“Instruction is the core of any developmental education strategy,” Thomas Bailey and Shanna Smith Jaggars write in “When College Students Start Behind.” The report on underprepared students is the fifth installment of The Century Foundation’s ongoing College Completion Series.

Bailey, founding director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and Jaggars, director of Student Success Research for the Office of Distance Education and E-Learning at The Ohio State University, note that improving instruction is one of four key areas of reform for students coming to college less ready for the demands of the coursework than their peers. The authors support this assertion through an exploration of instructional programs that have produced promising results.

CUNY Start math classrooms, for instance, include real-world curricula that emphasize strong connections between coursework and students’ interests. Another example, the California Acceleration Project, encourages faculty to forge positive relationships with students and use class time for student-centered learning activities, among other techniques.

The report serves to prompt a broader discussion on how effective instruction can help underprepared students learn how to succeed in a college-level environment. To complement and build on the work of Bailey and Jaggars, ACUE’s teaching and learning experts present a list of specific research-based classroom techniques shown to help all students, and in particular underprepared students.

1. Use early, ungraded assignments to check students’ level of readiness.

Early in the term, an ungraded assignment can provide relevant information about your new students’ readiness and help you tweak your course plans. For example, ask students to write a few paragraphs on what they hope to learn in your class and give them a reading with accompanying questions. Or give a short quiz that measures math skills needed to begin work in your class (Gabriel, 2008).

2. Share exemplars of work products for your class.

Provide students with exemplars of papers, projects and presentations from prior years’ students. When possible, share examples that received a range of grades. Offering students exemplars to more clearly understand your expectations for an assignment makes it more likely that they will put in the time and effort required to meet those expectations (McGuire & McGuire, 2015).

3. Take time to learn about, and reflect on, your students’ goals.

Students not only enter college with differing kinds of knowledge and experience. They also enter with varying degrees of motivation to learn. Expert Linda Nilson explains the differences:

Bailey and Jaggars (2016) recommend tying course concepts to student interests, which any instructor can do. For example, you might use a one-minute paper exercise, asking students to answer questions like “What are your life goals and career aspirations?” and “How does this course help you pursue these goals—in ways big or small?”

Explicit connections between your course and your students’ future careers and aspirations are a particularly strong motivator (Nilson, 2010). Underprepared students are often unfamiliar with the skills that might be required in their future lives and careers, and showing them the relevance and significance of your subject will increase their motivation to learn about it.

4. Encourage student-to-student support

Early in the semester, bring in students from past years for a panel early in the semester to share what helped them be successful. You might ask questions such as these: How many hours each week did you spend studying and doing homework? How did you approach the readings? How did you prepare for exams? (S. D. Brookfield, personal communication, January 25, 2016). Hearing from a peer about what it takes to be successful can be more effective than the same message coming from the instructor.

 5. Provide opportunities to use feedback to improve their performance.

Murphy and Destin (2016) call for “wise feedback” in Part Three of the College Completion Series. Dr. Thomas Angelo explains what exactly that means:

Offer specific and timely feedback—especially early in the term—so that students have the information and opportunity to make improvements. Having students rework an assignment— using your feedback to guide them— can be a valuable learning experience and provide the additional time and practice they need. This emphasizes the process of learning, promoting what Dweck (2006) calls a “growth mindset,” or the understanding that you learn more and become smarter through effort and practice.

Add to the conversation by adding your comment. What ideas and practices have you heard about or used that work?  

References

Bailey, T., & Jaggars, S. S. (2016, June 2). When college students start behind (College Completion Series: Part Five). New York, NY: The Century Foundation. Retrieved from https://tcf.org/content/report/college-students-start-behind

Downing, S. (2011). On course. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. How we can learn to fulfill our potential. New York, NY: Random House.

Gabriel, K. F. (2008). Teaching unprepared students: Strategies for promoting success and retention in higher education. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

McGuire, S. Y., & McGuire, S. (2015). Teach students how to learn: Strategies you can incorporate into any course to improve student metacognition, study skills, and motivation. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Murphy, M., & Destin, M. (2016, May 18). Promoting inclusion and identity safety to support college success(College Completion Series: Part Three). New York, NY: The Century Foundation. Retrieved from https://tcf.org/content/report/promoting-inclusion-identity-safety-support-college-success

Nilson, L. B. (2010). Teaching at its best (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

The latest discoveries in cognition and the learning sciences show that learning is not a passive process. In order to learn, the brain can’t just receive information—it must processes it in a meaningful way.

One of our partners, the University of Arizona, has embraced that “active learning” concept in a big way. Through its Collaborative Learning Spaces Project, the Tucson campus is transforming large classroom environments to be less centered around traditional lectures and more focused on techniques and strategies that are proven to increase student engagement and learning.

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Students learn on different timelines and from different sources, which has increased the focus on individual learning styles. The potential for such a wide variety of styles can leave instructors feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of creating unique learning experiences for every student in their classrooms.

But fundamentally, human brains learn in similar ways, a point that Derek Bruff emphasized in an interview with ACUE last month.

“Our brains are wired to work verbally and visually, and when those two input streams are working together, we learn better,” said Bruff, who is director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching. “We are, in fact, all verbal and visual learners.”

Bruff, who is also a senior lecturer in Vanderbilt’s Department of Mathematics, discussed a range of teaching topics for ACUE’s Course in Effective Teaching Practices. One of those topics included the use of concept maps and visualization strategies to support student learning.

For decades, lecture-style teaching has catered to the notion that college students learn best as verbal learners. But there are limitations to what students can learn solely from hearing words and reading text, especially when it comes to making connections between key concepts. That’s where concept maps, concept circles, flowcharts, and other visualization tools in the classroom come in.

Concept circles, for example, help people understand the intricacies of relationships by seeing them spatially. To the left, a concept circle shows the different ingredients that distinguish the many different coffee-based drinks available at a typical coffee shop.

“That’s the point of concept maps and visual tools,” Bruff said. “We may not think of ourselves as visual learners—we may have to work a little harder to develop some of our visual learning skills and vocabulary—but this is actually a way to reach all students.” Bruff added an important caveat: people with vision or hearing impairments are limited in learning those functions.

Members of the ACUE Community had a chance to ask Bruff questions, too. They asked about introducing concept maps to new students and how to integrate them into lessons for students whose first language isn’t English, and they asked about the long-term career benefits of visual learning skills.

Read more here from ACUE’s interview with Bruff, which has been edited and condensed for clarity:

For students who are not well versed in concept maps, what does an instructor need to do prior to assigning them the task of creating a concept map? (NJ Professor)

It’s often helpful to supply students with an example first, or have them create a concept map on a topic that’s not related to course material.

For example, how do you think about making sandwiches? The ingredients, the process? You could create a fairly simple concept map that illustrates the idea and its nodes and connections.

Another approach is to actually give students the concepts.

You could say “Here are the twelve things that need to be in the concept map. You decide where they go.”

You could put the more important concepts at the top of the page and the less important ones at the bottom, or allow students to arrange them and label the relationships, and you could give them a piece to start with.

Experts structure their knowledge differently than novices do. How do you use concepts to help students, or novices, to think more like experts or to see how others structure their knowledge differently? (UNC-CH Professor)

Concept maps can be a nice tool to help students start with their knowledge of a discipline and to try to enhance and build upon that.

So you might have students start to create a concept map, then have them compare it to a peer’s concept map. Odds are that student two has identified a slightly different set of concepts or has seen a few relationships that student one didn’t identify. By comparing and contrasting, even peer to peer, students can start to develop and enhance their own concept maps.

Then, as the expert in the discipline, you show them your concept map. Have them identify what they missed. If you want to go a little further, you might have a colleague create another concept map using that same material, showing that two experts also are generally going to have slightly different concept maps. That compare-and-contrast can be interesting for students to see. Often students think that there is a right answer to everything, that you’re the expert and you’ve got all the knowledge and they have to do what you’re doing. But our fields usually aren’t so cut and dry.

Some concept mapping software forces all of the concepts to branch out like a tree and doesn’t allow more netlike joins. Does this help or hinder their conceptualization? (Mira)

Some concept mapping software forces all concepts to branch out like a tree and doesn’t allow for more netlike joins, and they don’t have any kinds of loops in them. In general, I think you’re going to find that can be limiting.

To really capture the richness of connections among ideas, you have to be able to have loops and have to be able to cross branches. Some concept mapping software will enable that. It’s more complex to use the software and handle the concept maps, but it’s a little more flexible in terms of what it can represent.

How can visual tools be integrated into classrooms that serve students who are learning English as a second language? (Lourdes Albo-Beyda)

Supplementing text-based or verbal understandings of ideas and their relationships with visual tools and concept maps provides a set of tools that students whose first language isn’t English can use to help wrap their mind around the material. If we are entirely dependent on text and words, then sometimes those students have to work a little bit harder to catch up and engage.

All of us learn well when we encounter information through words and pictures. But if the words are in a language that we’re not fluent with, then pictures become much more important.

I do think that some of these visual tools are a way to make our classrooms a bit more inclusive and a bit more welcoming to students with various backgrounds.

Be careful when your visual tools involve doodles or photos or images as a way of representing ideas and concepts. There’s a whole other level of visual literacy that can be involved. When you and I look at a photo, we’re going to see different things. What we think of as a nice visual metaphor might not work for students from different backgrounds if they don’t have the same kind of cultural hooks to hang it on.

How can visual learning be used so that it is relevant to particular career pathways? (Lourdes Albo-Beyda)

One of the things that can be really powerful about visual tools is that they’re used as a way to communicate ideas.

Certainly they can be useful for helping students form their own ideas. Once they have a story, once they have a plan, once they have a pitch, some visual tools can help them communicate that to others in ways that they can understand and believe in, or fund, or hire.

So I think there’s an element to these visual tools that students can use as they go forward in their professional careers. When we talk about students having terrible PowerPoint skills, maybe part of that is because they don’t have a lot of visual tools to bring to a blank slide in a PowerPoint. Having a concept map, or a flowchart, or a timeline can provide a bit of visual structure that students can leverage in communication as they move forward.

Why I’m optimistic about the future of civic learning.  Continue…

At a recent civic learning workshop for Cal State LA faculty, my colleagues and I received some timely words of wisdom. Continue…