Steven Blurton
Abstract
Using teaching activities to improve students’ preparation for classes
Good student preparation enables the teacher to have rich discussion, hold effective exercises, and have well-motivated students in class. In contrast, a lack of preparation can not only render an exercise pointless, but is also connected to poorer performance in exams and a higher probability of dropping out from the course, in short, is a severe obstacle for reaching intended learning outcomes. Though student preparation has rarely been in the focus of teaching and learning in higher education, some teachers have provided empirical data to point out the problem and also suggested some methods, mostly introductory quizzes, to raise student preparation.
In this project, I investigated the effectiveness of general teaching activities in class to increase the time students spent on preparation before class. While quizzes may be suitable for courses that contain mostly intended learning goals in the knowledge domain of the European Qualifications Framework, it seems difficult to align quizzes with learning goals based on skills or responsibility and autonomy (former: competencies). Also, creating those quizzes to raise student preparation puts a further strain on limited teaching capacity. Therefore, I investigated the effectiveness of general teaching activities by strategically placing them in class. In one group, those activities were held early in class, in the other they were occurred later in class. Preparation behaviour was compared between the two groups and to a third group in which no activities that required preparation before class were held.
The results show that placing teaching activities at the beginning of the class can increase the amount of preparation before class. This effect, however, was not statistically significant. Therefore, further studies, preferably with a larger sample size are necessary to confirm this result. Beside this main result, the obtained evidence suggests that a lack of preparation may be caused by the immense time pressure put on students nowadays. Throughout the data collection and across all groups, students overwhelmingly report having less time available for preparation than they wished.