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Faculty members can ask students about
their interests and skills, or test them (including tests
for understanding and misunderstanding) to help prepare for
the term, for the month, for the coming lecture, or even for
the next few minutes of a lecture. The instructor can use
the findings to fine-tune the syllabus, to create interest
groups, to develop homework assignments keyed to student
interests, and so on.
Interests: For example, a faculty member
teaching statistics might ask students about their need to
learn about certain classes of problems (e.g., testing the
significance of results when comparing an experimental
situation with its control; looking for underlying patterns
that could help analyze problems with large numbers of
variables).
Skills: Similarly a faculty member may well
want to begin a term by asking students about their prior
experience and confidence in their skills so that he or she
can decide how advanced or basic various elements of the
course should be. For example, in a research class in
teacher education, the faculty member might want to ask
whether students have experience in analyzing transcripts of
school classes.
Conceptions and Misconceptions: Faculty
need deep insight into their fields to create good questions
of this type, but it can be extremely important to learn
what students are thinking about the content beforehand.
Research indicates that these misconceptions (especially if
they are in accord with 'common sense') are extremely
difficult to change. For some vivid examples (graduating MIT
and Harvard seniors who still have misconceptions that they
acquired as children, despite having taken many courses that
"taught" them something different), you might want to watch
the video series "Minds of Our Own." Physics is ahead of
most disciplines in developing tests of misconceptions,
perhaps because student misconceptions in this field can be
so persistent. The best known test of student misconceptions
in Physics is the Force Concept Inventory.
Background: You can get
additional insight into your students with questions about
their wider interests. For some courses, it might be useful
to know what books students have read recently and what
movies they've seen; among other things this will tell you
whether your students are all alike, or whether they have
contrasting interests and habits (thanks to Pat Nellis of
Valencia for passing along that idea).
Building your own survey:
We have created an "empty" Flashlight Online survey for
creating Course-Related Interest and Skills Inventories
(Template ZS31026). You'll need to create the topics
(interests and skills) but we've done a little of the work
by supplying the headings. For example, for a study of
interests near the beginning of the term, we've followed
Angelo and Cross in suggesting a scale that runs from "no
interest" to "interested in doing a research paper on this
subject". For Skills, the scale runs from "No skills/no
experience" to "advanced skills/extensive experience."
Here's some introductory text you could adapt for use with
your own survey:
I need to fine-tune plans for this course. I'd like to make
sure that the assignments, lectures and readings fit most
students' interests and skills, so you all can do well in
this course. Please answer these questions as thoughtfully
as you can. I won't know who said what; this is anonymous.
If you and other students help me plan the course, the
results should be better learning and higher grades for
everyone! After I read your responses, I'll tell the class
how I'm using your advice to adjust plans for the course.
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