Effective Strategies for In-Class Review

Event Date & Time

Event Description

Managing the variation in students’ background understanding is one of the greatest challenges for successful university teaching. Many instructors devote significant class time to reviewing concepts from previous courses in the hopes of creating a level foundation for learning. Frustratingly, these review efforts often fail to meet their goals. In this workshop, participants will identify challenges that can limit the effectiveness of in-class review and explore results from education research that offer some direction for improved approaches. Participants will also experience, from a student perspective, a strategy for review based on collaborative two-stage testing (Maxwell, Mcdonnell, & Wieman, 2015). This strategy, which was developed at UBC, offers three key benefits: (1) students gain awareness of their own level of preparation, (2) students receive immediate feedback to improve their understanding, (3) the instructor receives detailed information on student understanding and misconceptions that can be used to tailor instruction.
(1) Maxwell, E. J.; Mcdonnell, L.; Wieman, C. E. An Improved Design for In-Class Review. J. Coll. Sci. Teach. 2015, 44 (5), 48–52.

Facilitators:

Jane Maxwell, Teaching and Learning Fellow, Chemistry