How much information are the learners really retaining from your lecture? – AKA Why are they keeping the envelope and throwing away the letter?

How much information are the learners really retaining from your lecture? – AKA Why are they keeping the envelope and throwing away the letter? 

One of the ideas I discuss with faculty that I work with is to create “place-holders for learning”. Structuring the learners’ interactions with the content so that it all builds upon itself naturally

1. – introduce a topic,
2. define relevant terms or technologies,
3. speak/assign readings on the topic,
4. ask the learners to prove their knowledge.

IF each of those steps are not connected – and very obviously for the learner – then the place holders for learning are not being created. 

A place-holder for learning can be bold and obvious to the students – like a list of key terms they must remember for the upcoming exam.

A place-holder for learning can also be a checklist of tasks for groups to divide amongst themselves.

The place-holder has to lead to the place that has the “knowledge”. A place-holder for learning is only as good as its associated knowledge source – in both accuracy and accessibility.

If the students are referring back to their own notes from a lecture that took place in the beginning of the semester, that wasn’t recorded, and has no additional lecture resources. Then the place-holders for learning they have built are connected back to a source that is not easily verified for accuracy.

By accessibility I mean the fact that both the learner’s notes and the lecturer’s words do not exist together in a digital format that can be viewed by both learner and lecturer – with the knowledge they are looking at the same material.

If you find that your learners are coming back to the assessments with simply a surface level understanding of the content, and they find themselves unable to make the deeper connections without a lot of individual assistance.

These learners are taking home the envelops and throwing away the letters from your lecture/readings. 

In order to fix consider:

Making additional efforts to make your content available to the learners in multiple formats – readings should be digitally available unless impossible – and lectures should be recorded and made available for however long the learner is connected to the lesson/course (for the whole training, entire semester, etc.)

Obvious connections need to be made between the lecture content, the upcoming assessment, and the eventual usage of the content in the “real world”

Feedback/checkpoints for the learner need to happen before the resulting assessments – or at least before the higher stakes assessments where failure is more severe.

• Practice exams,
• draft assignments,
• points for reflection assignments,
• assigning points for repetitive quiz taking from a pool of questions
  • For instance a completion score can be given for completing a 10 question Quiz 10 times instead of using the actual earned scores. (Random block of questions required)

All of these examples can lead the learners to the connections that you need them to make before it is time for the actual assessment to be completed.