Winter Workshop 3: Motivating Students

In this week’s workshop we explored student motivation. Our main goals for the workshop included discovering what motivates students, learning how different factors affect and are affected by motivation, and exploring techniques to increase motivation. We began with a discussion of why motivation is important for student learning and then brainstormed what motivates students. To better understand what factors impact student motivation, we explored a model compiled by Ambrose et al. (“How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching”). In this model, the goal values, student expectation for success, and learning environment all affect motivation levels, which in turn impact a student’s behavior and ultimate achievement of a learning goal (see diagram). In the culminating section of the workshop, participants generated lists of techniques for establishing values, encouraging expectancies (expectations for success) and building positive classroom environments. In these lists, several participants said that connecting activities and assignments to "real world" concerns and issues could be motivating for students. Others said that by giving students positive feedback, and setting clear expectations for their work, they could help foster a positive attitude toward the class. 

Student motivation model, modified from Ambrose et al. (2010)

While formulating this workshop, we first tried to generate our own list about what might motivate students, which included grades, job prospects, interest in the subject matter, etc. However, as we got deeper into the research surrounding student motivation, we started noticing that there are so many (sometimes conflicting) factors that influence student motivation, some of which instructors can control, and some of which they can’t. We hoped we emphasized the specific things that instructors could control, like cultivating a collaborative classroom environment and setting clear expectations, but in future iterations of this workshop, we might try to get even more specific about what strategies instructors can use to motivate students in the classroom. For now, though, we think this group of workshop participants came up with a thorough, helpful list!

Making the Most of Memory and Rethinking Retention: a workshop on Desirable Difficulties

Synopsis
This workshop presented material based on research by cognitive psychologists Robert Bjork, Kelli Taylor, Harold Pashler and others. The fundamental idea behind all of the desirable difficulties is that slowing down learning, forcing students to pay attention and work harder to learn consistently has two results. First, it improves students learning in the long run, not necessarily immediately. And second, it routinely causes those facing the desirable difficulties to feel like they are less successful. The types of desirable difficulties discussed were threefold: changing the environment, multimodal learning, and interleaving.

Reflection
We and the participants learned a great deal through the workshop. Parts of the content were well received and other parts were more challenging, especially when it came time to convey the information in a manner that was directly relevant and accessible to the participants. The best received aspect was the notion of the “myth” of learning styles. Participants knew about learning styles--e.g. learning auditorily, visually, linguistically, mathematically/logically, and kinesthetically--as a way to reach students. In our workshop we discussed how cornering ourselves into one teaching or learning style is actually detrimental to students, and it is often the case that a blended approach to learning styles is more effective.

We had a lively discussion of how these desirable difficulties can be applied on an individual and discipline-specific basis. Participants asked how the process of “interleaving” could be applied to different disciplines. What is interleaving? True to this concept, we held off on giving away a solid definition (although we gave hints) until the end. This process, characterized by giving students information in small chunks rather than all at once, has been shown to be highly effective, but seemed limited by the kinds of disciplines it has been applied to in research.

We encourage participants to use research databases at their disposal to look up research done on interleaving and education in their fields. Furthermore, as TAs and AIs, now is the perfect time to “experiment” with your students, to give lessons in innovative ways, and to reach beyond our comfort zones as future professors. It is a common argument that one discipline is more suited for one kind of teaching approach, and it is rare--if not outright inexistent--that this is actually true for most pedagogical approaches.

Winter Workshop 1: Active Learning

This year’s winter workshop series focuses on ways to teach effectively, and we started off with a fun and productive workshop about the benefits of active learning.  After a brief overview of the series, we began by defining active learning in small groups and compiling each group’s definition into one presentation for all to see.  After this great opening discussion, we compared active learning to traditional passive lectures as participants generated a list of the pros and cons of each.  Following this discussion, we presented a few compelling studies demonstrating how active learning methods improve learning outcomes. Using the information participants had learned so far, they then took time to create active learning activities to use in their own classrooms and then critiqued them in small groups.  We finished up by discussing both the participants’ activities as well as a list of additional activities provided to participants.

The first workshop seemed to go over really well and we had lots of positive feedback.  We were pleased with a big turnout of over fifty participants, and even with a large group the discussions made it possible for many individuals to contribute their ideas.  Given the nature of our workshop on research supported techniques, one of our goals was to discuss literature surrounding the use of active learning.  We found many studies pointing toward its benefits, but did not find any showing that it doesn’t work.  One of our participants brought this up during our discussions, but no one was aware of any contradicting studies.  Also, we knew going into the workshop that fitting active learning into a single, specific definition would be difficult. However, by relying on a few pre-selected definitions from educational professionals, we showed participants how their own definitions shared common themes with the definitions created by professionals. Ultimately, even though some participants preferred to see one definitive definition for active learning and even though common themes in the definitions were important, we believe that active learning is a complex, multi-faceted concept that can be defined in various ways. Using the powerpoint and polling technology was very helpful in this defining process because we were able to quickly compare participants’ definitions side by side for all to see.  The participants seemed to enjoy the use of technology in our workshop and we hope they are looking forward to the future workshop on teaching technologies.  Altogether, we had a great time preparing and giving this workshop on active learning.