Tailoring Teaching to The Learner: Teaching Tips to Help Students, Strategies to Enhance Motivation and Literacy

Tailoring Teaching to The Learner: Teaching Tips to Help Students, Strategies to Enhance Motivation and Literacy. Teaching Tips to Help Students. Use Their Learning Styles to Study More Effectively. Strategies to Enhance Motivation. Strategies to Enhance Literacy. Assessing Learning. Specific Instruments

Teaching Tips to Help Students, Strategies to Enhance Motivation and Literacy: Tailoring Teaching to The Learner

Teaching Tips to Help Students

Use Their Learning Styles to Study More Effectively

• Use diagrams, PowerPoint presentations, videos, outlines, charts, concept maps, graphs, symbols, etc., to help students who are visual learners remember concepts. Encourage the use of index cards of different colors to help organize material to study and the use of different colored highlighters to underline important information in notes and handouts.
• Use cooperative learning groups to help auditory learners talk aloud and explain ideas to others. Encourage them to form study groups to ask each other questions, tape notes and read aloud to each other, and review course material with peers.
• Require writing assignments, such as listing concepts or rewriting ideas in own words, to help those students who prefer reading/writing. Give a variety of reading assignments and handouts, and encourage them to organize diagrams and charts into sentences. Have them summarize reading assignments in their own words.
• Have students actively work with content by using active learning strategies and give students an opportunity to practice what they learn in real-life settings (use scavenger hunts to find resources for the elderly community client or a windshield assessment to learn how to assess a community ). Use field trips, role play, problem-solving activities, and flashcards to help them learn concepts. Allow them to move into different groups to work with a variety of students who learn differently.

Strategies to Enhance Motivation

Faculty can pre-assess students’ motivation and attitudes about the course or topic through the use of questionnaires and small group discussion. In addition to interviewing students, the College Student Inventory (CSI), which is available in paper-and-pencil or online formats, provides an assessment in four areas: academic motivation, social motivation, general coping, and receptivity to support services (Hirsch , 2001; Stratil , 1988).

Motivation is internally derived, but can be enhanced or influenced by the faculty member’s passion for the material. Making the material interesting to students who might not be excited about the topic is challenging, but faculty enthusiasm for the topic can motivate students to learn the material. Part of the faculty member’s role is to model a positive sense of enthusiasm for the material and the students.

Displaying emotion, energy, and animation in teaching sessions can help students catch the enthusiasm for learning. Humor is often effective to influence students who appear to be extremely unmotivated and difficult to reach. Using a cartoon or funny story related to nursing may be helpful to keep students engaged and receptive to learning the material.

Leamnson (2000) suggests “that the really difficult part of teaching is not organizing and presenting the content but rather in doing something that inspires students to focus on that content—to become engaged, to have some level of emotional involvement with it” (p .39). Therefore, learning should become a more personal interaction between the faculty and the learner to facilitate or motivate the students’ interest in the material.

Teaching then becomes a process that encourages and reinforces curiosity and other modes of emotional involvement with the material. Several other strategies can be used to help students become and stay motivated as well. Using authentic assignments, those that will actually lead to developing knowledge and skills that will eventually be used in later situations can be extremely motivating (Svinicki, 2004).

For example, to teach students how to understand why it may be difficult for certain clients to make health-care appointments on time, consider assigning students to use public transportation, such as a city bus or subway. Success itself can be a motivating factor. Faculty can structure assignments and tasks so that early success is likely and the learning is challenging and has interest v alue.

Faculty who provide students with immediate feedback about their progress toward learning, help to reinforce the learner’s efforts toward goal attainment. In addition, faculty can help students acknowledge their own efforts toward achieving success and to begin to perceive their errors or mistakes as learning opportunities. Giving encouragement and reflecting on the progress that students are making aid in motivation even in the face of obstacles and frustration (Svinicki, 2004).

Strategies to Enhance Literacy

While reading and comprehension difficulties are a part of academic risk, students often do not seek assistance specifically for these difficulties (Hirsch, 2001). Thus, illiteracy may often be a hidden problem. Frequently students will complain of reading too slowly, but may also lack the comprehension skills that are actually more crucial to academic success. Various assessment tools can be used to assess reading difficulties. Reading rate can be calculated by having students read a passage from a textbook while being timed.

The words per minute can be calculated from this sample reading. In addition, there are more than 40 formulas that can be used to measure the readability levels of written materials. Researchers suggest applying a number of readability formulas to any given piece of written material, and then using the results in conjunction with the reader’s individual characteristics to determine the difficulty that students might have (Bastable, 2003).

Faculty can use two basic methods to evaluate reading materials. One method employs the use of one of a number of formulas to determine the average length of sentences and words (vocabulary difficulty). Examples of readability formulas include Spache , Flesch, Fog, Fry, and Smog, all of which have high reliability and predictive validity and are available on the Web (Bastable, 2003). In addition, newer computerized readability analyzes are available to evaluate reading materials that can prove useful to faculty.

These formulas function as a means to test written material, and the formula chosen should be geared to the specific learner population being tested. Many commercial software packages are capable of applying several formulas to calculate the reading level (Mailloux, Johnson, Fisher, & Petibone , 1995). One strategy to help build reading and comprehension skills is to teach students to develop a system of active reading and note taking to reduce the text into what is most important to learn.

This process involves surveying the material before reading, developing questions to answer before reading, reading small sections or paragraphs, summarizing the information in your own words within the margins of the text, and then reviewing to ascertain if the material has been retained (Hirsch, 2001; Stewart & Hartman, 2006). Helping students to find main ideas, highlighting the ideas, and developing one example to illustrate the idea are useful ways to help students focus on the material to be learned.

Encouraging students to work collaboratively in groups to review and discuss reading assignments helps to broaden their comprehension of concepts and deepens their knowledge base. Helping students make the reading assignment personally relevant may increase comprehension, such as having them apply the material to a specific patient assignment or case study.

Literacy improvement takes time, effort, and practice. Reading a variety of materials, from textbooks to pleasure reading, can provide various opportunities to practice increasing reading speed and comprehension. By encouraging students to use a variety of techniques and to read frequently, students may benefit in their ability to transfer these practices to fit the demands of more reading assignments and become difficult more proficient in their literacy skills.

Assessing Learning

It is also important to assess learning so that instructors can better adjust and tailor strategies for future students.

Preadmission Assessment

Preadmission assessment information, such as grade point average, standardized test scores from such tests as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and American College Test (ACT), and high school rank, often are used to admit students into nursing programs. These measures alone, however, are frequently not sufficient to determine the overall potential of students entering nursing programs today.

Before entering into a program, pre-testing students in areas such as learning style preferences, mathematical abilities, reading and writing abilities, stress and coping strategy preferences, critical thinking abilities, and English as a second language (for example, the TOEFL exam) could help in planning for additional resources and to inform faculty about deficiencies that students may have before providing instruction (Billings & Halstead, 2005).

Feedback on Learning

Faculty can use a number of resources to determine what learning is actually taking place in the classroom so that course materials and methods can be adjusted accordingly. Traditionally, formal classroom assessment involves testing, which captures what students learned for the exam, but does not identify how they learned throughout the course. Low scores would indicate too late that students did not learn as much or as well as faculty intended or expected.

Angelo and Cross (1993) identify 50 different methods that faculty can use to “obtain useful feedback on what, how much, and how well their students are learning. Faculty can then use this information to refocus their teaching to help students make their learning more efficient and more effective” (p. 3). Such Assessing Learning 101 06Moyer(F) Ch-06 5/28/07 2:11 PM Page 101 methods give faculty ways to monitor learning throughout the course to help students before they begin to flounder.

Classroom assessment techniques (CAT) are tools that have the following characteristics: learner-centered, teacher-directed, mutually beneficial, formative, and context-specific (Angelo & Cross, 1993). Classroom assessment is learner-centered, which shifts the emphasis from teaching to learning. CAT can be used to provide students with feedback to inform them whether they have grasped the material or if they need to adjust their study habits to enhance their learning.

Teacher-directed refers to the faculty member’s responsibility for describing when, how, and what to assess. It is the individual faculty member’s own judgment that is used to determine which CAT is used and when. Classroom assessment is mutually beneficial. By participating in the assessment, students learn if they have accurately grasped the material or if they need to improve or alter their study strategies.

Likewise, faculty members can gain insight into their students’ learning and age or improve their teaching based upon this input. Classroom assessment techniques are context-specific, meaning that what works well with one class or group may not work well with another class or group.

Thus, faculty members need to consider using a variety of techniques. Faculty can use a CAT before beginning class, during class, and/or at the end of class to determine how well students understand the information and to discover gaps in understanding before moving to the next topic.

Specific Instruments

Seven of the most widely used, quickest, and simplest techniques to assess content knowledge in almost any discipline follow:

• Background knowledge probes: These can be a pre-test or short answer questionnaire to use before presenting or introducing a topic. They are designed to elicit specific background knowledge from the student on the topic so that the faculty member can determine how and where to begin the formal instruction of the material. This technique also serves as a preview to focus the students’ attention on the topic.
• Focused listing: This is used to determine what students recall about important terms or concepts by having them list several ideas that they remember about the term or concept.
• Misconception/preconception checks: These use specifically designed tools to uncover common incorrect or incomplete assumptions that students have about a topic and that may act as barriers to new learning. A questionnaire or pre-test designed to uncover commonly held incorrect knowledge is an example.
• Empty outlines: These work well when large amounts of facts and principles are regularly presented. The empty or partially completed outline is given to the students who must complete it within a designated amount of class time.
• Memory matrix: This provides feedback in the form of a blank rectangle divided into columns and rows that the students fill out with recalled information and use to illustrate relationships in the material. Faculty can quickly scan and analyze the matrix to assess the student’s understanding of concepts.
• Minute papers: These enable students to write on a note card their responses to what was the most important point learned in class or what question still remains unclear or unanswered. This useful feedback provides manageable amounts of information about student learning that can help faculty adjust their teaching for the next class. The minute paper requires students to do more than just merely recall what they heard or did; it asks them to evaluate what they understood or did not understand. 102 6 Tailoring Teaching to the Learner 06Moyer(F) Ch-06 5/28/07 2:11 PM Page 102
• Muddiest point: This involves having the faculty pose a question such as “What is still unclear or muddy?” Students write the answer to the question anonymously so that students will be honest and not fear reprisal. This input can help faculty to clarify misconceptions and provide remedial recommendations. The minute paper and the muddiest point have been identified as resources that assess higher level thinking.

Conclusion

This topic cues faculty into the importance of assessing and promoting learning. Learning is an extremely complex concept that varies for each individual student. Students learn in various ways and need to be assisted to develop additional learning skills in order to be more successful in a variety of learning environments. Faculty should strive to facilitate and guide students to realize their highest potential to learn by encouraging connections between themselves, their students, and the material that students are expected to learn.

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