Category: Effective teaching and learning strategies

Articles that support undergraduates in their learning and community building journey

Helping Students Practice Knowledge Transfer

Celia Ann Evans and Rafael Dilone on

 

Being able to apply information that is learned in one context to solve problems in another context, is known as ‘transfer’.  Many would argue that being able to transfer concepts and knowledge to a new context is the true test of learning.  We agree!

 

“A central and enduring goal of education is to provide learning experiences that are useful beyond the specific conditions of initial learning.”

(Lobato, 2006, in Nokes-Malach and Richey 2015)

It turns out that researchers have been arguing over, and studying, both content and context in which learning transfer fails or succeeds since the very early 1900s. Nokes-Malach and Richey (2015), summarize the arguments, research, and outcomes in this complex literature. For our purpose of sharing practices that can make transfer more likely, we will focus on the outcomes. To illustrate just a bit about the complexity of this topic, transfer of knowledge can be: ‘near’ (executing learned procedures), ‘intermediate’ (adapting learned procedures), and ‘far’ transfer (relating concepts to each other and to new problems with different features).

Examples will be discipline specific. Here are examples of where transfer of knowledge is required in a civil engineering design course:

Basic Knowledge: Structural Analysis (Beam). Using the principles of statics and mechanics of materials, students learn to determine the shear force, bending moment, and deflection along the length of the beam.
Near transfer: Structural Analysis (Frame). Students are asked to analyze a structural frame, such as a door frame. The frame consists of interconnected beams and columns, subjected to various loads and boundary conditions.
  • In the frame analysis, there is a more complex structural system with multiple members connected at joints. This requires additional considerations and analysis techniques (frame stability, joint behavior, and load distribution among members).
Intermediate transfer: Truss Analysis. This problem involves the analysis of a truss structure. The truss consists of interconnected members subjected to external loads.
  • The new approach must be adapted to account for the unique characteristics of truss structures (i.e. axial forces in the members).
Far transfer: Foundation Design: This example involves the design of a  structural foundation. The structure has specific requirements for load-bearing capacity, settlement, and stability
  • Designing a foundation system that interacts with the underlying soil and supports the entire structure involves applying principles from different areas of civil engineering, such as geotechnical engineering and foundation design, which may not have been directly addressed in the analysis of a beam.

These levels of transfer require different skills and likely help explain the variety of learning outcomes in the transfer literature. Applying, adapting, comparing and contrasting, and evaluating are (more or less) progressively more challenging cognitive tasks (think ‘Blooms taxonomy’, Agarwal, 2018). These different levels can be promoted using different learning strategies.

If transfer of knowledge is an expectation and it requires critical thinking skills, this should be transparent in the learning objectives for the course and/or assignment. Rather than teaching or practicing these skills, it may be that students are expected to already have these skills. Some likely do; others do not and need structured practice.  This is a question of equity. Because  students are transitioning to college courses from a variety of educational experiences, not all have been challenged to critically think and transfer complicated knowledge to a new context. This does not mean they are unable to learn how. If we make assumptions about students’ critical thinking skills, we perpetuate an inequitable situation in our classrooms and institutions.

Higher level critical thinking skills needed for information transfer include the ability to analyze, compare contrast, link concepts, and evaluate approaches. These skills can be practiced and scaffolded so that students who have a grasp on content in the context it was taught can know how to use that information in a new context.

A review by Hadjian (2019), reported that transfer could occur at any stage of learning and practices that might be effective to support students include scaffolding the learning, students interacting, reflecting and practicing assessment in a low stakes learning environment.
A summary of some practices to support learning of transfer skills include:
  • Identifying ‘knowledge transfer’ as an expected learning outcome.
  • Scaffolding complex problems by helping students build on the basic information using metacognitive questions and reflection.
  • Comparing and contrasting the simple questions with more complex questions.
  • Provide relevant real-world problems for students to practice and collaborate on.
  • One key here is inviting students – in groups – to practice and discuss a progression of problems from one context to another.

This is an easy way to help our students be more successful in their learning.  Happy teaching and learning. Happy transferring!!

 

Recognizing and Requesting Transparency in the College Classroom

Celia Ann Evans on

Black boxes are useful in a model system or the research we do as we work to understand the world.  In those cases, the ‘unknowns’ are exciting and they represent what we are working to ‘know’.  However, when it comes to what is expected of you as a learner in your classes, there should NOT be black boxes.  Transparency is paramount for equitable, inclusive learning.

This post is intended to share materials and ideas for students to recognize transparency or lack of it, so that they can ask the right questions of their instructors and have those expectations clarified so that they have the best chance to be successful.  The framework of transparency is not intended to be  unidirectional – simply clarifying the information shared from faculty to student- but also a conversation where clarity and communication are maintained through a regular feedback cycle about how well it is working and what might be made even more clear.

What is transparency in educational settings and why does it matter?

The basic concept is simple. Transparency in the classroom means that the purpose, the task, and the criteria (to be successful) must be clear to the learners. 

Probably the most comprehensive set of materials on transparency in higher education comes from the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) Higher Ed. body of work inspired and directed by Dr. Mary-Ann Winkelmes. Many of the resources discussed or linked here are from that work in some way or another.

Most of the research and resources regarding transparency are aimed at teachers who are looking for examples and templates to increase transparency in their course materials.  The number of these types of resources is growing, which means change is happening!  As with most of the evidence-supported practices that make learning inclusive and effective, there is still work to do.  In the meantime, learners need some tools.

The rules and criteria that result in ‘success’ in a particular course (or assignment) are determined by the instructor.  It follows that, if those expectations and criteria are inadvertently withheld from the students (unless students can intuit specific expectations and can do it correctly – and some can) a barrier to learning and to meeting those expectations is established. 

You may be wondering how information that allows students to be successful can be ‘inadvertently’ withheld. Easily.  As humans, without being intentional and reflective about the varied realities of others, we often operate based on our own past experiences, our own understandings of the world, and our own ‘entry points’ into ideas and tasks. Ultimately, we make assumptions.  In an educational setting where we are working to develop a diverse group of learners and professionals, our assumptions can create biases and a very unequal playing field for students with different past experiences and understandings. Most often if we experience lack of transparency as learners, instructors are sharing what they experienced and haven’t taken or had the time to consider the assumptions they are making when they share expectations, use language, and/or expect certain outcomes on assignments.

How to recognize Transparency

Read your Syllabus and your assignments.  Your syllabus is effectively your learning contract with the course, and the course’s learning contract with you.  It takes time to develop these, even more time to make them transparent and welcoming. Each assignment should also be transparent so that students have clear understanding of what is expected of them to do well.  Associated with transparency in assignments is the related transparency in assessment.  Rubrics are the best ‘tools’ to help a student know what is required and valued in any assignment and how they will be graded. These can also lack detail and transparency. At their best, they are sufficiently detailed and concise so that a student can use the criteria to pre-check their work. At worst, rubrics are a great starting point for a more detailed discussion about expectations. Be sure you do the work of reading what has been shared so that you can ask necessary, specific and respectful questions that will allow you to meet instructor expectations.

This link will help students look for the key indicators of transparency in a syllabus/assignment:

  • the purpose (why are we doing this, learning outcomes objectives)
  • the task (what are we doing specifically)
  • the criteria – (what specifics are required to be successful)

How to ask for transparency, if it is lacking

Simply asking an instructor to provide a more transparent syllabus or assignment could require some clarification on your part as to what it is you mean. So what can a student do to recognize when transparency is missing and ask valuable clarifying questions?

Again, read your syllabus and your assignments. Look for purpose, tasks, and criteria. Read for unfamiliar terms or phrases. Remember, the language and expectations may not be familiar to you for a host of reasons, for which you are not to blame!  After you have paid careful attention to the materials provided, go to office hours, ask in class when opportunities arise, or reach out after class to the instructor, TAs, or other members of the teaching staff.

  • Ask how the assignment connects specifically to the content and learning outcomes objectives
  • Ask for examples of good work
  • Ask for rubrics with detailed criteria
  • Ask for definition of any terms used in the syllabus or on an assignment with which you are unfamiliar

In the case where you are having difficulty getting the answers you feel you need, you can use the metacognitive cycle to help you fill in what you can until you get more answers.

    • Find a diverse group of peers to work with.  Discuss and write what you collectively believe are the purpose, the task and the criteria.  More ‘heads/persectives’ will represent different experiences and possibly include someone who can better intuit or understand (via their experiences) what is really expected.  Reflect on what you are being expected to learn in the context of what has been happening in class. Here is a link to a previous Edublog with support for turning problem sets into study sessions using ‘metacognition’ (thinking about your learning process) that could help.

The bottom line is: we may be quite a distance from perfect transparency in our higher education classrooms, and slowly things are changing. All learners deserve an equitable opportunity to be successful, regardless of diversity of experience and cultural expectations. We are richer for our diversity. Lack of transparency is typically an oversight, and therefore calling respectful attention to it will help instructors recognize oversights and will benefit individual learners now and in the future.

Do well on finals AND retain knowledge: Strategies for short and long-term success

Celia Ann Evans on

image of students in traditional lecture room taking an exam

Many of us have experienced that doing well on an exam, may not mean all that information we used to successfully answer the questions on the test is retained. Both remembering and forgetting are physiological processes likely driven by the need to prioritize bits of the massive amount of information to which we are exposed. While the science  and biology of forgetting is an emerging and large part of the story that dictates what information ends up in our long, long-term memory, this post will focus on ‘remembering’  and practices that are shown to support it.

As finals time approaches in colleges and universities, there is still some time to structure study practices so that we not only remember and can use information from early in the semester and perform well on the final assessment, but that we are also more likely to take that remembered information (learning) forward so that it can be recalled and used long into the future. Program curricula are structured with the expectation of a high degree of pre-requisite learning from previous courses. So, practices that help to reinforce the neurological pathways that allow us to store and access information, not only support success on the final exams in the  short-term, but also support more effective building of disciplinary knowledge throughout our chosen programs. The implications of these long-term effects of effective study deserve more consideration as motivations for adopting the strategies shared here.

What are the basic stages of memory?

Memory is more complex than this but here are the basics:

Simple memory diagram
https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/8-1-memories-as-types-and-stages/
Sensory memory – subconsciously gathers information from the senses (allows time for your brain to process incoming information from the senses (retention is generally less than 1 second)
Short-term memory – if a sensation (visual, auditory, tactile) is attended to, it can move into this version of memory.  Without further attention, this will be lost within seconds.
Long-term memory – Storage of information for longer time periods (retention is hours, days, months or years)

For learning to be effective, we want the information that we hope to use into the future to be transformed into memory, and specifically the kind that will be available to us for a long time.  There are some practices that can be used to improve the likelihood of taking information with you into the future, for example, into a course for which this information is pre-requisite! These practices can be incorporated into course and assignment design by instructors, and they can be incorporated into personal study habits.

What can you do to make learning stick?

Here we summarize  a set of study practices to promote long-term memory.

Retrieval Practice –  referred to as ‘free recall’,  ‘blank page testing’ or ‘brain dumps’. This practice simply entails writing down all you can remember associated with a particular topic or learning objective. Retrieval is particularly valuable as a way of finding out what you know and what you don’t know well enough… yet. The focus and cognitive struggle to pull those memories to the forefront is the practice that helps create those neurological changes that reinforce pathways in the brain to keep information accessible for longer time.

Collaborative learning  – has been shown to improve learning outcomes because of the opportunity to share knowledge, fill in blanks for each other, reflect and share strategies and perspectives among learners. After some individual retrieval time, compare and discuss your individual sets of information with other learners, remind each other of ideas that may have been missed by making a collaborative braindump. Then individually and collectively, identify the most challenging pieces of the topic so they can be the focus of more practice. While the research on the value of collaborative recall is complex and can be very dependent on context and structure of the collaboration, according to a meta-analysis on the topic by Marion and Thorley, 2016:

“Generally, collaborative remembering tends to benefit later individual retrieval.”

When collaborating in study groups, intersperse opportunities to recall and reflect on information and process individually, with small-group collaboration to fill in knowledge gaps, teach and quiz each other, and work through and discuss the process in problem solving. End each session with a reflection on what you learned, what you know, and where you need to continue to work.  This reflection requires retrieval of the information immediately after learning it and thus can improve long-term remembering

Spacing and mixing-up (interleaving) topics for Retrieval Practice 

Two more critical concepts related to your retrieval of information and other active approaches to working with material during study are interleaving and retrieval spacing. 

Interleaving is simply the idea of devoting short periods of focused, active time (not simply re-reading notes, etc) on one subject and then switching to another, or to several topics, and then, after a break, returning to the first and cycling through again. This can be done during a 3 hour study session where you alternate 35-45 minute chunks of working on 3 different topics (with short breaks between), to designing a weekly schedule for a set of 5 different topics spread across daily study sessions and re-organized and revisited several times across a week. As is common with active and collaborative learning strategies, even though assessments show students benefit from these practices, students find it difficult and thus do not ‘feel’ that it is working.  Unfortunately, the bit of extra cognitive struggle required to shift gears and retrieve information multiple times, is the very reason it works. Treading the same path multiple times across a study session, a week, and a semester, is what leaves the traces in our brains that allow us to find our way back to that knowledge over time.

“Over 8 weeks, students in two lecture sections of a university-level introductory physics course completed thrice-weekly homework assignments, each containing problems that were interleaved (i.e., alternating topics) or conventionally arranged (i.e., one topic practiced at a time). On two surprise criterial tests containing novel and more challenging problems, students recalled more relevant information and more frequently produced correct solutions after having engaged in interleaved practice (with observed median improvements of 50% on test 1 and 125% on test 2). Despite benefiting more from interleaved practice, students tended to rate the technique as more difficult and incorrectly believed that they learned less from it.”

Samani and Pan, 2021

Here is a schematic representing the more effective ‘interleaved practice’ with the more common ‘blocked practice’ schedule

https://schoolhabits.com/study-techniques-how-to-use-interleaved-practice-to-study/

Spacing of retrieval practice refers to the amount of time between revisiting a topic and working with it for a 2nd, 3rd and even 4th time before an exam. A really thorough and accessible resource for implementing spaced retrievel from the University of Iowa concludes that  the time between retrieving and working with the same information matters much less than making sure it happens over time before the time of the assessment.  A good rule of thumb is ‘touching’ the material 3-5 times  over a week, several weeks, or even the period of a full semester is beneficial to retention of knowledge.

It is the time of year where the focus of learning moves toward being successful on those cumulative final exams in each course.  There is still time to implement these practices on your own and to share them with like-minded collaborators.  In the long-run, these strategies will allow students to be better prepared to move through a scaffolded curriculum in a disciplinary program, get the most out of individual courses, and lay the groundwork of concepts and knowledge that will make them more prepared to build on the next layer of learning in future courses or in chosen pathways beyond an undergraduate education.

Hope these help!  Finish Strong!