Learning or Working at different paces?

Much of the discussion of the benefits of blended and self paced/mastery learning comes from an assumption the biggest factor that limits students' ability to succeed is that each student learns at a different pace and learns best in different ways.

There's no doubt that there is some truth in this, but from what I've seen, the single most important factor that affects students' ability to succeed is not that they learn at different paces, but that they work at different paces. In other words, the level of effort put forth seems to make the most difference. If a student doesn't work hard enough, there are most likely going to be problems no matter what type of instruction is provided. Moreover, slowing down the pace (through self pacing) for some of these students has not seemed to help, but rather to enable them to fall further and further behind. It seems like they work harder when we all move together at the same pace.

While there are definitely benefits to self paced and blended learning, the challenges should not be ignored. One of the biggest challenges is that slowing down (through self pacing) for a student who is working hard but needs extra help is useful, but slowing down (through self pacing) for a student that is not working hard enough is actually harmful.

Practice Problems on Khan

One type of homework I assign is to do certain practice problem sets on Khan Academy.  From September - November I was having difficulty motivating the students to do enough problems to understand the concept completely.  For example, I would assign ten problems for completion points.  Most students would complete their ten problems (some would only spend seconds on a problem) but it wouldn’t matter to them if they got them correct or not.  Therefore, the student wasn’t receiving a full understanding of the material.

In December, I changed the requirement.  I assigned a minimum of ten problems but I took the ten problems for a percent grade. In addition, I allowed students to do more than ten to raise their grade.   This changed the student attitude completely.  Most students now complete as many problems as he/she needs individually to understand the type of problem being presented.  Some students will get the first ten correct and be finished.  Others, now spend the time they need to be prepared for class the next day.

In conclusion, I have found students seem to be motivated by the grade more than anything else.

Library time = Free time?

Lately, I've been more skeptical of the effectiveness of having all students work in a blended environment. Among the other things that I've been concerned with is that many students treat their library time as "study hall" for whatever work they need to get done from various classes. This would be fine if they could manage their time effectively and spend enough time doing their physics on their own time. Some students can do this, and have demonstrated an impressive level of discipline. However many students have demonstrated they don't yet have this level of discipline. That doesn't mean blended learning isn't a nice option for some students, but trying to force all students to do this seems fraught with peril.

I could of course constantly walk around the library and make sure students are working the whole time, but that somewhat defeats the purpose of a blended class.

Perhaps our students just aren't used to it, and need to get used to working in a blended learning environment. Maybe if they had dealt with this type of learning more they would perform better. Regardless, the traditional way of learning is so ingrained for some of our students that trying to make blended learning work for them feels as productive as trying to hold back the tides.

Self paced mastery learning is great and it's also a disaster

I've been using a variation of mastery learning in both my blended course and regular courses, where students don't move on from a topic until they mastered it. They would watch videos on a topic, and then progress at their own pace through lab activities, conceptual questions, and problem sets.

It was great because it allowed me the time during class to interview students during each step of their progression to identify any misconceptions. And it prevented students from moving on until they proved that they really understood.

It was a disaster because at least half of the students were unable to work at a decent pace and budget time accordingly without putting everything off until the last possible moment. Even when I gave zeros in the gradebook if they didn't complete something that day, many students still could not manage to move at a steady pace.

I really wish it would have worked. The personal interviewing component at every step was so powerful it is hard to abandon it. But people seem to need a hard deadline at a particular point in time for each assignment in order to muster the motivation to get anything done. This sounds obvious to me now. I guess I was blinded by all the potential benefits that self pacing can provide (mastery learning, more one on one time with students, etc.)

So, I am also going back to using a more traditional non-self paced, non-mastery based class with hard deadlines. We will all move together through the material at the same speed. Some students will have to move on before they are ready, but we should be able to move at a respectable pace now. Plus the students are actually welcoming the change. They know that most of them need a rigid deadline for each assignment or they won't get it done.

Going Old School

Recently in Intro to Economics, I've reverted to teaching, as the kids would say, "old school."  Based on student feedback and performance, they've displayed an aptitude for succeeding in a traditional classroom environment.  With this particular group of students, collaborative learning is a key to their success, and for them, that means having the opportunity to ask questions, engage in discussion, as well as have specific problems with each piece of new content.

To facilitate learning over the past several weeks, I've taught with a traditional textbook, assigned readings, and supplemented those readings with practice problems for each chapter.  Students both succeeded with this method (they scored well on quizzes) as well as seemed more comfortable.

I attempted to supplement their readings with videos from Khan Academy, but students expressed the concepts to be too abstract to understand without having the opportunity to discuss the answers with either myself or their classmates.  As this student group consists of mostly sophomores and juniors, they may just be exhibiting a developmental preference for hands on, concrete examples of complex ideas.  While the Khan videos are rich in theoretical content, they are difficult for students to grasp if such a student has difficulty with abstract thinking.

What I've noticed that students REALLY need above and beyond anything else is practice.  Based on the last unit, a traditional method of teaching was more readily able to achieve that objective.  However, in my next unit, I'm going to have students use digital resources to prepare a collaborative project and teach a lesson to the class.  I will post my next update with this unit is completed.

Too little face to face time for blended students?

I've been using interview exams at the end of each unit as an assessment. Well, I like the interviews so much (as both a summative and formative assessment) that I've incorporated them as THE fundamental pedagogical approach of my class (both blended and non blended).

Now, students are required to have brief discussions/interviews with me for every assignment, quiz, or lab that they complete. If they finish an assignment, they bring it to me, and are required to explain it. Then I ask probing follow up questions based on their responses. I carry around my ipad and give a student a grade right there on the spot. I grade students on their ability to convey understanding, but allow them to go back and study and then do another interview another time if they are unhappy with the grade they receive.

This has allowed me to uncover misconceptions held by individual students much quicker and effectively than trying to decipher whether the student understands based on just what they wrote on a piece of paper (quiz, HW, test, etc.). It has also made me concerned with the blended class. I am finding more and more that they have fundamental misconceptions on previous topics we covered compared to the other non-blended students.

I think this may be due to the fact that students who got face to face time with me everyday were constantly subjected to me pointing at their work and asking them "why did you do this?", "when won't this term be negative?", "what does this mean?" and other probing questions about the physics we're learning. The blended students only get this half the time since they meet with me every other day. This might be contributing to them getting to the correct answer on their HW and quizzes without really understanding how.

I hope that using short interviews every step of the way, and only giving credit for demonstrating understanding (rather than just turning stuff in), will convince my blended students that they should seek understanding, not just right answers. And, my real goal is to get the students to the point where they instinctively ask themselves these probing questions to analyze and self correct their own thinking. That type of precise/organized and self corrective thinking, more than any physics principle, is the main thing I want to teach my students.

Time Correlation

Recently, I have been analyzing the amount of time individual students spend on Khan Academy.  As I expected, there is a definite positive relationship between their grade and the time the student spends on Khan.

Looking at the overall time spent watching the videos and practice problems on Khan, the students with the most time spent have a higher grade.  If I look at the students earning A’s in the class, their time spent is on average much higher than a student earning a lower grade.  In fact, the time and most of the grades directly correlate.

When I look at the time of day that a student does their homework on Khan, it correlates with their grade.  It seems that students doing their homework in the morning before class are earning lower grades.  For example,  I have students that are doing their homework at 7:45 a.m when class begins at 8:15.  It seems to reason, they are not completely absorbing the material by rushing through before the bell rings.

In conclusion, I would probably find the same results correlating time spent on homework with grades in a traditional style classroom.  However, now I have data to provide me with information to help guide students to be more productive.