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Midterms and finals are the most common ways in which students in large lecture courses are assessed. In many courses, this level of assessment is adequate to judge students' ability and comprehension of material. But in other courses, particularly large introductory science courses, in which concepts often build cumulatively throughout the term and a lot of new material is covered, students are in danger of falling behind between exams and never being able to catch up.
To encourage students to keep up with their coursework, instructors commonly assign homework or quizzes. However, these forms of assessment of student learning can take significant time and resources to grade and may take days or weeks to return to students.
With the web, and more recently, wireless computing, instructors have new tools at their disposal to help students keep pace with a course without creating a huge workload for instructors or their teaching assistants.
"When I first started teaching my Biochemistry course, it was really apparent that students were not coming to class prepared," says Paul Larsen, a professor at UC Riverside. "It was clear that we were giving students too much information too fast and they were not benefiting from the lectures. This was also reflected in their poor performance on the exams."
Larsen and Professor Helen Henry, with whom he team teaches the 180-student course, decided they needed to make some changes to their teaching, one of which was to assign homework that would encourage students to read their textbooks.
They learned from the campus's faculty computer expert, Leo Schouest, that they could use their existing course management system, Blackboard, to assign web-based, self-correcting, multiple-choice or true/false homework, the results of which would become immediately available to them. They appreciated the advantages of this approach: it would require fewer resources to administer and grade than paper and pencil homework assignments; it would allow them to see student results prior to the lectures; and it would provide immediate feedback to students so they would know what they got wrong or right.
For three quarters now, Henry and Larsen have used this technique to great success. This is how it works: Students must complete, at least one hour before each of their three weekly lecture periods, short quizzes that consist of multiple choice questions based on textbook reading. They also must complete similar assignments after the lecture. For correctly answering the questions, students receive points that contribute to their overall course grade. Henry and Larsen often look at the pre-lecture results before they begin class to determine if the students are grasping what they're reading.
"We use the results to guide the emphasis we give during lecture," says Henry. "While I don't end up changing the content of the lecture significantly at this point, I often make a note to myself to spend some more time on a topic that the students seem to have a misunderstanding about, or perhaps to clarify the way a question was worded."
Henry and Larsen have seen dramatic improvements in their students' performance as well as more student engagement with the class. They say that students sometimes complain during the quarter about the amount of work, but end up being thankful when they've passed and received a good grade.
"You're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't keep up with the reading, and the pre-lecture assignments help you do that," says junior Tony Adkins, who received an A in the course. "The post-lecture assignments are also helpful because they get you to review what you learned so that it will stick in your mind."
Assessing Students During Class
Giving students paper-and-pencil quizzes during class time is another common technique for encouraging students to stay on top of their coursework. However, this strategy consumes valuable class time. Another approach is to call on students or informally poll them via show of hands; however many students are reluctant to participate, especially in large classes.
As we wrote about in the March 2004 edition of the TLtC webzine, some instructors are dealing with these problems by using a wireless computing system in the lecture hall that facilitates quizzes during class and gives students anonymity because they participate via a remote control-like device. Results of the quizzes are automatically calculated and a histogram of the responses is displayed within seconds.
"For the instructor, this strategy is useful because you may think you are giving a crystal clear lecture but then you discover, wow, they didn't get it," says UC San Diego Physics instructor Ed Price, who quizzes students several times during each lecture. "If nearly all the students get the answer correct, then I just move on and I'm confident that they understand the concept. If they get it wrong, I can spend more time on it. It has real payoffs in terms of student understanding and transforming the classroom into a more active and engaging forum."
The flip side of taking more time in class to explain things, says Price, is that it leaves less time to cover new material. One way he has dealt with that challenge is to assign weekly web-based quizzes, as Professors Henry and Larsen do at UC Riverside, that are based on the reading.
"If you take longer in class to explain material, it's important that you also expose students to the text that we didn't go over in class," says Price.
Experimenting with "Smart" Homework
Researchers at UC Berkeley are also interested in using technology to assess student learning and are working on a National Science Foundation-funded project called ChemQuery, under Professor Angelica Stacy, to test innovative approaches.
Kathleen Scalise, a graduate student researcher, and Professor Mark Wilson in the Berkeley Evaluation & Assessment Research Center are experimenting with web-based "smart homework" that tailors itself to the student's ability level and can give real-time feedback so that the student does not do hours and hours of homework only to learn it was done incorrectly. They piloted the homework assignments in Chemistry 3b last semester and are currently analyzing the data.
In the future, Scalise says, the tool might also be used for instructors to learn more about their students' abilities so that they can shape their instruction to their needs.
"Technology gives us a lot of distributive power to bring different courseware and content to students," says Scalise. "And part of the power is to give different content to different students based on what they need."
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