Students hate holes

Well, it happened. I didn't see it coming, and would have never expected it. My students like doing physics problems more than doing labs. And specifically, my students like doing Webassign online homework problems more than labs. In fact, they have been asking me over and over, "When do we get to do Webassign again?"

To put this into context, if you even mention the word "Webassign" to any of my students from previous years, they will give a long groan and say something like "Uggggh, Webassign was horrible. I hated Webassign." In fact, Webassign was probably their least favorite part of my course.

So for my students this year (blended and non-blended) to repeatedly request Webassign, and repeatedly say "I like Webasssign" with no prompting from me is absolutely mind blowing for me. And I am pretty sure I know why their experience this year is so much better than previous years.

The incremental sets of problems that I wrote over the summer are the main difference in my teaching this year. Briefly, the difference between the problems I wrote and the previous problems I used (which were just publisher problems from the back of a book), is that the problems I created were made specifically so that they can be grouped into sub-skills and ordered in a logical progression from the easiest possible problem to the hardest possible problem with very few gaps in between. This makes the number of problems assigned much larger this year than in previous years. It also makes it so that the hardest problems of a problem set are actually quite involved and complex.

But, think about what this means. Students are doing way more Webassign problems than ever before, and harder problems than ever before, and they are enjoying them more than ever before. I feel like I'm onto something here. It doesn't seem to inherently be the length of a problem set, or the difficulty of a problem set that students dislike. It is the holes in a problem set that students don't like.

My takeaway is this:

1. Students really do their learning when they are forced to use the material (not during lectures and videos). So I should spend much more of my time on making quality problem sets than trying to improve the quality of my lectures.
2. Students get very frustrated when they get stuck on a problem that requires them to learn multiple skills at the same time. So I should break material down into sub skills and let students master each one before having them try to put them all together in a single problem.
3. Students respond well when they feel like they are actually making progress. So I should make problem sets where one problem builds off the previous problem and gets progressively harder.

There is one slight problem here. Creating a problem set in a logical order from easiest to hardest with no gaps for each sub skill takes a long time. Still, once they are made they can be used over and over. And I've seen enough to convince me to keep making them.