Hello.  This is Dr. Concepcion Godev, Faculty Fellow at the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  Thanks for tuning in and welcome to Teaching and Learning Matters.

Today’s topic is "Instructions Can Motivate Students. Part 2 of 3." The working definition of instructions for the purpose of today’s topic is the same as for Part 1, that is, “any information that is provided to students with the purpose of guiding them.” In Part 1, I mentioned that most courses will feature some eight types of items containing instructions. For instance, the syllabus, which was discussed in part 1, daily plan and homework, assignment instructions, in-class activity, feedback, study guide, exams and quizzes.

Today I’ll focus my discussion on two types of instructions: the daily plan and homework, and assignment instructions.

Over the years, I have learned that students find useful to have an outline of what is going to happen in a given class period. Let’s call this outline “daily plan.” This daily plan is the equivalent of a meeting agenda. The daily plan accomplishes several goals. One goal is that it assists instructors to go to class with a well thought out outline of what to cover in any given class. Another goal accomplished by the daily plan is that it provides students with a mental map of what is going to happen in class. This mental map can help students to maintain their focus throughout the class period.

In addition to the class period agenda, the daily plan also includes homework for the next class, and a number of different reminders. For instance, it includes reminders to start working on different aspects related to semester-long projects, to review the study guide for an up-coming exam, to read assignment instructions, and it also includes reminders to turn-in assignments. For semester-long assignments, I have found useful to remind students of completing different parts of the project by a certain date, even if the entire project won’t be turned in until later in the semester.

Another type of instructions that students receive is assignment instructions. They can be as short as a two-liner or as long as two pages. When assignment instructions are lengthy, it is likely that students will overlook information or misunderstand it. The sheer amount of information may get in the way for students to be able to carry out instructions, especially if instructions are read shortly before the assignment is due.

Instructors can help students to get the most out of lengthy assignment instructions by assigning the reading of these instructions for homework and asking students to bring their questions to the next class. This event should occur in the first few weeks of the semester.

The daily plan can be a useful tool to assist students with information management and time management, which are two key aspects of students’ success. The usefulness of lengthy assignment instructions can be enhanced by directing students to reading instructions and being prepared to ask their questions in class.

Thanks for listening.  Tune in again and remember: Teaching and Learning Matters.

Valorie McAlpin: Welcome to this special episode of Teaching and Learning Matters. I’m Valorie McAlpin, Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning here at UNC Charlotte. It’s my pleasure to introduce our Bank of America Teaching Award Roundtable Series.

In this episode we’ll hear from Jack Piel, one of the 2011 Teaching Award finalists. Jack led a discussion entitled “Helping Students Develop a Love for Learning,” recorded on February 24, 2012.

Jack Piel: And I’m Jack Piel. I would be sitting down too, but then I can’t operate this thing. So I also have a difficult time talking when I met when I'm sitting. I have to use my hands and I have to stand up and move around.

The topic or the title of this was “Helping Students Discover the Joy of Learning,” I think. That would be nice if they did that. What I would really like them to do is to learn. And if they enjoy that and develop a joy for that, that's even better. But learning is what I'm really after here.

Becoming a teacher - that's what happened to me was quite by accident. As Michael is well aware, I went to college on a golf scholarship and thought that I was going to be the next great player. And thought I was going to be on TV and thought I was going to be rich and famous. But as you can tell, that's not me, that's not really what happened.

And so what I needed to do was decide, well, what's my career going to be. And I discovered that they had this this major called elementary education where you got summers off. And because of that I can work on my golf game and see if I could get better because I realized that the college players that I went to college with were much better than I. And so my chances of being successful were not very good.

But my teaching changed as a result of a family reunion. Now that seems a little odd but we gathered together for my mother’s 70th birthday. My younger sister was a loan officer with Countrywide. My mother was very impressed with that thinking that she was a bank officer and thought, wow, this is really a great person. And my older sister was a lifelong flight attendant with United Airlines and my mother thought of her as nothing more than a lifesaver. She's the one who's makes everyone safe on every flight that she flies on. My brother was a medical doctor in Denver - very successful, large practice did minor surgeries.

And then there was me. At the time I had a PhD. I had just finished my PhD and my mother says to our family as we gather for her birthday, “Oh, I'm so proud of you all, Christie, I’m so proud of you because you save lives and I'm so proud of you because you are a bank officer. Michael, of course, you're the family doctor and every family wants a doctor and we’re so proud of you. And Jack we like you a lot.”

And I say, “Mother, wait a minute. What do you mean, you like me a lot? I’m a doctor, too.” And she said to me, “Well, but you're not a real doctor” meaning you're not your brother. So it was kind of difficult until my brother took me aside one day after that and said, “You know, I'm really envious about what you do.”

And I asked him, “Good Lord, why are you envious of me? I see your house and I see your BMWs and I see all the wonderful things that you have. How could you be envious of me?” And he says to me, “Well, whenever I meet patients or whenever I do surgeries, I'm never surprised by what I see. It's like plumbing on humans: what goes on, goes on. It’s over and over and over and again, it's the same thing. And what you do is new every semester. And if you screw up one semester, it's okay because you got another semester to make sense out of it.” And I thought to myself, why am I using these yellowed sheets, these tablets of my notes with everything that I have to teach my students? Let me get rid of him and let me try again. And let me try to do something a little bit different.

And at the same time I met Dr. Green who was probably the first person I met when I came to UNC Charlotte. And he and I teach the same thing. And I sat in his classes a couple of times and I saw the way he did things. And I kind of liked that. He tells stories to his students and the first stories that I told my students, I stole from him. I claim them as my own now and they're probably much better than the way he tells them because I embellish a bit as you might be able to tell.

But I tell stories to my classes to try to make difficult content not so difficult. I basically teach two classes. I teach a child development class to undergraduates. And the child development class for undergraduates worked really well for the students who have children because I sit there and I watch when I talk about certain content in the class, I see parents in the class doing this: “Hmm, I understand, I recognize what he’s talking about.”

But when I'm talking to most of my undergraduates, they don't have children and their eyes kind of glaze over. And I say to them, “You'll remember this one day. You'll remember what I'm talking about.” And I started to think, well there's a better way to do this. I've had children - I’ve got three of them. And now I tell my students at the beginning of every class, this is a child development class. In fact, it's the story of my children and I tell them all about child development from my children's point of view. So I try to make content more meaningful to students who have no experience in that area. I kind of believe that if you don't have your own personal past experience, it’s very difficult to teach content to students.

Another class that I teach is math. In fact, Jean is in my math class and she can attest to the fact that lots of students in that class are fearful and have anxiety toward math, especially teaching it. And so what I try to do in the math class is make things meaningful to my students by talking about what's happened to me in the past from teachers and how we can overcome that idea that I was a very anxious math student through high school until I found a teacher who actually taught me how to be a mathematician, how to teach math in a meaningful way.

So the whole idea about what I'm going to talk to you today is about developing meaning for students who really come to you without any meaning. And that's a tough thing to do. So becoming a teacher. I had teachers who inspired me, who actually taught me, but they were far and few between. Most of my teachers talked at me, didn't really tell me what I wanted to know or didn't have a way of connecting with me. I wanted learning that was meaningful and that's what they provided for me.

So that's my major goal. My major goal for every class I teach is to get students to have meaningful understanding about the content that we’re talking about. The idea that let's talk about children for those who don't have them. Let’s talk about mathematics for those who are intimidated by math and try not to get them to shut down when you start talking about mathematics.

Anxiety is a big deal. Those who are math anxious when hearing about mathematics, you can almost see their skin color change. And they're not afraid to say: I never was any good at math so go ahead and try to teach me. I've never heard them say I wasn't very good at science or I wasn't very good at history. But they somehow try to almost wear “I wasn't very good at math” as a badge of honor.

So what do I do? I tell stories. And I tell stories as often as I can and if I find a good one, I take it and I claim it as my own. And I try to make it work with the content that I have to deal with. When do I tell stories? When my students eyes glaze over. And you can see that happen in your classroom when they’re just kind of sitting there.

I discovered attention spans range with young children from about five minutes to adults for about 20. And they can stay on task for about 20 and then they kind of zone out. And I can watch my students, they’re taking notes and then all of a sudden, the pencil starts to drag down the page and nothing’s happening but their pencils are moving. So when their eyes glaze over or when their attention needs a boost or when a change of pace is necessary in my classrooms or when I want to tell a story, I do. And it's taken me 23 years but I can pretty much talk about most content in my classes with a relevant stories. Stories are necessary to make connections when there are no connections being made by students and to rid students’ faces of boredom.

Stories that work. Why do they work? Because we have to connect a story to an objective. The biggest problem I have with my students when they think about planning an activity for when they teach, they think of the activity first not the objective first. So what I need to find out is what is the objective that I have for teaching. This is the objective. Now, do I have a story that fits that? Not here’s a cool story, let me make it fit.

So I need to fit my story to the objective and not the other way around. And I've learned this over time that I need to make sure that my students understand how the story relates to the objective. Otherwise they remember a series of unrelated stories. So I will have to tell them over and over, “Look, remember the story. Remember this story?”

One of the issues that both Michael and I have difficulty with in a child development class is the issue of positive and negative reinforcement. And they really have a tough time with that. They miss it in class. They miss it on tests later down the line, in that positive and negative reinforcement do the same thing, have the same effect on behavior. Well our students confuse negative reinforcement and punishment.

And so I'll tell them the stories about: if I clean my room, I get to play with my friends. My mother makes me clean my room, then I get to go out and play with my friends. Or, if I don't clean my room, my mother gives me the clean room lecture. And I clean my room so I don't have to have the clean room lecture. And my students say, “Okay one’s positive, one’s negative. What's the result? Cleaning my room.”

They'll remember it much better that way than if I try to tell them that positive and negative reinforcement have the same effect on behavior, increases the likelihood that the reinforced behavior will reoccur. They don't remember that but they do remember the clean room lecture. And when we’re reviewing positive and negative reinforcement, I say “Tell me about the clean room. Tell me about how I got, how my mother got me to clean my room. Well, she got you to clean it by playing with your friends. What is that? What’s positive? She got you to clean your room so you didn't have to listen to lecture. Well, that’s negative. Now give me more examples.” And they can do that but they can't do it without that kind of story. So they need to understand how the story relates to what we’re talking about.

Valorie McAlpin: Thanks for listening to Jack Piel’s discussion about helping students develop a love for learning. Please join us for our next Roundtable Discussion with Gregg Starrett from the Department of Anthropology. And remember, Teaching and Learning Matters.

Welcome to Teaching & Learning Matters. This is Harish Cherukuri, Faculty Fellow in the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Today’s podcast is Part 2 of Preparing Multiple Choice Questions.

In Part 1, I defined some terminology that is commonly used to identify various parts of multiple choice questions. I also briefly discussed the advantages and disadvantages of these questions. In this part, I will present some guidelines for preparing multiple choice questions. I hope that you will find them useful. I will break up the guidelines into three categories: General guidelines, Guidelines for Stem Construction and Rules for Writing Options.

So, let us start with General Guidelines:

• Questions should be independent of each other. The answer to one question should not depend on the answer to a previous question.
• Don’t give clues to the answers in the questions. For example, if the correct answer is a plural, don’t make the distracters singular!
• Write the questions based on past experience. Think of common mistakes that students make or the common misunderstandings that students have about subject matter.
• Let the questions be on only the subject matter. Don’t write questions where knowledge extraneous to the course material is needed.
• Have the questions peer-reviewed.

Next, let us talk about some guidelines for the construction of the stem:

• Keep the language clear, simple and short. Longer stems take longer to read and therefore you cannot put as many questions as you would like to.
• If there is a repetitive text in each of the options, it is better to move it to the stem. For example, consider the following question: Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the capital of South Korea, the capital of Thailand.

In this question, the stem is “Tokyo is” and all the options have the common text “the capital of”. The question would sound better if this common text is moved to the stem. This modification also has the effect of reducing the reading time.

• Negative stems should be avoided if possible. If these cannot be avoided, use upper case letters to highlight the negative words. For example, in the question stem, “Which of the following is NOT a capital city of a country”, the word NOT should be highlighted so that it does not escape the attention of the student.

The third part, and perhaps the most difficult part in writing a multiple choice question, is the construction of options. Here are a few general rules that can make it easier to develop the options.

• First, write the correct answer before coming up with the distracters. You can move them around later.
• Limit the number of options to a maximum of five. It is hard to come up with good options and any more than four or five options do not add value to the question.
• Make the distracters plausible yet incorrect. These can be based on common mistakes that students make or common misunderstandings that students may have.
• Avoid using the option “All of the above”. If one distracter is eliminated, then “All of the above” option is eliminated as well!
• Be careful with the use of “None of the above” as an option. It usually doesn't provide much insight into what the students know or don't know. Clearly, this option is not the right option to use if the students are asked to choose the best answer amongst all the options.
• Options should be independent and not overlapping. Overlapping options can be confusing.
• If a distracter was not chosen by any students on previous tests, change the distracter.
• To reduce guesswork, use each position for the correct answer about the same number of times.
• Another strategy for reducing guesswork is to use negative points for wrong answers. If you go with this option, it may be better to have a “Do not know” option as one of the answers. For more information on reducing guesswork, please check Wikipedia. It has an excellent article on Multiple-Choice questions.

Now that I have shared some of my thoughts on preparing multiple-choice questions, I would like to emphasize that some planning is necessary in preparing these questions. I hope that the guidelines that I have suggested will prove useful in this regard.

I would also like to point out again that there is a wealth of information available on the web on this topic. In the transcript that accompanies this podcast, I have provided a few links that provide more information and references on writing multiple choice questions. Please take a look at them if you would like to learn more.

Thanks for listening. Be sure to join us for our next episode. And remember: Teaching and Learning Matters.

References:

1. Tomorrow’s Professor: General Guidelines for Developing Multiple Choice Questions
   http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/tomprof/posting.php?ID=932

2. Writing Multiple Choice Questions
   http://www.utexas.edu/academic/ctl/assessment/iar/students/plan/method/exams-mchoice-write.php
    
3. Designing and Managing MCQs: Appendix B: Designing MCQs - Do's and don'ts
   http://web.uct.ac.za/projects/cbe/mcqman/mcqappb.html
    
4. Practical Suggestions for Writing Multiple-Choice Questions, the University of Oregon Teaching Effectiveness Program
   http://tep.uoregon.edu/resources/assessment/multiplechoicequestions/practicalsuggestions.html
    
5. Wikipedia article on multiple-choice questions
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_choice

Hello. This is Dr. Concepcion Godev, Faculty Fellow at the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  Thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Teaching and Learning Matters.

Today’s topic is Is Your Textbook Driving Your Curriculum? This topic gives us a chance to reflect on how textbooks may lead to instructional inertia and how this inertia may get in the way of assessing or even identifying programs’ instructional goals.

Are we compelled to cover everything in a chapter? It is common to hear comments such as “I feel I have to rush to cover the entire chapter,” or “I had to rush towards the end of the chapter,” or even “I had to rush towards the end of the semester.” If we manage our time well and yet we find difficulties to cover chapters, what is the cause of these difficulties?

It is also common to hear colleagues saying: “Chapters go too fast.” What does this mean? In fact, chapters cannot go either fast or slow. However, the chapter organization and the content density may influence how a syllabus is organized. If a textbook is too ambitious and covers a lot of ground, syllabus designers will have to be more vigilant and make sure that they pick and choose according to their programs’ goals. In turn, these programs’ goals have to be aligned with reasonable expectations in terms of pace of learning for the average undergraduate student.

Ultimately, the syllabus is the tool that marks the coverage pace of the material presented in a textbook, no matter how dense the textbook content might be. While we cannot change a textbook, we do have control over the syllabus. An effective way of making sure that the textbook does not drive the pace of a course or a program is to periodically ask, “Why do students need to learn this part of the material?”

The next question we should try to answer is “How long will it take for students in my program or university to learn this material so that they can demonstrate competence in task y or z?” To answer this question, instructors may have to reflect on the following factors: the amount of time the average undergraduate student will need to read through assignments, the time needed to complete tasks associated with a reading assignment, and whether the material is presented in a way that is conducive to learning.

Another area where textbooks may influence the curriculum is testing. In fact, instructors may select textbooks on the basis of the number of ready-to-use tests and quizzes bundled with the textbook. And in the future, this trend may become more prevalent as class size increases and instructors may have less time for designing tests and grading. So, the guiding question to examine the quality of testing materials should be “Is the testing aligned with the learning outcomes of the course or program?

Textbooks are great resources that can afford instructors to save time on gathering instructional materials and allocate this time to other instructional tasks. But textbooks are usually not good at defining learning outcomes, what to do to achieve them and how to test them.  These are the areas where instructors have to apply their pedagogical expertise.

Thanks for listening.  Tune in again and remember: Teaching and Learning Matters.