March 4, 2022

Have you missed my weekly teaching tips email?  I am afraid the past several weeks overwhelmed me and something had to give.  I will do my best to send out tips more regularly but can make no promises for the rest of this spring semester.

Helping Your Student Improve How They Take Notes, Study and Learn

This week’s tip is an article published in the Chronicle of Higher Ed on February 3, 2022 by Beckie Supiano.  As an instructor of a course many people dread (I have had dentists and physicians tell me the hated biochemistry) I work to make the concepts interesting and accessible.  I believe the biggest issue is how students process and learn the concepts.  I work to convince them to adopt a growth mindset, that all of them can be successful in my biochemistry course.  I also describe and model learning best practices like spaced study and practice (vs. cramming and just reading over their notes).  Supiano’s article focuses on note taking and helping students identify key ideas and concepts.

Take Note

As an instructor for an introductory course with 1,500 students, Tanya Martini thinks a lot about what first-year students need to succeed.

So a question we posed in a recent newsletter — from a dean looking for ideas on how to help this cohort of first-year students, whose educations have been so affected by the pandemic — resonated with her.

Martini, a professor of psychology at Brock University, in Ontario, wrote in to share the guided note-taking format she and her co-instructors use in their introductory psychology course, currently offered online to combined sections. The professors landed on the format ahead of the pandemic, but Martini thinks it might be especially helpful now, given students’ fractured attention and uneven preparation.

For each lecture, the instructors give students an outline of the lecture’s key points and a template to fill in. Martini hopes to roll out a color-coded “road map,” visually laying out the lecture, this coming fall.

The instructors strive to break up their lectures with activities, but they still ask students to do a lot of listening. And the students, they find, struggle with “knowing what to write down,” Martini said in an interview. “The guided notes were intended as a means of helping students to recognize what was central. And then, as they evolved for me, additionally it became a tool to help students retain a sense of the big picture.”

Martini, who shared in a previous newsletter how she makes explicit to students the skills they’ll develop in her courses, sees extracting the important information from a lecture as an important skill. Students might not know how to do it in their first year of college, but they’ll be expected to in future courses. And though they might not regularly listen to someone talk for an hour or two in their professional lives, being able to identify the main point someone is trying to make helps in just about any context.

Martini sees this effort as in keeping with the ideas of two teaching experts she follows: Viji Sathy’s emphasis on structure as important for inclusive teaching and Dan Willingham’s idea of building a lecture around questions in order to help students remember information.

Students appear to like the support; it’s something that comes up spontaneously in course evaluations, she noted.

Martini has wondered what happens to students who benefit from guided note-taking and aren’t given the same kind of structure in subsequent courses. So she tries to help them think through how they might do something similar going forward.

I provide lecture outlines, study guides and quizzes to help students focus on what I think are the core concepts and ideas.  What are things you do to foster better learning skills and identifying big ideas in your students?

Cheers, Paul

Paul Laybourn (he/him/his)
Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Director, W2R S-STEM Program
Director, NoCo B2B Program
Director, REU Site in Molecular Biosciences
paul.laybourn@colostate.edu
970-491-5100