Chapter 05 - What Kinds of Practice and Feedback Enhance Learning?

There are many ideas and misconceptions circulating about what neurologist Daniel Levitin said and what journalist Malcolm Gladwell intended with the "10,000 hour rule."  Ultimately, we can concur that practice is important to gaining mastery. However, practice without feedback can be counterproductive. As Ambrose, et al. propose, students will fall back on what they know and practice those parts to the detriment of learning new tasks (Ambrose 2010).

I believe that it is incumbent upon instructors to create practice sessions that incorporate what is known as building blocks into the unknown. Instructors can scaffold learning by creating assignment that remind students of what they know and then introducing ways of combining what is known into creating new solutions.

This idea of scaffolding on what is known can effectively create the "appropriate level of challenge" (Ambrose 2010) and move students to the next level of mastery. This concept was made clear in a recent course where students got lost in combining multiple complex concepts without clear models. The models required that students see the elements involved. If the students could not see the elements, they were totally lost in the complexities. As a result, I applied scaffolding into the next assignment. At first I told myself that the exercise did not work because of the level of chatter that was created by the assignment. However, it is quite possible that the result would have been worse had I not provided the scaffolding.

The chatter indicated that the students understood the complexity and were asking questions about it. In the earlier assignment there was very little talk. Perhaps the chatter indicated that, because they misunderstood the last assignment, they should clarify this one better. The only way that I can truly understand how will this change worked is to scaffold the first exercise in my next offering of the course and review the results for improvement.

Chapter 5: What Kinds of Practice and Feedback Enhance Learning?

• Have you provided students with “written prompts” for self-monitoring as knowledge and skills are acquired, and if so, how well did these enhance learning?  Were there any situations in which using self-prompts did not work as well as prompts from you as the instructor.

I do add written prompts for self-monitoring. I will have a student create a simple count of records. Then I will have them create a JOIN, add a calculation, and perform a sort. Then I will ask them if they have the same number of records in the result set. This simple check of numbers can allow students to determine if they joined correctly and used a calculation instead of an aggregation.

• What have you observed to be the appropriate level of accumulated practice in your subject matter areas, and how have you adjusted this practice as you have taught your course multiple time.

I have observed that students need to do the tutorial and/or demo that is assigned as well as any practice assignments. If they do not do them, only students with prior experience seem to be successful. Students will often not do the practice unless they are graded. If they are graded, then the workload is overwhelming. There needs to be another method; e.g., using a homework grader like SAM or MyITLab, to allow students immediate feedback. Since our program cannot agree on what to use, we use nothing. Students suffer and instructors who actually grade all the work are overloaded. I am hoping I can work with instruction and/or the Faculty Commons to purchase software that will allow us to create feedback for our students in their practice work.

• What are your experiences with using peer feedback?  Has it been successful, and if so, how did you prepare students for using this technique so it would be fair, meaningful, and well-received?

I use peer feedback in several of my classes. There are both development and cultural issues that come into play. I have found that students who are from culture where instructors are seen as the authority have issues taking feedback from peers and will challenge the credentials of a student providing feedback.  Students who have not learned to provided feedback give meaningless feedback, unless the feedback forms are designed to elicit specific information.

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Ambrose, Susan A., Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K. Norman. How learning works: seven research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Print. 

Materials from the Carnegie Mellon University Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence: http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/principles/learning.html#LP04 (items 4-7).