Cracking the code of biology tests: let’s get metacognitive!

This is a guest post from Greg Crowther. 

In a previous post here on Scientist Sees Squirrel, Steve raised an important and hard question: aside from helping students learn the specific content of our courses, how can we help students get better at learning in general?

Although it’s a hard question, I think I have a pretty good one-word answer: metacognition.

From one big midterm to weekly quizzes: what I expected, and what actually happened

You can sometimes teach an old dog new tricks.  Last semester, I made a significant change in my teaching, in one of my courses*: I dumped the traditional high-stakes midterm exam in favour of small weekly quizzes.  I know, it’s not a breathtakingly original idea.  I was persuaded to try it not because I’m a brilliant pedagogical experimentalist (I’m not), but because I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of Terry McGlynn’s new book, The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching. You can read Terry’s book too, as soon as it’s released this summer; in the meanwhile, you can read a little bit about it here.

If The Chicago Guide has one theme, I’d say it’s using respect for your students to make navigating your courses easier them and also for you.  Who wouldn’t want to do that? The book makes lots of suggestions I’m likely to adopt; but one I jumped on right away was that move from a big high-stakes midterm to small weekly quizzes. It’s not that I’d never thought of that, or seen it done – it’s that Terry does a wonderful job of selling the idea.  The Chicago Guide convinced me that the weekly quiz could have lots of advantages, both for my students and for me.  (It slices! It dices!).

It didn’t quite work out the way I expected.