Three teaching things: week of May 2
In this issue: a paper on the benefits of collaborative note-taking and techniques to build participation & online community.
Issue #45
1. Collaborative note-taking affects cognitive load: the interplay of completeness and interaction
Here’s a model of note-taking which seems to create conditions for learning and that could easily be incorporated into a flipped or online course.
First, sidebar time into (overly-simplified) cognitive load theory: when learning, we have a finite amount of working memory to encode what we’re encountering into our long-term memory. Too much load can impact our ability to learn. But not all cognitive load is bad. Germane cognitive load is the mental work that’s needed to “put” what we’ve got in our working memory into our long-term memory: learning takes effort. Extraneous cognitive load, however, is everything that gets in the way of the learning task. As educators, we should be aiming to reduce the extraneous cognitive load, and enhance germane cognitive load.
The results of the study in this paper suggests that allowing students to create a common set of class notes by using the real-time collaboration features of an online word processor “…benefits learners’ levels of germane cognitive load” (p. 13) — a good thing.
So…what did the instructor do? Graduate students enrolled in the experimental group for this course were put into small groups of 3-5 students, and provided a shared Google Doc for each week of class. Each student group collaborated asynchronously on ten sets of lecture notes (one for each week of lecture in the course). Each week, students in groups were asked to “…take collaborative notes on the concepts from the online lecture…” (p. 8), and were able to use the notes when taking weekly quizzes.
Costley, J., & Fanguy, M. (2021). Collaborative note-taking affects cognitive load: the interplay of completeness and interaction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-021-09979-2
2. Participation Versus Attendance: When Just Showing Up Isn’t Enough
Here’s a short blog post by Dr. Alice Kim, Dr. Celia Popovic and Dr. Brian Narin that points to research that underpins the claim in the post title: that students “connecting with the content is critical for effective learning” and closes with six different approaches to encourage participation.
There are two additional resources linked, including a 20-page, 28-year in the making (!) PDF by Dr. Kevin Yee that lists over 250 interactive classroom techniques.
3. 6 Strategies for Building Community in Online Courses
To close, a web-based resource from the K. Patricia Cross Academy. Here, community is defined as “…more than participation; it requires moving from participation to engagement, involvement, and action.”
Included among the suggestions are three videos on collaborative learning techniques, adapted for the online learning environment.
I’ve embedded one below:
Three Teaching Things is a weekly newsletter compiled by Gavan Watson, which shares three different teaching and learning resources (papers, resources or tools) worth your attention.
May will mark the first anniversary of this newsletter. What started as an experiment has grown to a sustained year-long effort. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to write this over the year, but I will be taking a hiatus over the summer months. Not quite sure what that look like yet, but wanted to give you a heads-up to expect a change in frequency of publishing at the end of the month.
Thanks for reading!