“I like to talk about the teaching,” cites Dr. Craig Lending as one of the reasons he’s a Pearson Faculty Advisor. “Mastering focuses on the pedagogy, and talking about it with other faculty members gets them thinking about pedagogy over content,” says Lending, who enjoys educating other faculty on how he runs his Biology courses – one for Majors and one for Non-Majors. Traveling to present MasteringBiology allows Lending to interact with former students of his who are now teaching, as well as meet other Mastering Faculty Advisors in person. “I wanted to be an A&P professor after seeing the great artwork they have to work with.”
For Faculty Advisors new to the program, Lending reminds them to “be a part of the action.” Presenting not only allows you to teach others about how you use technology, it also gets you thinking about what you could do differently, what new ideas you could try. Traveling and presenting also allows you to step out of the daily grind and really focus on the teaching.
Lending uses MasteringBiology to get students to do the work on a topic before it’s addressed in lecture. Assignments are given the class session before the topic will be covered in lecture, and 20% extra credit is added for those students who complete the work beforehand. “Students love extra credit, and I feel it helps them more during the lecture” to do the work before the topic is covered in class.
Students are responding positively to this tactic, with about 75% of them completing their assignments before class. From a teaching perspective, this method helps reassure Lending that students are at least looking at the material. An increase in class participation, as well as a lesser need for a straight PowerPoint lecture, has resulted from the use of MasteringBiology. Lending also has been able to shape his lectures to focus on problem areas students are having with a particular topic because he sees the results of their assignments beforehand.
“Mastering is the best platform for conceptual-based questions. The open-ended format and feedback without easy answers are both great and unique aspects of Mastering.” Students need to learn to think, and MasteringBiology helps them to develop this skill while ensuring that they know the material.
In addition to traveling and talking about teaching, Lending is helping shape the development of Mastering itself. As Mastering evolves, Lending hopes his feedback will help take the Mastering platform to an even more useful place. “The big picture is that students aren’t always prepared to learn, but we have the opportunity to effectively channel the technology to teach students how to learn.”
I like very much the idea of encouraging students to complete assignments before a lecture. I also agree those who argue that extra credit too often is an unfair advantage for student who more time (e.g., do not work or have family responsibilities)but this helps to counter the unfair advantage. QUESTION: What type of activities does Lending do with MasteringBiology? Thanks!
ReplyDeleteGabe,
ReplyDeleteI would agree that this presents an equal opportunity for all students to earn a bit of 'extra credit'. I typically assign about 80 to 90 minutes worth of total assignments per week (based on the statistics provided by Mastering when you create assignments). Since I teach on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule, I post the material to be covered the next week as soon as possible on Thursday afternoon, and if they choose to do the assignment for the 20% extra, it must be completed by the following Tuesday at class time. They then have one full week to do the assignment for full credit.
The Mastering assignments overall are worth only 10% of their total course grade, so the most they can earn is 2% 'extra credit' -- I do not give other activities for EC, so they have the opportunity to boost their overall grade by 2% in the course -- not a lot, but enough to possibly make a difference in their final grade.
Most of the assignments consist of the activities built around the BioFlix, and most animations that are in the tutorials and coaching activities are assigned, with a few of the reading questions scattered in. They tend to complain if the assignments get much longer than 90 minutes per week.
I am currently starting to 'play' with the Advanced Editor, as I find the best questions to be those that are the 'drag and drop' type rather than multiple choice. My hope is that, as more and more faculty begin to create content, the folks at Pearson will come up with a way for us to easily share them.
Hope this helps, and please feel free to e-mail me at clending@brockport.edu if you want any further information.
Good luck!!!
Craig