April 1, 2013

Designing the learning experience

Scaffolding instruction and guiding deliberate practice

Research shows that students will reveal more of their thinking and advance further in their learning when questions and tasks are scaffolded. Scaffolding can take a variety of forms, but generally means breaking a complex assignment into smaller steps, or giving students other structures or resources that help them produce better quality work. Closely linked is the design of deliberate practice for skills students need to succeed in a course or discipline. According to the authors of How Learning Works, “Research has shown that learning and performance are best fostered when students engage in practice that (a) focuses on a specific goal or criterion for performance, (b) targets an appropriate level of challenge, and (c) is of sufficient quantity and frequency to meet the performance criteria.”²⁰

UW instructors build such opportunities into course design, scaffolding tasks in a variety of ways.

• Breaking up complex tasks into small steps: “I use multi-part assignments in which students are required to reach and try something new. Because they often fall short on part of the assignment, there is room to make it up later on and to reach an acceptable level of competency.” — Ingrid Walker, Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, UW Tacoma

Laboratory exercises and essay questions can be scaffolded as well, by providing elements such as vocabulary or concept “banks,” checklists, sub-questions, or tutorials that help the student build towards a result, argument, or conclusion.

• Step-by-step video tutorials: Undergraduate Instruction Coordinator Amanda Hornby recommends that faculty post links to ”How Do I…?” tutorials created by the UW Libraries. These short videos introduce students to topics such as “How do I find background information on my topic?” and “What is a scholarly journal article?” “Students watch the videos before class and are then more prepared to discuss scholarly or research processes and to effectively use scholarly research tools for their coursework and research projects.” — Amanda Hornby, Undergraduate Instruction Coordinator, Odegaard Undergraduate Library, UW Seattle

Designing a course to include deliberate practice means ensuring that there are smaller-scale, low-stakes, often self-directed assignments that effectively simulate the skills needed to show mastery and pass a final assessment. Creating sufficient opportunities for deliberate practice is a task often made easier by technology tools such as Canvas. In Canvas, faculty can create question banks students can use to quiz themselves on their own time, helping students identify and fill gaps in their understanding of the material.

• Creating self-study quiz banks: “Canvas allows the instructor to set a quiz for multiple attempts and shuffle answers on each attempt. The learner uses self-assessment to discover what they don’t know and to go back and spend time studying the very things they didn’t know.” — Colleen Carmean, Assistant Chancellor for Instructional Technologies, UW Tacoma

In courses where learning goals include strengthening critical thinking, students will need multiple opportunities—
with constructive feedback—to practice critical thinking during the term. Many UW instructors design the learning
experience to include this practice.

• Creating opportunities to practice critical-thinking problems: “In my undergraduate economics classes, I’m very deliberate in creating ample opportunities to practice thinking critically and applying concepts. Students must attend lectures and quiz sections, of course, and I build group practice into class. Students are also instructed to spend 70% of their out-of-class time doing practice problems that I provide. Questions and answers are kept up-to-date on the course website.” — Haideh Salehi-Esfahani, Senior Lecturer, Economics, UW Seattle

 

Cultivating a supportive climate to promote learning

Practice alone doesn’t maximize learning. “Recent research…has converged on the notion of classrooms as communities,” according to an article in Studies in Philosophy and Education. ²² Students need a positive environment in which to learn—one that is supportive and inclusive. Instructors can cultivate this climate of inquiry and equity and set norms for interpersonal behavior. In a forthcoming book chapter, UWprofessor Mark Windschitl asserts, “Over the past 20 years, this idea of teachers making clea
r, in talk and in practice, what everyone’s role is in the production of knowledge, and whose knowledge will be valued, shows up consistently in classrooms where widespread student participation and learning are evident.”²³ UW instructors seek to establish such norms and expectations to foster a more supportive learning environment.

• Having students negotiate norms for behavior: “I ask students in their small groups to negotiate their own rules and expectations of one another, such as interim deadlines for group assignments, and I ask the class as a whole, on the first day, to negotiate class rules and expectations for themselves, such as under what circumstances laptop and smart phone usage are permitted.” — David Goldstein, Director, UW Bothell Teaching and Learning Center; Senior Lecturer, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, UW Bothell
• Meeting students where they are: “Choosing to conference with students on platforms such as Skype eliminates the perceived power an instructor’s office carries with it. Once removed from these sanctioned spaces of authority, I have found that students are better situated to become active learners and collaborators in a course.” — Brian R. Gutierrez, Teaching Assistant and Graduate Student, English, UW Seattle

Instructors also work to cultivate a climate that supports learning by preparing for differences in linguistic and
cultural backgrounds, disabilities, and attitudes and motivations towards schooling, classroom roles, and ways of
learning. For example, accommodations for persons with disabilities need to be available in online contexts, as well
as in face-to-face classrooms.

• Understanding accessibility: “We are still dealing with the issues that arise in providing individual accommodations and removing barriers in face-to-face classrooms, but if the technology that is used is also not fully accessible, then we must also provide accommodations for any barriers that technology may create. As a university, we should strive to create classes with technology that is universally accessible.” — Amanda Paye, Title IX / ADA Coordinator, UW Office of Risk Management

Technologies can also provide accommodations that are not available in face-to-face classrooms. One example is the opportunity for self-paced learning offered by lecture capture tools like Tegrity.

• Helping English language learners: “Putting video explanations online allows English language learners, students with disabilities, or students who are simply less familiar with the content or conventions to proceed at their own pace.” — Kevin Mihata, Associate Dean for Educational Programs, College of Arts and Sciences, UW Seattle
• Letting struggling students rewind: “For the mathematically challenged students, my lectures were far too fast. With online videos, students can work through them at their own pace. The videos solved what was previously a problem without a solution.” — Doug Wills, Associate Professor, Milgard School of Business, UW Tacoma

Providing feedback to support learning

Most of all, research indicates that students need regular and constructive feedback that they can directly and immediately apply.²⁴ Authors of an article in the Review of Educational Research found that “A detailed synthesis of 74 meta-analyses…demonstrated that the most effective forms of feedback provide cues or reinforcement to learners; are in the form of video-, audio-, or computer-assisted instructional feedback; and/or relate to goals.”²⁵ Furthermore, online settings offer tools that can enhance immediacy and clarity of feedback,²⁶ such as posting and reviewing rubrics,²⁷ while helping faculty balance the desire to give rich feedback with other demands on their time.

At the UW, faculty provide meaningful feedback in many ways, such as peer-review, descriptive commentary on problem-solving, and online quizzes that provide correct/incorrect answers—with explanations—immediately after students answer each question.

• Providing feedback on language students’ audio files: “In my hybrid introductory French classes, my students can submit audio files. This allows me to listen to each student and give them individual feedback, which you cannot do in a regular class.” — Hedwige Meyer, Senior Lecturer, French and Italian Studies, UW Seattle
• Using rubrics and peer review: “I use detailed rubrics to provide online feedback and guide course discussion about an assignment. Students also present work in class in front of their peers and some of their work is available online for peer review.” — Hedwig Lee, Assistant Professor, Sociology, UW Seattle

Like many UW instructors, Assistant Professor Riki Thompson provides feedback while modeling expert thinking. She leads and records workshops where students discuss anonymous student papers.

• Recording writing workshops for students to review at home: “I project a sample assignment on the screen and as a class we assess the strengths and weaknesses, talking through possible revision suggestions together. Using my stylus, I write on the assignment as if I were marking it up on paper, which students see projected on the screen. I am currently using an iPad to project the annotations I am making and record the discussion using an interactive whiteboard program, screencast recorder, and remote desktop program for iPad that can project through any PC. I currently save workshop recordings to YouTube and post them on the class website so everyone can review them later, but will experiment with the Tegrity tool for lecture capture next quarter” (sample workshop video). — Riki Thompson, Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, UW Tacoma

Designing a learning experience where students can learn and thrive is an area where technology can be particularly helpful by supporting scaffolding,

practice, and rubrics for constructive feedback. Technologies can also make it easier to gather real-time feedback that helps faculty gauge understanding and adapt accordingly, a practice called formative assessment. Formative assessment is a particularly powerful tool to provide information to students about their progress and inform the instructor’s choices about the next lesson, or even the next few moments in a class discussion.²⁸ According to the authors of an article in Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, “Practice in a classroom is formative to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited.”²⁹ Formative assessment, when done well, is both adaptive and iterative.

• Adjusting teaching in real time, based on in-class assessment: Biology Senior Lecturer Scott Freeman notes an example when he used formative assessment during a discussion of experimental design. A clicker question asked students to evaluate experimental designs for testing how cedar trees would respond to different mulching treatments in reforestation. “The vast majority of students picked an answer saying that you could only do an experiment like this in a greenhouse or garden, where you can control conditions tightly, when, in fact, the whole point is to expose the trees to field conditions. Very few people picked the answer proposing a large randomized trial in a normal replanting area. So I discovered that the way I was teaching was breeding a misconception.” Freeman was able to correct the students’ misconception by adjusting his teaching in the moment and in future classes “to introduce the idea of designing experiments so conditions don’t differ between treatments on average.” — Scott Freeman, Senior Lecturer, Biology, UW Seattle

Shelly Rasmussen, a junior physiology major, thinks it is especially important for instructors to check student understanding during class, as some of her professors do using clickers. “The professor can manage class time better. If a large number of students don’t understand a question, the professor can address it.”

Learn More

Read the full Provost report on how students learn and how technology helps.

Additional resources for teaching with technology.

For a full list of referenced works, click here.