Classroom Research Step 1: Pick a Learning Goal (Turn Your Teaching into Publications #6)

If you’ve made it this far, then you’ve probably decided to give classroom research a try. Congratulations. You either want a more reliable route to publication or you’ve accepted that, with or without publication, doing classroom research will improve your teaching.

To make this whole process as easy as possible, I am going to provide specific guidelines for assessing a teaching strategy: a rubric-based assessment using baseline and end-of-term data collections. It just seems easier that way, especially if you've never done an action or applied research study.

I like rubrics because they make it easy to organize entire courses, give examples to students about what they're learning, plan activities, and design and assess test items. 

Step 1a: Pick a Class

In what class do you want to test a teaching strategy? Is there a course you think you're really good at teaching and you want to assess yourself? Or maybe there's a class that you're not too sure about. Either one will work.

This coming semester, I’m teaching three different courses:

1.     General Psychology

2.     Human Growth and Development

3.     Behavioral Research

I'm doing an IRB-sanctioned assessment of my curriculum in #3, and I'm piloting a new Gen Ed instructional strategy for #1.

Step 1b: Pick a Learning Goal

What do you want students to be able to do by the end of your time together? The simplest way to choose a learning goal is to see if your school or program has already established a specific goal for the course. If the course you’ve chosen is a general education elective, for instance, then there is already at least one goal that has been determined by the university (or distant regents or trustees) and approved by a regional accrediting agency. My General Psychology course is a gen ed elective at my school and, as I’ve already shared, one of the stated goals of the course is that students will learn how to analyze stuff.

If the course you’ve chosen is part of a degree program, then your department may have identified specific goals for your course. Since only about 5% of my General Psych students are psychology majors, I don’t like to emphasize the psych program objectives (which are mostly information-based).

But there’s no reason to be limited by institutional or program learning goals. A semester is a lot of time to work on skills. It’s entirely possible to develop analytic thinking skills and something that you think is important. In my General Psychology courses in the past, I have experimented with the following learning goals in addition to the analytic one:

·      Knowledge of psychology (psychology program goal)

·      Emotional intelligence

·      Self-actualization

·      Creativity

·      Scientific Reasoning

·      Calculation

·      Interpretation of graphs, charts, and tables

I learned a lot about each of these skills as I designed activities I believed would help students develop them and as I witnessed the difficulties and questions that students had during the process. In several instances I presented the results of what I learned at conferences, and a few times the outcomes (good and bad) were published.

The One Hour Test

A trick for choosing an excellent learning goal is something I’ve taken from the late writer and educator Neil Postman (who stole it from someone else). Instead of imagining what goal you want to focus on for an entire semester, imagine that you only have one hour to spend with your students. If you had just one hour to teach your students one skill related to your course, then how would you spend that time? (Keep in mind that if you spent that hour talking/lecturing, then your students would get to practice passive listening; and I doubt that passive listening is the quintessential skill you want students to learn.)

What’s neat is that my answer to this question varies from year to year. For a very long time, self-actualization was the key skill I wanted students to practice. But now that I have just finished a school-wide five-year gen ed assessment, I’m really curious about how best to facilitate our gen ed objectives in the classroom. To begin with, I want to know if a single well-designed course is capable of taking students from “Fails to meet basic expectations” to “Meets or exceeds expectations.” And what I’ve found so far is that it is possible.

For me, I’ve decided to use the Gen Ed objective for my course, which asks students to analyze psychological phenomena.

Non-Learning Goals

You might want to target something unrelated to the learning objectives of your school, program, or course. We’ve been struggling with student absenteeism, for example, and I would very much appreciate it if faculty designed unique and inventive ways to get students to increase their attendance. “Showing up” isn’t all that difficulty, skills-wise, but it’s hard to teach college algebra to students who prefer to stay home.

Other nonlearning skills (that no doubt improve the learning environment and process) might include:

·      Psychological skills

·      Study habits

·      Relationship-building

·      Financial literacy

·      Diet and nutrition

·      Sleep

·      Meditation

·      Exercise and other health and lifestyle behaviors

There is no doubt that these skills would be beneficial for students, but choosing a nonlearning goal will make it slightly more difficult to find a home for publication. But more on that when we get to publishing your study.

Step 1c: Break Your Goal Into Steps            

It will be tempting for me to “teach” my students how to analyze behavior by giving them lots of examples—that is, analyzing behavior while they watch me. It will also be tempting for me to give them a bunch of problems to solve. But when, on that first exam, everybody fails, I won’t know where they got stuck or what they didn’t understand. Not unless I understand the logical progression of my chosen goal.

            If you don’t have a well-designed progression and achievement target, then you will run the risk of asking students to do too much too fast. They’ll be confused and will want to give up. You’ll become frustrated because, to you, what you’re asking of students is really simple; you will wonder why they don’t apply themselves.

            The simplest way I’ve found to avoid this inevitable scenario is to use a rubric. Find one or design your own. (See more about rubrics here.)

Step 1d: Choose an Achievement Level You Want to Target

On your rubric, decide the level you want your average student to reach by the end of the semester. This might seem arbitrary from the outset, but I’ve found that it’s helpful to show students were you expect them to be by the end of the semester (and then organize course grades around this goal for added incentive). 

If you have a PhD, then it can be hard to imagine a good benchmark for first- or second-year students. Your tendency will be to pick a target that’s unreasonably high. If you have to, start with your own level of achievement on a skill and work backwards to where you were when you started graduate school, then imaginatively move backwards still further. Keep going until you reach a point that makes you think, "My students will be embarrassed by how easy this is." You'll still be overestimating their preparation.

Next, I'll give an example using the rubric I've designed for my General Psychology course.