OZARKA COLLEGE

Eating an Elephant

One Bite at a Time

This week's methods provide instructors with an opportunity to use an active learning technique that boosts student learning and provides some assessment for the instructor, allowing the instructor to focus on any areas that present a problem for students.

Characteristic Features are those traits that help define a topic and differentiate it from others. This assessment technique is particularly useful for seeing whether students are separating items or ideas that are easily confused. By selecting especially critical differentiators, an instructor can both highlight and assess the students' use of analysis to help them characterize central concepts. Because this assessment technique asks students to fill in blanks with plus and minus signs, scanning the results is easy and rapid; it is suitable for use in large classes. Even simple tallies will reveal the extent to which students are paying more attention to some traits and less attention to others. (Angelo and Cross. 1993.)

One Sentence Summary-has the students answer the questions "Who does what to whom, when where how, and why?" (represented by the letters WDWWWWHW) about a given topic, and then to synthesize those answers into a single informative, grammatical, and long summary sentence. This technique also gives students practice "chunking" information - condensing it into smaller, interrelated bits that are more easily processed and recalled. This is a powerful way to help students understand and synthesize complex information. Be aware, though, that some material cannot be easily summarized. Limit the topic and try it out yourself first so you do not inadvertently give students a confusing or even impossible task. The final sentence should be grammatical, factual, complete, and original. (Angelo and Cross. 1993.)

If you have time and don't want to wait for the next bite, you can find the rest of the toolbox in myOzarka under the "Ozarka Resources" tab.

Or you can follow this link:

https://www.ozarka.edu/files/resources/teachingtoolbox.doc

I will be posting each section in the Student Success Center Blog. So if you are interested in checking out "back bites," you can find them there.

Or you can follow this link:
https://www.ozarka.edu/blogs/success/index.cfm/Weekly-Postings-for-Faculty-

Hope you enjoyed it.