Over the summer, at one of the “curriculum Tuesdays” hosted by our Director of Professional Development, after reading about a course-ending assignment by Sue Frantz, we developed a shorter version to be completed every two weeks by students who have enrolled in the honors section of Social-Cognitive Psychology.
Our assignment attempts to leverage several principles that come to us from the learning sciences.
- Elaborative learning: students need to make a personal connection between course content and their personal experience or prior academic learning.
- Distributed practice: students review course content on a regular schedule.
The second “half” of the assignment, after writing the review and elaboration paragraph, is a peer review, facilitated by Canvas, our learning management system. The educational benefit to students from a peer review component was emphasized at Stanford PsychONE conference in 2017. The short-version is that students invest more time and effort into work that will not only be read by instructors but will also be critically reflected on by classmates.
I like this assignment because I think it’s got high-value and low-friction for students. That is, for the small amount of effort that it requires, they learn quite a bit. Further, as we look forward to a 25% increase in our teaching-load, the assignment feels sustainable.