.  It might be overly apparent to you, but you would be surprised how many students are thinking, “WTF”.  As you cover the material, update table slides with the correct answers at every step.  This enables students that did not hear the correct answer clearly or who thought they got it right, to have an “ah, ha” moment.  It also ensures students are studying the correct information.

Dr. Knopp demonstrates the selective permeability of a cell membrane.

Use learning devices

• Mnemonics. Use them!  Who can forget the color spectrum of a rainbow, ROYGBIV? At NCSU, Dr. Knopp is quacked up about mnemonics and uses them to help students memorize a variety of biochemistry concepts including the structure of glucose.
• Use hands on techniques and demonstrations.  Dr. Emigh gave groups of students two pieces of twine and a pencil to demonstrate DNA unraveling for transcription. My physics instructor (wish I remember his name, because he was awesome) got up on his laboratory desk to demonstrate aspects of gravity and brought in apparatus to demonstrate different electricity concepts.  These techniques not only make the material easier to understand by giving a visual to relate to, the techniques keep the class interesting.
• Relate the topic to a real life topic students are likely to have experienced or already are familiar with.
• Find videos on the Internet that demonstrate difficult concepts.
• Attach concepts to song lyrics.  If students can remember the jingle, they will not forget the concept that goes with it.
• Act out or perform visualizations.
• In The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Jonathan Spence talks about associating items you want to memorize to objects within a fictitious room within a fictitious palace.  Attach concepts to something ridiculous, more memorable or easier to recall.

Create orderliness and congruency

• Whether in lecture or in notebooks and slides, ensure processes flow from beginning to end and do not skip around.
• Consider layout and usability of notebooks and slides. Highlight key terms in material, so they don’t get lost in the jumble.
• When using acronyms for the first time, spell the entire word out and bold type it, so it is easy to find later for reference.
• If you use slides for your presentation, provide a copy to students for download prior to class.  This will keep them from flipping through textbooks or class notebooks looking for the related material.  If a class notebook is provided, this is an ideal place to put in the slide material, so long as it is orderly and students don’t have to keep flipping back and forth to locate what is being covered.
• When using handouts, notebooks or slides, it is very helpful to have the text and image it describes on the same page.  Flipping pages gives room for confusion and loss of information.
• When transitioning topics, make a clear statement “Now let’s talk about …”  This will give clue to the students that something new is about to be covered and it is not associated with the proceeding material.
• Part of orderliness is having all the complete steps.  With math and chemistry in particular, it is important to show all the steps.  Showing students how two molecules interact, giving an intermediate and then what happens next to give the product adds reasoning to the process.  It is easier to deduce an end results, following steps that make sense than to memorize something with no rhyme or reason.

Enunciate

• Not everyone hears with the same capability.  Additionally, students with social phobia, agoraphobia, enochlophobia, etc … are likely to be found in the back of the classroom or in quick exit seats along the aisles instead of up front in easy listening positions.  Help them out, by speaking loudly and clearly.
• When you enunciate, you also tend to have better lip movement, making it easier for individuals that hear better reading lips to understand you.  Instructors with beards and mustaches particularly need to be aware of this.

Optimize classroom environment

• Minimize distraction from outside sources
• Good air flow is important.  If the air in the classroom is stagnant and warm, even the most interesting instructor is going to find students taking a snooze and having difficulty giving their undivided attention.
• Be alive and enjoy what you are teaching. If you are not enjoying the material you are covering, it shows and is also less interesting to the student.  Excitement is energy.  Energy is transferable!
• Refrain from randomly calling on students who are not volunteering to give answers.  This practice causes panic for some students and the student will spend class time worrying about being called out and making a fool out of him or herself instead of giving his or her undivided attention.
• Create a safe environment to learn.  If you cut students up or give negative feedback when they volunteer to answer, students are not going to want to answer.  Use positive feedback and assist them with clues to get the correct answer, but never make a fool out of the student.  If a student does not understand something, s(he) is not stupid, s(he) simply did not pick the information up in the format it was previously presented.  Try something else to help the student learn.
• Stadium seating works.  Nobody wants to look at the back of someone else’s head.  If you have an opportunity to select a classroom with stadium seating, pick it. That way, students will be looking at you.

Have good cred

• Know your stuff. Know more on the topic being covered in class, so students that want to ask detailed questions can get detailed answers.
• If you don’t know something, say you don’t recall and you’ll have to look it up and get back to the student.  Spitting out information or random numbers that don’t match up with slides, notebook or textbook information reduces your credibility.

What makes learning easier for you?  What tactics have you seen instructors use that are effective? What are some of your favorite mnemonics?