U of Ideas of General Interest -- March 2000
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Mark Reutter, Business & Law Editor, (217) 333-0568; [email protected]
COLLEGE TEACHING
Unlearning misinformation helps students learn, scholars find
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. ---- Unlearning what is already known is often more difficult than learning new information.
That was a lesson two University of Illinois business professors learned when they examined how well beginning college students in a finance class understood the important points of a lecture.
Like many entry-level courses, the UI class is taught in a lecture format before 450 to 900 students. "How many times have you thought you taught a beautiful finance lesson, only to discover that the students didn't get it," asked James A. Gentry, a UI finance professor who researched the issue with colleague Michael A. Dyer.
"As a teacher you are disappointed, but, more importantly, you want to learn how to enhance the likelihood that the students get it and retain it."
To find out more about the dynamics of learning in a big lecture, they asked a sample of students to write a brief response to the questions: "What were the most important points in the lecture?" and "What were the muddiest points in the lecture?" The responses formed the basis for a brief review of the prior week's lecture as well as short, unannounced quizzes on the most confusing points identified by the students.
With quiz scores usually below the 50 percent mark, the professors held small group discussions to identify why so little information was being retained. "In a large lecture class where grades are based exclusively on three or four hourly examinations," Dyer said, "a frequently employed strategy of students is not to prepare for the lectures, but rather to cram for the examinations."
Only a small proportion of the students (between 15 and 20 percent) recognized what was important in the prior lecture. Even when all the student responses were tabulated together, between 33 and 38 percent of the points the faculty members considered most important were not mentioned.
Unlearning incorrect information was a major step in improving learning, Gentry and Dyer said. Before presenting new material, teachers should use a quick diagnostic "probe," containing a few questions, to help locate hidden "icebergs" of misinformation. "Whatever you discover will help you and the students find more appropriate starting points," they noted.
Other pointers for improving the learning skills of beginning college students:
-- Provide many and varied examples, metaphors and analogies to teach new information. Ask students to provide their own examples and be sure to give them feedback on their examples.
-- Don't assume that students understand a concept. Have them jot down confusing points as well as explicitly point out how long it takes to master any academic subject.
-- Test what you want students to learn. Short, non-threatening quizzes are useful, as are study questions or sample tests to practice for the examinations.
-mr-
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