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ing able to synthesize knowledge and ideas in new ways, and, at the most sophisticated level, being able to use learning to evaluate opinions and ideas and make judgments based on evidence and objective criteria.
Here are some of the main techniques Wenderoth uses.
Transparency. At the outset, Wenderoth teaches her students about the testing effect, the principle of desirable diffi culties, and the perils of “illusions of knowing.” She promises to make her instructional philosophy transparent and to model these principles in class. As she explained to us recently, “The whole idea of the testing effect is that you learn more by testing yourself than by rereading. Well, it’s very hard to get students to do that because they’ve been trained for so long to keep reading and reading the book.”6
I can’t tell you how many times the students come to me and they show me their textbook and it’s highlighted in four different colors. I say to them, “I can tell you have done a lot of work and that you really want to succeed in this class because you have blue and yellow and orange and green highlighter on your book.” And then I have to try to tell them that any more time spent on this after the fi rst time was a waste. They’re, like, “How is that possible?” I say, “What you have to do is, you read a little bit and then you have to test yourself,” but they don’t quite know how to do that.
So I model it in class for them. Every fi ve minutes or so I throw out a question on the material we just talked about, and I can see them start to look through their notes. I say,
“Stop. Do not look at your notes. Just take a minute to think about it yourself.” I tell them our brains are like a forest, and your memory is in there somewhere. You’re here, and the memory is over there. The more times you make a path to that
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memory, the better the path is, so that the next time you need the memory, it’s going to be easier to fi nd it. But as soon as you get your notes out, you have short- circuited the path. You are not exploring for the path anymore, someone has told you the way.
At other times, Wenderoth will pose a question to the class and ask them to think about it. She has students write three possible answers on the whiteboard up front and then vote on which answer they think is correct by raising the number of fi ngers that corresponds with the answer on the board. She’ll instruct students to fi nd somebody with fi ngers “different from yours and talk to them and fi gure out who has the correct answer.”
Wenderoth gives her students a new way to think about learning, and she gives them a new vocabulary for describing setbacks. When students trip over an exam question, they’ll commonly accuse the test of containing trick questions. When the student blames the test, she says, it’s not a good meeting ground for solving the problem. But now, students come to see her after a disappointing exam and say, “I have the illusion of knowing. How do I get better?” That’s a problem Wenderoth can help with.
Testing groups. Wenderoth has transformed class “study groups” into “testing groups.” In a study group, the person who knows the most talks and the others listen. The emphasis is on memorizing things. However, in a testing group, they all wrestle with a question together, without opening the textbook. “Everybody has bits of information, and you talk with your colleagues and fi gure it out.” The emphasis is on exploration and understanding.
Wenderoth will ask students in a testing group what ideas they don’t feel really clear on. Then she’ll send one student to
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the whiteboard to try to explain the concept. As the student struggles, perhaps putting up the pieces of the answer she knows, the rest of the group are instructed to test her by asking questions whose answers will lead her to the larger concept. Throughout, all textbooks remain closed.
Free recall. Wenderoth assigns her students to spend ten minutes at the end of each day sitting with a blank piece of paper on which to write everything they can remember from class. They must sit for ten minutes. She warns that it will be uncomfortable, they will run out of ideas after two minutes, but they must stick it out. At the end of ten minutes, they’re to go to their class notes and fi nd out what they remembered and what they forgot, and to focus on the material they forgot. What they glean from this exercise guides their notes and questions for the next class. Wenderoth fi nds that the free recall exercise helps students pull learning forward and develop a more complex understanding of how the material interrelates.
Summary sheets. Every Monday, Wenderoth’s students are required to turn in a single sheet of certain dimensions on which they have illustrated the prior week’s material in drawings annotated with key ideas, arrows, and graphs.
She’s teaching physiology, which is about how things work, so the summaries take on the form of large cartoons dense with callouts, blowups, directional arrows, and the like. The sheets help her students synthesize a week’s information, thinking through how systems are connected: “This is causing this, which causes this, which feeds back on those. We use a lot of arrows in physiology. The students can work with each other, I don’t care. The sheet they bring in just has to be their own.”
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Learning paragraphs. From time to time, on a Friday, if she doesn’t feel she’s overburdening them, Wenderoth will assign students to write low- stakes “learning paragraphs” for which she poses a question and asks students to prepare a fi ve- or six- sentence response. A question might be “How is the GI tract like the respiratory system?” Or “You just got your tests back; what would you do differently next time?” The point is to stimulate retrieval and refl ection and to capture a week’s learning before it is lost to the countless other concerns and diversions of college life. “What I found over the years is, if I don’t do anything before the test, they don’t do anything until the day before the test.” The learning paragraphs also give her science majors practice in writing a passage of clear prose. She reads through the responses and makes a point to comment on them in class so that students know they’re being read.
Bloom’s taxonomy of learning. To remove some of the abstraction from Bloom’s taxonomy, Wenderoth has translated her class material into the different levels of the taxonomy on an answer key to her tests. That is, for any given question, she provides a different answer for each level of the taxonomy: one that refl ects learning at the level of knowledge, a more thorough answer that refl ects understanding, a yet more complex answer that refl ects analysis, and so on. When students get their tests back, they also receive the answer key and are asked to identify where their answers fell on the taxonomy and to think about what they need to know in order to respond at a higher level of learning.
Closing the achievement gap in the sciences. Wenderoth and her colleagues have experimented with class structure and the principles of active learning to help close the achievement gap in the sciences. Poorly prepared students seldom survive entry-
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level science courses. As a result, even students whose interests and aptitudes might lead them to successful science careers never get through the door. For what ever reason, these students do not have a history from high school or family life of learning how to succeed in these highly challenging academic settings.
“For most of us who have found our way in the sciences,”
Wenderoth says, “any time we fell, there was somebody around to help us up, or to say, ‘This is how you get up.’ You were taught that when things don’t go well, you keep working anyway. You persevere.”
In their experiments, Wenderoth and her colleagues have compared the results of “low- structure” classes (traditional lecturing and high- stakes midterm and fi nal exams) with “high-structure” classes (daily and weekly low- stakes exercises to provide constant practice in the analytical skills necessary to do well on exams). They also teach students the importance of having a “growth mindset” (see the work of Carol Dweck, discussed in Chapter 7)— that is, that learning is hard work and that struggle increases intellectual abilities.
The results? High- structure classes in a gateway biology course signifi cantly reduced student failure rates compared to low- structure classes— narrowing the gap between poorly prepared students and their better prepared peers while at the same time showing exam results at higher levels on Bloom’s taxonomy. Moreover, it’s not just whether the student completes the practice exercises that matters. In the classes where exercises count toward the course grade, even at very low stakes, students achieve higher success over the course of the term compared to students in classes where the exercises are the same but carry no consequences for the grade.
“We talk to the students about how these are the habits of mind,” Wenderoth says. “This is the discipline that you have to
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have in order to succeed in the sciences. They’ve never thought about that, that every discipline has a culture. We teach them to think like the professionals they want to become. And when they fall, we show them how to get up again.”7
Michael D. Matthews, Psychology Professor,U.S. Military Academy at West Point The pedagogical philosophy at West Point is founded on an instructional system called the Thayer method, developed almost two hundred years ago by an early superintendent of the academy named Sylvanus Thayer. The method provides very specifi c learning objectives for every course, puts the responsibility for meeting those objectives on the student, and incorporates quizzing and recitation in every class meeting.
Students’ grades at the academy rest on three pillars of training: academic, military, and physical. Mike Matthews, a professor of engineering psychology at the academy, says the load on students is enormous, greater than the hours available to them. In order to survive at the academy, West Point cadets must develop an ability to zero in on what’s essential and let the rest fall by the wayside. “This is about having very high expectations across multiple dimensions and keeping them real busy,” Matthews, says. In fact, as stunning as it sounds, Matthews will tell a student, “If you’ve read every word of this chapter, you’re not being very effi cient.” The point is not to “slide your eyes over the words.” You start with questions, and you read for answers.8
There’s little or no lecturing in Matthews’s courses. Class opens with a quiz on the learning objectives from the assigned reading. From there, on many days, students “take to the boards.” The classrooms have slate on all four walls, and a group of students are sent to each blackboard to collaborate
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on answering a question given by the professor. These are higher- order questions than are given in the daily quiz, requiring the students to integrate ideas from the reading and apply them at a conceptual level. It’s a form of retrieval practice, generation, and peer instruction. One student is selected from each group to give a recitation to the class explaining how the group has answered the question, and then the group’s work is critiqued. All class meetings focus on constructs, not specifi c facts, and on the days the students do not take to the boards, they are engaged in other forms of exercise, demonstration, or group work aimed at understanding and articulat-ing the larger concepts underlying the matter at hand.
Clear learning objectives prior to each class, coupled with daily quizzing and active problem solving with feedback, keep students focused, awake, and working hard.
One of the most important skills taught at West Point is something learned outside the classroom: how to shoot an azimuth. It’s a skill used for keeping your bearings in unfamiliar territory. You climb a tree or a height of land and sight a distant landmark in the direction you’re headed. Compass in hand, you note how many degrees your landmark lies off of due north. Then you descend into the bush and keep working your way in that direction. Periodically, you pause to shoot an azimuth and make sure you’re on course. Quizzing is a way of shooting an azimuth in the classroom: are you gaining the mastery you need to get where you’re trying to go?
Matthews has had the privilege of seeing two of his students win Rhodes Scholarships. The most recent was Cadet Kiley Hunkler (now Second Lieutenant Hunkler). Hunkler will be spending the next two years at Oxford University, and then matriculating at Johns Hopkins Medical School. It was Hunkler who spoke to us of shooting an azimuth. “Everything at the academy is about self- responsibility, taking own ership for
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