Monthly Archives: January 2013

from ProfHacker: “Multiple Choice Exam Theory (Just In Time For The New Term)”

from ProfHacker: “Multiple Choice Exam Theory (Just In Time For The New Term)”

For those of us interested in what Sterne calls “large lecture pedagogy,” this post from ProfHacker covers some of the best practices for large sections in humanities classrooms that can mitigate some of the potential shortcomings of the multiple-choice test.  The comment on clickers resonates with my experiences as a student and an instructor, but I have seen them used in more illuminating ways from time to time.  Ultimately, what may be the biggest challenge related to the multiple-choice format of assessment is the fact that the instructor cannot fully control the way in which students approach the exam–through the lens of their previous experiences with this kind of assessment.  The genre of the ‘test’  can encourage students to draw upon either positive or negative habits of thought developed in their earlier educational experiences.

Advertisement

Social Media and the Classroom

Social Media and the Classroom

From Forbes magazine – an instructor at Temple University talks about using social media in the classroom as a way of engaging students twice with the same material. While the article offers some great starting points and can provoke some useful discussion among the technophiles and curmudgeons, I think that Shapiro might have emphasizes more strongly the underlying point that harnessing these existing technologies means educating students about the potential benefits and limitations of these technologies.  He points to this explicitly when talking about Twitter, but changes to the traditional curriculum–such as hybrid or online courses–means asking students to think critically about their existing use of technology and meeting them at widely varying levels of familiarity and technological fluency.

Pomodoro Productivity

Towards the end of last year, one of my colleagues (also an ABD literature student) pointed me towards the ‘pomodoro’ method of increasing productivity. The time management idea apparently comes from a book by Francesco Cirillo, and the idea is that you take about five minutes off for every 25 that you work on the task in order to keep your mind and focus fresh for the task at hand. Part of what made this stand out to me is my interest in trying to avoid a repetitive stress injury while writing my dissertation since the effects of the injury would be present for years to come. Coupled with concentrated efforts to reduce multitasking and distractions, the benefits of this kind of time management have become almost cliché among graduate students trying to finish their dissertations or theses. Having found it to be useful in my own work, I have begun to question why our time management goals differ so dramatically from the way in which we ordinarily structure classroom time.

Given this fact, what does this knowledge and these practices imply about the way in which teachers traditionally order their classrooms? From my experience, the conventional knowledge in many institutions of higher education is that variety and changing teaching methods (group and individual work, lecture and discussion, reflection and recall) can help students maintain focus, but is there too little room for downtime or breaks? Are students in 3-hour evening classes, for instance, better served by an intricate and wholly uninterrupted class that allows them to cover the maximum amount of material, or would they be able to engage with the material more with structured time that permits them to relax or pause their focus during the class period? Perhaps it is this need for this kind of structuring that makes integrating downtime in the classroom so difficult, as it is easy for students to ‘lose focus’ when instructors provide down time or early dismissals without the structure needed to make the downtime productive in the long run. How might one assess downtime and its purpose, student focus in a way that permits a variety of learning styles and differences?

-Donovan Tann