Student Engagement and Learning

Last year, after having my formal observation by one of the assistant principals at my high school, we sat down for my post-observation debriefing. I try to maintain interactive and engaging classrooms, which was affirmed during the observation. The question that was posed was how do I know how much each individual has learned, other than during assessments? My assistant principal was asking me to push further, to make direct linkages to the learning objectives I set and verification that those objectives were met. She wanted me to push students to be more personally accountable for their learning.

I thought about this conversation over the summer and while I was teaching the introductory statistics class at MSU Denver. Due to the compressed time-frame of the class, I elected to give weekly quizzes that covered material from the previous week. Toward the end of each lesson, I tried to provide a problem that reflected what I would be quizzing on the following week.

I decided to implement a similar program in my Inferential Probability and Statistics course. I am giving a weekly quiz that focuses on last week's materials. The questions cover foundational knowledge that students need to be successful. During the week, I provide problems and ask students to write their responses in their notebooks.

In the past, I had asked students to answer the questions but did not require them to write down their responses. Of course, there would be some students who would appear to be thinking about the problem but were more likely thinking about where they were going to eat lunch that day and with whom.

After we discuss responses, I tell students my expectations toward their understanding. For example, in working through various sampling strategies, I provided scenarios and students needed to identify the sampling technique being described. I told my classes that the expectation is that they should be able to read a scenario and determine the sampling technique.

I realize this is the first two weeks and we're still in the "honeymoon" phase of the semester, but students seem much more engaged and attentive. The scores on the first quiz were quite good, approximately 85% of the students received an A or B grade.

I still need to make more explicit connections to the lesson's learning objective and what students are doing. I will continue to require students to write answers down when working through example problems. I will see if the level of engagement and learning continues to hold over the next few weeks and throughout the semester.