Do They Understand? Checking Students’ Understanding of Complex Topics
The course material is well prepared, there are effective examples of the key topics, and engaging “thought” questions to help students synthesize the information. While going over all of this in class, the students are attentive, they nod positively to questions about understanding, and they don’t request any further information when asked if they need additional details on a topic. Great! The students are understanding and on board with the material being presented in class. But are they?
On the exam, the answers tend to wander, or students provide everything possible in hopes that something hits as the “correct” answer. This demonstrates that they don’t understand what information is important or how the information fits together. What to do? The answer comes back to teaching: What if the students had to teach the information to other students? This idea is not new, but how do you effectively make all of the students “teachers” rather than a select few?
Group Graffiti Project
I’d like to share an example of how I do this in my course on the Neuroscience of Pain. After several lectures that built up information about a complex neural system that is regulated by several brain regions as well as the immune and glial systems, it was up to the students to put all the information together. I cannot take credit for this technique and am so thankful for the Active Learning Session provided with the Kaneb Center Course Design Academy program. After the class learned about the system, how the neural inputs affect the system, how the immune system modulates activity, and finally how glial cells interact with all the inputs to enhance changes in the system, instead of asking students if they understand—I had students draw all the elements together. They were split into groups. Giant Post-it notes were placed around the classroom and each group had a single marker—with a different color for each group. They were asked to draw the circuitry of the system and to include any inputs that affect the activity of this system.
The students worked in groups so that they could bounce ideas off one another and discuss what they had learned in previous weeks. After 15–20 minutes, once the students felt their diagrams were complete, they were asked to take their colored marker with them and rotate to another diagram in the classroom and add anything they saw that was missing or needed correction. This allowed students to evaluate different ideas and see how other students approached the problem. The students were asked to rotate three times, and then they went back to their original diagrams to see what was added. The different colors made the additions and corrections stand out, and an interesting theme became evident: None of the diagrams were the same, even though the students were asked to describe the same system and were given the same information.
Not only was this striking to me, given that it was the first time I completed such an exercise, but it was also striking to the students. It allowed for a discussion about understanding the elements of the system and reiterating information that was missing from the students’ diagrams. In addition, it allowed the students to teach one another their take on the material and think about it actively rather than passively agree that they understand what I am saying. It was such a simple task that had a huge impact on my students’ learning. It is something that I will try and incorporate with other topics as well.
Diane Lane is an assistant teaching professor of neuroscience in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Biological Sciences. She was a 2022–23 participant in the Kaneb Center Course Design Academy.