eInstruction has developed a set of guidelines for involving students in the learning process. These teaching guidelines include following four fundamental components:
1. Daily Instructional Activity
As a general guideline, 8-12 appropriate objective questions should be integrated into every one hour learning activity. The breakdown of the questions, assuming the maximum of 12 questions, is as follows:
- Prequestions (4)
- 2 review questions over previous materials to provide retrieval and repetition practice
- prequestions to direct attention to the session's learning objectives
- Inserted questions (5)
- Questions for retrieval and repetition purposes
- Postquestions (3)
- Questions for retrieval and repetition practice (spacing occurs which improves learning benefits)
2. Biweekly Instructional Activity
On a biweekly basis, it is recommended you incorporate an engaging team activity into the learning environment. eInstruction has developed a CPS team activity called "There It Is!" to support a simple and fun retrieval/repetition activity. You can find this game as well as others on eInstruction's team activity tab. For instructions on how to set up and implement "There It Is," click here. For setup instructions for "Challenge Board" (a game similar to Jeopardy ®), click here.
3. Weekly Instructional Activity
On a weekly basis, instructors might consider offering a self-paced classroom activity with immediate feedback. This is diagnostic in nature with practice on retrieval, repetition and spacing. CPS supports this by coordinating a teacher-entered key to a set of objective questions in hardcopy format. It is recommended that a relatively small number of questions be used and coordinated to the key learning points of the week. Approximately 10 - 15 questions are reasonable to support this activity.
Each student proceeds to answer the questions. As an answer to a question is entered the student is provided feedback in the following manner. If the answer to the question the student is attempting is correct, CPS will blink the student's response pad number and then move immediately to the next question. If the feedback is positive - the answer entered was the correct answer.
On the other hand, if the answer provided is incorrect, CPS will blink the student's response pad number, but remain on the question. The feedback indicated that the answer entered was incorrect and another answer must be entered until the correct answer is provided. At that time, the student is positioned on the next question and ready to enter an answer for that question.
Although the feedback is very minimal, correct or incorrect, the student can eventually attempt every question and identify the correct answer to every question. This can provide the basis for additional work for the student to understand the basis for the correctness of a question.
4. Bimonthly Instructional Activity
Twice a month, we suggest a more formal 30-50-question test. This test can be constructed in the same manner as the Bi-weekly activity with a hardcopy for the student and a CPS teacher-constructed key. The key benefits of spacing, repetition, retrieval and delayed feedback are applicable with this activity.
Notice the delayed feedback approach recommended here. As the student undertakes the questions, no feedback is provided other than the fact that CPS has received the student's answer. Since the results are electronically captured there should be no reason why the feedback for the activity cannot be provided within a day or two of the activity.
Source:
eInstruction - Methodology for Academic Progress (MAP)
