When discussing the prevention of mental fatigue strategies in Day Two, I introduced the idea of using “core content scaffolding, such as incomplete handouts, review sheets, worksheets, or other printed resources that students work with while listening or doing throughout the evening.” Today, I thought I would share some tips and resources for developing these types of documents/tools.
Learning research demonstrates that using handouts that are incomplete help students develop note-taking skills, manage their learning in and out of class, and support good study habits. Sometimes these tools are called templates, interactive study guides, word pictures, concept maps, outlines, or job aids. The purpose of each one is to help students stay focused on the activities of the evening while learning the core concepts or principles being emphasized, their structure and relationship to each other, and perhaps their varied applications to real-world problems. They also serve as excellent review tools prior to exams or job aids when trying to replicate a procedure or problem-solving sequence, in part because they can provide a visual anchor for later recall (Almost all students are visual learners these days!).
Perhaps one of the least visual of these options is an outline, given to the students near the beginning of class. The outline could delineate the core material to be emphasized that evening. Many words, phrases, or other key points are left blank, however, to be filled-in by the students as they experience the content in many different ways throughout class. Adding minimal numbers of text boxes or circles to demonstrate relationships makes for an interesting adaptation of the incomplete outline; these are often called interactive study guides. Email me if you’d like an electronic copy of Tom Cyrs chapter “Communicating with Word Pictures” to see lots of examples. I know sometimes we spend so much time trying to put our ideas into words, we find calling on our visual capabilities a challenge!
More visual, but no less troublesome to create than an outline is a basic concept map, again with many missing words/phrases or details on the various nodes of the map. These are quite simple to create using the drawing tools in Microsoft Word or free Web 2.0 tools such as FreeMind or Mindomo. Take a look at some Mindomo examples that Maria Anderson, a math instructor at Muskegon Community College, has created for her students and for the rest of us. Notice that when you see a “paper” symbol next to any of the nodes, you can hover your mouse over it to see her explanatory notes pop up. A more detailed icon near a node represents a link to another page (with perhaps another level of the concept map!). These are fun for students to develop too!
Finally, job aids can be built during class under your guidance, but be used more AFTER class (in their complete state) while doing homework or practicing. Job aids do what they imply, assist us in remembering what is important when doing a complex, infrequent, often-changing or solitary job/task. It helps us track our progress in improving while doing the tasks. It can even help in doing peer review of our colleagues as they practice doing the task. Job aids provide that scaffolding that we have been talking about until the job/task has been done so often and so well that the job aid is no longer needed. An incomplete job aid that is built during an evening class will be more effective since it is developed by each student on his own or in collaboration with his small group at various junctures during class. I have two books (written by Allison Rossett) on developing effective job aids for improving performance if this idea is useful for your type of learning outcomes and you’d like to see examples.
You may want to create a simple interactive study guide/concept map/outline/job aid for each lecture, for each core topic or one for the entire evening. In all cases, leave plenty of white space near the various elements of it so that students can take additional notes, as desired.
Have any of you used incomplete outlines, worksheets, etc. in your classes? How? Why? Tips?
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