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I DREAMED I SAW JOE HILL LAST NIGHT--
STUDY GUIDES
ESSENTIALS
WISE WORDS
"If the structure does not permit dialogue, then the structure must be changed."
--Paolo Freire
READINGS
CURRENT WORK
PAST
SIMULATIONS
MY THEORY OF STUDY GUIDES
Of all the iconic features of my courses, unquestionably the most identifiable, and highly respected (by students, they're hated by other faculty!), are the study guides. I came up with the idea for the study guides about fifteen years ago, following the worst class I ever taught. Everything that could have gone wrong in that class did, so I was forced to analyze not only that class but a number that had gone before it, in an attempt to modify my teaching so that a course could never again turn out that badly. I did make those adjustments and, as result, I have never had a class that even came close to the one that infamous semester.
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Some words from Barney Calhoun (Half-Life 2 )
"Nice job, Gordon, throwin' that switch and all. I can see that MIT education really pays for itself!"
I won’t go into everything I changed, except to say I changed pretty much everything! My analysis of my courses, together with what I knew about organizational, and other kinds of, communication led me to conclude that there existed in the transmission model of teaching/learning numerous opportunities for missed or garbled communication. Hence, I decided that, prior to any other revisions, I would attack the problem of misunderstanding inherent in the multistep transmission of information. What I did was to reverse the process by which information is delivered to the student. Because most teachers do the same as I had done up to that point, which is essentially throw information at the student in the form of readings, lectures, discussion, and other modes of information transmission, relying later on exams or research papers to indicate how much of that information had “stuck” in the student’s mind.
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Instead, I decided to divide my course into multiple units and to test students with objective exams. I reasoned that more frequent testing on smaller amounts of information would enable the student not only to process and recall the information more efficiently, but would also get the student into a rhythmic cycle which would become a primary reflex, defining a well-rehearsed process through which to engage the material, not just for my course, but other courses as well.
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Second, the transmission model (and I realize I am painting with a broad brush here, since there are many variations in and additions to the model) in general relies on approaches that engage far too limited a range of human intellectual performance, concentrating primarily on data and information, but neglecting the emotions, will, imagination, and other features of the human mind that not only are not well adapted to the transmission and retention of data, but are widely (though, in my opinion, mistakenly) believed to interfere with it. To appropriate another metaphor, the transmission model is like running a multi-cylinder engine with only a few of the cylinders firing.
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This seems to me a tremendous waste of potential resources students could bring to the performance of extraordinarily complex tasks. (In passing, although I cannot prove this, I have always thought that much of our irrational attachment to the transmission model arises from the fact that it is the chief method of instruction [at least in its early stages] used in training people in medicine and the law, both of which are also considered the "gold standard" for quality instruction. I would agree that the memorization of large amounts of information is absolutely necessary for doctors and lawyers, though I would also point out that in the later stages of learning about medicine and the law, heavy reliance is placed on experiential learning through, for example, internships at health delivery facilities [for medicine] and moot court [for law].)
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Third, one advantage of experiential learning--its vivid experiences in unusual circumstances, which in turn makes it easier to retain information--is largely lost in models that rely entirely or primarily on the transmission process. With traditional education, so much information is presented in classroom circumstances that seldom seem to vary much, regardless of which field one is in, that it fails to "stick" in the memory. In experiential education, particularly in those versions of it relying on vivid or memorable simulated problems (such as occurs in this simulation course), it is difficult to forget what one learns, not simply because it is novel (although that is a very important part of the reason for its success), but also because many different forms of intelligence and understanding are used by the student, awakening whole regions of their internal mental landscape that have lain fallow in conventional instruction, sometimes for decades. When the brain combines with the emotions, the will, the imagination, values and virtue, as well as a host of other abilities long underused, it makes the "dry information" of the classroom enter and become a part of the student's experience.
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Another innovation I enacted was to write all of the exams completely, prior to the start of the semester. One of the most unreliable features of the feedback (primarily through exams) that characterizes the transmission model is that the teacher often composes the exam after teaching the material, thereby introducing a significant amount of uncertainty into the processes of transmission and recall. The teacher is placed in the uncomfortable situation of trying to recall what exactly s/he "taught" the student during lecture and/or class discussion and determine the most appropriate form of question to elicit student knowledge of that material. As if the confusion were not enough by this point, in preparing for the exam the student usually has to guess what was important about the course and what was not, introducing into the process further degrees of uncertainty. Then, later, there are of course recriminations about whether the test "really" reflected what was taught in the course, and on and on and on...
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With all of my exams written long before the semester began, I knew precisely what pieces of information I wanted my students to know. It was at this point that I had one of those "light bulb" moments. I decided that, for each exam, I would write a study guide in which the phrasing of the question, almost word for word, would be relayed, in the words of the study guide, to the student. Thus, in my courses, at least for the reading material, the student knows precisely what will be asked on each exam and, moreover, the phrasing in which it will be asked!
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I can almost hear experienced educators groaning, "But that's too easy! If you tell them the questions beforehand, of course they will do well!" My answer to these skeptics would be: you haven't been paying attention. Remember what is being tested here. With many multiple choice and true/false questions, there are many items for the student to remember. As a way of upping the ante, I never rephrase or simplify the multiple choice items or the true/false questions: they are always direct quotations from the literature (which is often highly advanced or technical reading, and not by any means confined to communication studies). In other words, throughout the course, the student who the aforementioned skeptics theorize simply recalls what is on the study guides and "does well" on the exam would have to, over the course of the semester, memorize hundreds of pieces of information, memorize hundreds of pieces of information, expressed in appropriately opaque scholarly language from fields with which the student is unlikely to be well-versed. To claim that this could be done by rote memorization of "what's gonna be on the test" is, frankly, ridiculous.
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Instead, what happens (and I will admit I did not predict all these nuances of this process when I instituted it) is that the student, absent the mental ability to memorize the items on the study guide, actually has to read the material more closely than they otherwise would have. The reason is that the key words which (remember) cannot be memorized, must make sense in the context of the item on the study guide (which is the exact way it is phrased on the exam), meaning that the student is forced, not to memorize the statement, but to fully understand the key terms, in order to process the choices on the exam, making highly fine-tuned decisions about these words and their referents.
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An extended, multi-part example will serve to illustrate this process. Let us say that I begin with a piece of information from an article I have assigned in my class in external organizational communication, the subject of which is persuasive messages in advertising. I want students to be able to judge the following statement true or false (and it might be encountered as a standalone true/false question or as an item in a multiple choice question): "Petty's research shows that people exposed under high involvement conditions agree with a message more if there are more arguments." As it happens, that statement is false. For it to be true, it should say, "...people exposed under low involvement conditions..." I should point out that this piece of information is taken from an article with an impressively extensive literature review, one in which many, many lines of research are cited, the research by Petty being merely one.
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Here is how the "clue" to that question is stated on the study guide: "Know whether or not Petty's research shows that people exposed under high involvement conditions agree with a message more if there are more arguments."
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For me, one major payoff gained by this method is what the student has to know in order to identify the key elements of the statement on the study guide (and hence the exam), which include (at a minimum): (1) who Petty is and what work was accomplished in this individual's line of research (and, secondarily, how Petty's research compares and contrasts with other lines of research on these issues); (2) what it means to be "exposed" to a message; (3) what constitutes an "argument" in advertising persuasion research (and, perhaps, how this was used in Petty's methodology); and (4) the distinction between high involvement conditions and low involvement conditions. And that is just for one item--the student must, just for this one exam, repeat that process over a hundred more times.
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So, please, don't try to tell me this method "makes it easy" for the student--far from it. It increases retention of detailed information, expressed in exactly the same language as that used in the original research writing, to an extraordinary degree, making it certain that the student retains the "pure" information, not some watered-down rephrasing in more casual language to "make it easy" to recall and answer on an exam. For those of an empirical turn of mind, to the charge that this makes getting a good grade "easy," I point to this inescapable fact: in the fifteen or so years I have used this method (and it's exactly the same template and structure, no matter which class I teach, so it's seen use in a number of classes now approaching a hundred, at three different universities, in about twenty different areas of specialization), I have not had that many students reach a grade of "A" (usually just a little less than what you would get in a normally distributed group of grades in a class), and only four cases in which a student has scored perfectly on all exams. Obviously, even for talented, motivated students, this is no cakewalk.
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One thing that has happened, about which I am very pleased, is that I have far fewer failing grades (well below the norm, often only one or two, sometimes none at all) and a slightly less than normal amount of "D" grades. I am sure this is due to the sense of empowerment bestowed upon the students by having in their hands the exact contents of almost all of the material for every exam, from the moment the course begins! Students who are driven to get an overall grade of "A," or even a "B," will naturally turn with more energy to using the study guides, whereas students with perhaps less ambition (or, in some cases, time and energy) will still be reassured that there will be no surprises to upset them when they take the exams--plus, if they decide they want to increase their scores subsequently in the semester (something which happens quite often), they can become more involved and work harder on the study guides, as the "A" and "B" students typically would already have done.
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Not being a teacher who counts the success of a class as based on how many students flunk it (I know a bunch of so-called teachers who do this!), I regard the reduction in failing grades, while retaining a nearly normal distribution for the other letter grades, to be a highly positive outcome. If you want to hang the "grade inflation" sign on me, then it's one I wear proudly. My method is a proven, enormously effective means of conveying to significant amounts of worthwhile information from respected, varied, detailed, and substantive scholarly (and occasionally popular) sources, to relatively large classes at large public universities.
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And if you think all of this makes me a drone, well...wrong again. The other part of my courses has to do with the extensive use of experiential learning simulations, so go check out the pages on the site that cover that aspect, along with the production and writing assignments.
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Believe me, I have everything covered.
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