Results tagged “testing” from PEDABLOGUE

Education Week is reporting on a study that the makers of the ACT have recently put out that points to the gap between what high schools and college teachers want their students to be ready for when they come to college.

The new survey found that college professors generally want incoming students to have a deeper understanding of a selected number of topics and skills, while high school teachers in all content areas tend to rate a far broader array of content and skills as “important” or “very important.”

In other words, the "array" of content coverage is a sign that HS emphasizes breadth, while college tends to emphasize depth of work in a single content area. I'm not sure if this happens because of the assumptions of high school teachers about what college actually expects, or if it is merely a symptom of a larger neurosis regarding testing (prompted, perhaps, by NCLBA). "Breadth" is easy to test and grade, and errs toward assessing memorized knowledge over analytical and critical thinking, which usually takes essay reading and concentrated analysis in itself to generate a response.

Thus, the report itself shows the outcome:

the survey found a general lack of reading courses in high school and a decline in the teaching of targeted reading strategies after the 9th grade. In contrast, college instructors of remedial courses rated such strategies as very important and reported devoting a large percentage of time to teaching them.

I am not damning all High School in some generic, demonizing way. One of the things colleges have to offer is a shift in this paradigm of thinking. I think breadth is perhaps JUST AS important as depth for that level of learner, and I would simply suggest that some sort of balance should be sought. Whether or not an institution can support that kind of balance, in a frenzy to establish assessable outcomes, is debatable. But until teachers begin supporting reading in every way they can -- which means being active readers of their own student's writing, in addition to simply assigning texts -- the culture will not change.

The last time I gave a quiz to my Intro to Lit course, I tried a new variation on my collaborative quiz methods (see this blog's articles tagged with keyword "testing" for others)... and it seemed to work really well.

Have you ever posted a question on your quiz that you thought was important enough to test, but which you knew was likely to be one few students answered correctly? I had that sneaking suspicion myself, when I asked students to define "metonymy" in a multiple choice question. The term was not really covered very well in the book, but I did give a mini-lecture about the word and I thought it was important for them to understand...but when I was composing the quiz my back brain reminded me that I didn't see very many students taking notes at the time I lectured, and I knew it was brand new and difficult term to spell, let alone comprehend, so I suspected few would get it right on the quiz.

But I wasn't really sure. So I gave them a chance. After everyone had turned their quizzes over, I asked them to take a moment to circle the one single answer on they quiz they were least sure of. Then they passed the quiz to a neighbor (who, as in Quiz Taker/Note Maker, had to put their name under the quiz-taker's and would be held accountable for any cheating on their behalf). The neighbor then had to read the circled question and write their own answer to it down. If they felt the student got the question right already, they were told to write something supportive instead, like "way to go!" Then I collected the quizzes.

Once I had them all, I did a quick scan of the pile...and found my suspicions were correct. Most people had circled the "metonymy" question. There was another question often circled that came in "2nd place". I turned these two answers into brief discussions with the class, and since I became fully convinced by that point that "metonymy" hadn't really sunk in the first time we covered it, I announced that everyone would get the points for that answer, whether right or wrong. We discussed the second most-commonly circled answer and I felt that enough people already knew that one that it would not receive instant credit, unless the "corrector" of the quiz got it right. The same held true for the other answers that were circled which we hadn't covered in discussion: if the corrector got it correct, they "saved" the quiz-taker some points.

In the end, this didn't really skew the scale for the class or have any negative impacts. The only students it "hurt" were the ones who got the question they chose to be "saved" right to begin with but missed other questions on the quiz. But that isn't really my fault -- they had their chance.

So why do this, beyond hedging my own risk on quizzing the class on an "iffy" course topic (like "metonymy") that I wasn't confident I had taught well or that they would really know?

For the teacher, it saves time. I usually like to go over a quiz after we take it (often using them to structure a lecture/period), but in this instance drilling down to the top two answers which the majority of the students presume they got wrong helped me to know what answers were most pressing, and dispensed with the others, leaving me enough time to shift to another class matter.

The benefit for students, beyond possibly getting a few bonus points, is essentially two-fold: it fosters bonds between neighbors in the room, and, more importantly, it rewards collaboration. Not only did we get to have an open, collaborative dialogue about the most pressing material right after the quiz, but the "corrector" gets to be the quiz-taker's hero if they happen to save them some points. In this way, the student gets to see the value and significance in knowing answers beyond the scope of their own grades, and comes to understand that what they know might benefit others. They don't get punished for not knowing; they get to reward others for knowing! And many were proud of doing so in my class that day. These benevolent correctors were given a sense of power, in the form of academic philanthropy. I hope to cultivate that sort of "givingness" among those who have knowledge and skills.

One might contend that all I did was sanction an act akin to "cheating off" a fellow student, by turning it into a system for extra credit. I don't see quizzes as instruments of torture and panoptical surveillance. I see them as opportunities to make students accountable, yes, but if they are not integrated into the class period of the day, they feel like tools intended to police rather than instruments of learning.

Pop quiz (for extra credit points):

"What group invaded the British Isles from France about a thousand years ago (one point), and in what year (one point)?"

For the (in)correct and (sad but) true answers, see Tenser, said the Tensor.

***
Hilarious, but I felt a little guilty laughing at the jokes about visual learning and what not. I wonder if Tensor shared the results of this exam with his or her class? I would guess so. When the majority of students miss a question -- extra credit or not -- I always spend time on it during the following meeting, and I might even share some of the funnier answers people gave (after all, creativity and deductive reasoning can and should be rewarded!). But if such questions appear in a final exam, there often is no opportunity.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I made a small series of new handouts on the topic of source citation for my Composition class and, among them, attached a page of a sampling of cited sources from an older handout to the batch. As I looked over the sources, I realized that all of the samples were from the 90's...and I wondered: at what point do these examples become self-evidently outdated? While it's true that a good old source is still a good source, and that "dated" research is not a necessary condition for poor research, there will soon come a time -- if it hasn't come already -- when the post-Millenial generation will see EVERY reference that begins 19xx as foreign, alien and other. I wonder if we're there yet. And I wonder if I need to update my handout just to keep it contemporary and invisibly relevant to today's world.

I used to think that the handouts I made in preparation for a course were valuable because I would have them done -- and ready to pull out as preformulated tools for the next time I taught the class (and thereby also saving me prep time). But now I'm starting to realize that revising a handout is like revising an article: it not only improves the original, but also renews its pertinence to the mind. Working on these same handouts over and over again, refining them each time I utilize them, is a way to keep me integrated in the present class and in tune with the students' developmental process, rather than tethered to the content alone. I never want to become one of those crusty old professors who lecture off of even crustier yellowed notepaper. Updating (literally, bringing them up to date) handouts helps keep the teaching vital, even though it sounds like 'extra' work; running a class is a lot like composing a long essay and revision is a necessary part of the process.

This is why it may actually be a bad idea to, say, ask a workstudy student or a teaching assistant to update the handouts for you. A handout isn't just a matter of administrative work; it's a way of processing a body of knowledge. However, sharing a handout with an assistant or even a colleague in your department might allow you to catch things you've missed. They can function as editors do. Students often do this anyway -- I know that I've had students catch mistakes in handouts "live" in class, and I appreciate it, but I've forgotten to make the changes they recommended because I get so caught up in the moment that I neglect to jot down a note or memo.

One frequent update I have to make in my handouts is in page numbers that reference the course textbook. I often try, for example, to point students to the page in the book where I am getting a quiz question, by appending the page number to the question in the quiz itself. When I reformat the quiz, I have to remember to look up the new page numbers if the book has gone into a new edition.

Naturally, this is also one of the benefits of integrating electronic handouts into your curriculum. You can make updates and edits "on the fly" to keep a handout current at any given time. But I've found that sometimes this can lead to problems, because students will print out handouts to bring to class, and if I've made many changes, they will all have different handouts. It's important to mark the date of the update somewhere on the document when going this route.

In my Freshman Composition class, we use a book called Re-Reading America (edited by Columbo, Cullen & Lisle) to generate research paper and class discussion topics. The book is a cultural studies reader, designed to get students to rethink their assumptions about American myths and stereotypes regarding race, gender, class, family, education and more.

Teaching the unit on race (aka "The Myth of the Melting Pot") is the last piece I do in our year-long sequence for the course, and it's always been the most difficult, because the students in my class -- typically about 85% white -- don't want to (or don't know how to) discuss it with the same gusto that they can talk about education or gender. More often than not, they mistakenly assert their innocence and claim that racism is a thing of the past. I always assign Shelby Steele's "I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent?" -- an article that calls such an assumption into question, but it's often very difficult for Freshman to understand -- and rare that a student untrained in cultural studies will be able to see their own "situatedness" in relation to cultural power. I try to teach these things, but it takes patience and a hope that raising these issues will at least cause students to rethink racism and at best set a foundation for later development of the issue in their intellectual lives.

An interesting assumption that comes out of my classes, however, is that racism is an issue only limited to blacks and whites, and often the only students in my class who aren't white are African-American. Obviously, culture is far more diverse than that. One of the best ways that I've been able to get students to think critically about race relations and talk openly about their assumptions is to focus the conversation on populations that aren't sitting in the room. Rereading America has a few articles on Native American culture that I like to assign for this purpose, especially Sherman Alexie's short story, "Assimilation." I couple this with a screening of the film he wrote, Smoke Signals, which features an all-Native cast. This not only raises issues regarding race and post-colonization culture, but also educates my students about Native American culture in general... a topic they are woefully undereducated about. Less than 1% of all Native Americans reside in the state in which I teach (Pennsylvania) -- and, at best, all the knowledge my students have about Native Americans comes from their Junior High history classes and the occassional historical reenactment or pow wow they may have attended as a tourist.

This is my long-winded way of getting to a teaching strategy I wanted to share. Before we launched into our unit on Native Americans this semster, I proctored a "cultural awareness quiz" I designed by culling questions directly from a "FAQ About Native Americans" website...designed for children. When they failed the quiz, as I assumed they would, the irony that a college-aged group were as clueless as a young child about this material really drove home the point that they could stand to learn more about Native American culture.

My intention was to use it as a way of uncovering cultural ignorance and stereotypical assumptions about indigenous peoples -- not by collecting and grading the quiz, but by having them fill it out and then discussing the answers openly as a class -- and it worked really well to begin a dialogue. Here are a few of the questions culled from the quiz:

• True or False: Native Americans often call themselves "indians."
  
• What is the difference between "American Indian," "Native American," "First Nations," and "indigenous people"? Which is the preferred term?
  
• Is "Red Man" or "Red Indian" a pejorative term (i.e., is it offensive)? Regardless, what other rude names can you think of that might offend a native people?
  
• Are Eskimos considered Native Americans? Is it offensive to call someone of that culture an "Eskimo"?
  
• True or False: Hawaiians are considered Native Americans.
  
• What's the difference between an "Indian Nation" and an "Indian Tribe"?
  

You can download the full quiz (MS Word format) with an answer key, if you'd like to use it in your own class. It isn't perfect, but it worked well for me!

Although I'm a little uncomfortable "objectifying" Native American culture by proctoring an assignment like this, I'm happy with this exercise because it really got the students more interested in the material and aware of their own ignorance. The discussion of their answers was fruitful. Hoping I've excited them enough to find the answers, I follow it up with a research assignment (based on a question they come up with in pairs). One of the jobs of teaching writing is training students in how to ask questions -- and to generate enough intellectual curiosity so that they'll persue their own answers. I might use quizzes like this more regularly to launch topic areas in my writing classes...I've always used the readings themselves to begin a trajectory of inquiry, but a quiz like this can start the inquiry where it should always begin: with what we know and what we don't.

The topic of exam stress comes up at the end of every semester, but a recent post on Dan Mitchell's "Teachnology" blog points to a new twist on this old topic: how test anxiety impacts good students. An interesting article in the "health" section of today's NY Times -- "Why Students Struggle When Pressure Is On", by Benedict Carey elucidates. The article reports that the extra pressure of an exam actually psychologically impairs the better students in a class, while having little effect on the mediocre ones. This comes from a fascinating study that is actually available online, "Why High Powered People Fail: Working Memory and 'Choking Under Pressure' in Math" (.pdf file) by cognitive psychologists Thomas Carr
and Sian Bielock, first published in the journal, Psychological Science. Test anxiety, according to the study, consumes the working memory capacity that high achievers rely on for their superior performance, particularly skill execution and the capacity to retain verbal information. Beilock and Carr write:

If pressure and anxiety target those high in working memory capacity, it would carry significant implications for interpreting performance in high-pressure situations (e.g., college entrance exams). First, it would suggest that individuals most equipped to handle difficult, working-memory-intensive situations...are the ones most likely to “blow it” under pressure. Second, as working memory capacity is known to mediate and predict higher-level functions from comprehension to learning (Engle, Kane, & Tuholski, 1999), such results would call into question the ability of performance in high-pressure situations to differentiate those most qualified to succeed from those with less capacity-related potential.

In other words, the "A" students are most susceptible to "choking under pressure," which means that tests don't reward them with challenges and may be punishing them, despite their facility, knowledge and skill. Another way of thinking about this is that tests don't adequately measure skills the way we think they do. Getting an "A" on a test may instead be a grade on one's ability to handle stress, which is rarely listed under "course objectives" on a class syllabus.

I didn't give any tests this term and I usually have students demonstrate their skills and knowledge via small quizzes and papers throughout the semester. But I do give tests in literature and film survey courses, not only because retaining historical information is important to those fields but also because any serious literary student needs to prepare for taking the GRE if they hope to go on to graduate school.

This material caught my eye because of a recent blog entry I enjoyed --"Exams: Hard vs. Unfair" -- by my colleague at SHU, Dennis Jerz. Jerz gave a very tough exam recently to his American Lit class, and took it as a compliment when a chemistry major told him afterward that his test was the most difficult she'd ever taken in her life. Jerz and the girl exchanged a wink and a nod, both proud of the challenge posed and met. I'd be proud, too, because it meant that I'd stimulated the strong student. Jerz writes:

I figure it's my job to challenge students. I'll curve the exam, of course... but students who work hard all term deserve the chance to demonstrate just how good they really are. They all deserve an intellectual challenge, and I'm happy to give it to them. It's only fair.

I've also harbored this assumption: that offering an "intellectual challenge" to a student is a just way to reward them for their scholarship. But I'm starting to rethink my assumptions about tests and the type of challenges they pose, because surviving a stressful exam unscathed -- while a skill -- isn't exactly a learning objective or a criterion for success in my field. Besides, I try to pose "intellectual challenges" all year, so a exceedingly difficult final won't be necessary. For the student, an excessively difficult test is felt as "unfair" not becuase of the challenge, but because it threatens to tumble the grade they've been building up all term. The problem is the betrayal of the endgame: while even the "A" students might be up for the challenge, they'll still be anxious because of the threat the exam poses to their final grade. When a climber reaches the top of the mountain, only to find another, taller, mountain waiting on the other side, then even the best of them don't think they "deserve the challenge." Instead, they think God is a sadist and -- like Job -- they must endure.

A challenging exam is a great way for the students who have done the work to show off their knowledge and skills, if they can handle the pressure. I think the trick is to be very careful about preparing the class for it. I try to do this by giving tough quizzes all term -- mini-versions of the exam with challenges of the same magnitude -- and even an end of year "practice" exam or study session. I know, from our private conversations, that Jerz assigns a lot of writing in his class, so the "challenge" in his exam was certainly prepared for by having students answer essay questions in the final test. That's smart. I'm certain that writing about literature, too, is a learning objective in that course, and that's another point to remember: that an exam should clearly be designed to adjudicate how well the student has met the objectives for the course. The trick is to be challenging while not generating animosity of any kind and not generating more stress than would normally be required in the field. (Another option, of course, is to waive the exam for the A students and proctor a "less challenging" test that examines basic skills.)

When I put together a creative writing course, I typically assign quizzes and a challenging midterm but no final. I figure that the midpoint of the term is the point by which the students in the room can be assumed to share a certain knowledge set that will enable them to share discourse professionally about writing. Since I tend to assess students progressively, guaging their process rather than the end-product of their learning, this works great. After the midterm, writing workshops go much more smoothly, since everyone has learned what they need to in order to "talk the talk" of writers.

A question I have that I'm still musing over is not what does a test measure, but what does a student learn from taking a test? Accountability for what they learned. The discipline of studying for an exam. And perhaps even the skill of performance under pressure. These are valid outcomes, but not necesarily course objectives. I'll have to keep thinking about this one.

I've been a longtime user of a PDA (a Sony Clie with PalmOS) -- given a keyboard, it's become my substitute laptop for traveling, and I love to write on it when I'm on the road. A few years ago, I did a creative writing experiment with it (which developed into my book, Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems) and, along with Agendus Datebook, I use an excellent outlining tool called ShadowPlan to plan and organize my life.

This semester I've decided to bring the PDA into my teaching a little more actively. I just purchased Teacher's P.E.T. -- an interesting student management tool that includes a portable electronic gradebook. I worry that it's more suitable for courses where there are regular tests and quizzes than impromptu writing assignments, but I'm willing to give it a shot. It features "category weighting" of grades which, I think, might work well for my purposes. There's also a Windows' desktop add-on which I might look into down the line.

What I expect will be tricky: a) to remember to carry the PDA with me to class; b) not be impeded by the act of weilding a stylus on a small screen (paper and pen is always easier) -- hitting the checkboxes accurately is important; c) ensure visibility given the classroom lighting; d) keep regular backups and enable security features in case of emergencies; and e) try to keep my cool and not look too geeky in the front of the classroom.

Handango features many handheld software teaching aids if you're thinking about doing something along these lines, too. Handheld learning is becoming more and more common. Many schools have already made Palm Pilots an active part of their classes, with students performing work on them and "beaming" assignments to the teacher and so forth. Some teachers are doing pioneering work along these lines. PalmOne is supporting the growing industry. GoKnow seems to offer some very good educational tools in this regard (for example, their PicoMap is a neat "mind mapping/brainstorming" tool. You can find a great list of links on Midge Frazel's page, Tips and Tricks for Using Handhelds in the Classroom, which is intended to accompany her book by the same title.

One of the lessons here is that Palm Pilots aren't only being used for high tech cheating. Like all technology, it's only a tool -- it's up to teachers to make it pedagogical.

The latest issue of David Allen's Productivity Principles newsletter features a tip for executives that suggests taking a digital photo of a whiteboard after a meeting, to save time taking notes or recording brainstorming sessions in the minutes.

Of course, some whiteboards come with software that automates this like an Etch-a-Sketch, and there are alternative ways of capturing a dialogue (say, by jotting notes down on a computer as you lecture, a la Dennis Jerz' "just in time" handouts).

But thinking "old school," I like this idea for my own blackboard use. Maybe I'll sneak a digital camera into the classroom in my satchel (since I don't intend to get a cameraphone) and after the students leave, take a snapshot of the board. That way I can remember some of the key ideas that came up in lecture/discussion for classes that incorporate quizzes or exams over lecture notes. I could also appoint an assistant to snap a shot during class, if need be, before erasing the board to start anew.

I might be tempted to even post such "snapshots" to a website for the class to refer to. But I don't think students should be allowed to take photos with their cellphones or other gizmos in lieu of taking notes! Writing and notetaking during a lecture/discussion is still an important component of the learning process. Allen's "tip" assumes that everyone in the meeting is tugging their collars and rolling up their shirtsleeves in active collaboration. That's what class can be like, but the physical act of writing the notes on the board in the first place means that I have mentally processed the ideas...when students write the notes in their own books, they, too, process them (ideally) rather than simply copy them. Notetaking is not merely recording data; it's often paraphrasing it or jotting down one's own thoughts in relation to the data on the board. It functions as a way of concentrating and listening to a speaker. Organized listening through note taking can be a key to student success. Snapping a photo is useful, but does little more than capture an "impression" of visual memory for possible studying later on, rather than actively processing thought synchronically along with the class. Note-taking enhances learning and teachers can help students succeed in it. A snapshot, however, only goes so far (except for those lucky souls with eidetic memory, of course).

Even so, it would be a useful strategy for me, the teacher, when I want to remember examples given or ideas that came up that stray from the lecture plan. I have often sat in a class at the end of the hour, copying notes from my own board for using later on in a quiz or test...this might be a cheap easy and fast solution to save me the trouble.

As I watched Primetime Thursday's special on the "Cheating Crisis" last night, I felt the full range of familiar emotions: frustration with students who don't realize that they're only cheating themselves out of learning experiences, anger at the audacity of students who proudly plagiarise, vindication when the students who in the early segments were claiming ethical high ground were confronted with their own cheating by a surprise 'trap' that a teacher sprung on them... I even felt I could identify, in a strange way, with the freelance writer who writes papers for students as a fulltime job, for twenty bucks a page...

I already knew about a lot of these problems, but I kept wondering: so what's the solution? I've read a lot about what teachers can do to better police their classes and prevent cheating in the first place; I've also heard the arguments that the change really needs to come in the students themselves, who need to value ethical behavior. And I realize that this is a cultural issue whose origin lies in multiple cloudy areas, ranging from TV news reportage of big business cheaters (like Enron) to the ease of text manipulation in cyberspace. But Primetime made it clear that the problem is worsening and that it may very well be a "crisis" in the educational system as a whole. If the problem is systemic and out of control, I'm wondering what academic institutions can do to help save us from the "crisis"?

One solution that seemed to leap out at me is instituting smaller student-teacher ratios. The more intimate teachers can become with their students, the less likely they'll try to sneak a peek at a graphics calculator or videophone. Cattle herding students through huge lectures halls generates the anonymity that allows and encourages cheating. This should be obvious, but it's more cost effective to some institutions to have large lectures with grad student recitations/discussion sections than otherwise. A lecture hall reduces the number of faculty necessary, the number of classrooms needed to schedule, and so on. It will take institutions really caring about this problem enough to cap classes at a reasonable level and do what it takes to reduce the student-teacher ratio, even if it means losing money.

Another solution might be to ban some technologies from the classroom...but I don't mean to get rid of them. The trick might be to prohibit student-owned storage and transmittal devices and instead to substitute them with technology that the institution provides. To actually have non-networked computers already at the desks or calculators that are distributed by the teacher for the purposes of working the texts. Technology should be used as a tool, but one that enhances learning. As with many technologies, using it for its own sake seems to become part of the pleasure of cheating with electronic gizmos -- it's "fun" to IM a friend in class...and only one step away from passing quiz answers.

I'm still a proponent of turnitin.com, though I realize that students can subvert it, that there are copyright issues still being debated, and that it is not a magic solution to the problem of plagiarism. Education is what will solve it. But I do still think turnitin.com is a good idea for now. I simply think it arms teachers with technology to fight cheating technology; like giving an anti-aircraft gun to a country without an air force, institutions can arm those teachers who are unsavvy about plagiarism and technology. It can also make some students think twice.

And finally, I think institutions need to have a "zero tolerance policy" for cheating. At one point, the "plagiarist for hire" in the program mentioned that when he writes an A paper, everybody wins: the student gets his A, his parents are pleased that their boy is succeeding, the teacher feels like they've done their job, and the institution doesn't lose a student. The institution needs to be willing to risk losing a student in order to gain a reputation for being academically sound. I think a zero tolerance policy would actually attract good students who want to reap the rewards of doing their own work -- in a classroom where there's an even playing field -- and that parents, too, would prefer to send their children to such a place.

I'm not sure what changes can be done in high schools to help students see the value of working for the sake of learning, rather than cheating for the sake of the grade (or for the sake of time management, or a host of other reasons...). But I do wonder if the emphasis on assessment in the "No Child Left Behind" era is a contributing factor to all of this. I have no basis to make such a claim; just a sense of uncertainty....but as a teacher of Freshman Composition, I will be confronting the products of today's high school head on, and do my best to at least talk about this issue and help my students see the value of learning for its own sake.

In my literary criticism course, we read one title -- Tim O'Brien's fantastic work of metafiction, In the Lake of the Woods -- and then apply a different school of theory to it about every week. The novel lends itself well to this analysis, and while we also study a film after midterms, it serves as the centerpiece of the course, freeing up the student to spend more time on reading criticism itself. I expect that students will reread it from a new perspective each week.

Structured as an "unsolved mystery" the book is so open to multiple interpretations that it was practically written for my course. This is something like the fifth time I've taught this course, and every year I read the entire book again, on top of the numerous readings I performed on the text after I first received it (as a review copy for the Eugene Weekly newspaper back in the 90's). Never mind that the novel has been made into a Lifetime Movie -- it's really one of the best books you'll ever read.

Or reread.

Although I'm happy to reread O'Brien's book again and again (because I always discover something new), I've been thinking about how many time literature teachers must necessarily reread the works they teach. Spending so much time living inside a book is one of the joys, in fact, of teaching lit, but there also comes a point, inevitably, when you resist rereading it for the umpteenth time. Once you've got the book "nailed," it feels like there's no need to hammer at it any more. You can even teach some titles without bothering to reread it at all. But you also always feel a little guilty about doing so and realize that you must try to reread the text you're teaching -- especially if you hope to have meaningful discussions -- no matter how many times you've read it before. The longer you neglect to review your book, the more you'll forget about it, and the more mistakes you might make in lectures or quizzes. Or worse: if you miseducate students based on false assumptions grounded in failed memories.

At the same time, we also need to teach students the value of rereading a work. But I find this notion -- rereading -- extremely difficult to "sell" today's harried and stressed-out students. I beg them to reread pieces, especially if we're going to discuss the same text for more than one period. But so few of them do. The root of this problem lies in consumer culture, of course, which trains us to swallow texts like chocolate bars, bank them in our brains, and move right along. Clearly, the arts don't work that way and literature is not a commodity the way that a Hershey bar is. A student might be able to absorb primary details or even pick up common interpretations of a piece (from something like Sparks Notes) but she'll never truly be reading for meaning if she isn't rereading. The first time we read we react, as though to stimulae. It's the second time through where we are at greater liberty to contemplate, to analyze, to interpret -- in ways that are less under the guidence of the author and more under the guile of the reader.

But there are also pragmatic reasons why students won't reread. Time constraints. And brain constraints. You can only do so much at once. College students who major in English often take three or four lit classes at the same time, which, under some circumstances, can translate into reading up to four novels during the same week of assignments. This is usually an institutional problem, grounded in the way the major curriculum is shaped and when courses are offered. Granted, English professors are partially to blame -- since they feel they must cover a lot of ground in each course, "surveying" breadth as much as "digging" any one of them for depth, they will rarely sacrifice a book (and if you're not a lit teacher, you don't know how hard it is to whittle down to a few select representative choices!). In the process, students must cut corners wherever they can (skipping reading altogether for some classes where they know they won't be quizzed, for example -- to be a literary professor is to become an expert of detecting when students don't read!), and it's hard enough to get a student to read in the first place, let alone reread. Assigning research papers which require mining the text for passages for analysis can accomplish this...but I wonder how much of this process is rereading in the way that I think of it.

On the flip side of the coin, often there are overlaps of material across a student's lifetime that solicit rereading. Like, say, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which many students read in junior high school (when they know absolutely nothing about the adult issues in that book -- adultery at fifteen?), which they later then encounter in American Literature courses in college (where adultery finally means something a little more concrete). Rereading at a later date like this can open up so much of the text that was "missed" the first time through and -- like any book we read several years later -- we discover that as we change, the books change as well.

But sometimes college classes will overlap texts so close together, however, that it's unlikely that the students will really reread the work in question. Even short stories. It's wishful thinking to assume a student who reads "Hills Like White Elephants" in an Introduction to Ficton course will then reread it closely in a 400-level seminar in Hemingway. I think, too, I would be somewhat devestated if another professor on my campus chose to use a book that I am very dependent on -- like In the Lake of the Woods -- in a course before I got the majors as seniors in their Literary Criticism course. And it's frustrating to encounter students who are cocky with set interpretations they picked up from another class -- and it's as if you're arguing with another teacher, through the medium of the student's brain, just to get them to think again about what they assume to be true. To me, reading literature is a way of challenging assumptions. Rereading makes that possible.

One reason why I enjoy teaching popular fiction and film is because more often than not, it involves texts that students think they already know quite well, but haven't yet analyzed or read critically before. They find they want to reread popular texts, but sometimes you run into different problems: resistence to criticism, rather than rereading.

Writing is one of the reasons why I value rereading so much. Writers must reread their own work if they hope to revise it well. Writers have to anticipate and predict multiple responses from various readers to their work, and take care of those potentialities in their revisions. There are also texts that are "retellings" of various earlier texts -- revisions that perform a sort of rereading.

In my creative writing courses, students will sometimes write very entertaining work -- usually humor or adventure narratives -- which are very successful in terms of generating emotional reactions, but which do very little to stimulate the intellect. I usually tell the student that there's nothing really wrong with "fun" fiction or poetry -- with writing for entertainment -- but if the piece "doesn't invite rereading" it probably isn't as good as it could be. For one thing, because rereading is a part of revision, I'm asking the student to spend more time with their own language. But beyond that, I value texts which beg to be reread. A good piece of writing really demands to be read again, because it either creates a world that the reader wants to return to and spend more time inside, or because it raises issues that are worth reconsidering -- or else it simply is open to multivalent interpretations that one can only 'see' upon rereading. The works we treasure tend to be those we want to keep on our bookshelves and reread. Although I'm no salesman for the literary canon, as I get older and more experienced teaching literature, that the canon serves a grand purpose in terms of rereading. The literary "canon" is -- at base -- a group of texts that scholars believe it is important for audiences to return to again and again. Works worth rereading over a lifetime -- or even more than one's own lifetime. Indeed, some scholars commit their whole academic lives to rereading one or a handful of classics by the same author over and over again, teaching and writing about them in hopes of keeping those classics "alive" -- read and reread -- in perpetuity.

So how can we encourage students to reread? One way is to talk about our own pleasures of rereading and have students journal about their own experiences. Another is to craft assignments that require rereading while not making it an act that seems like more work to the student: pull out passages or assign specific chapters with guided interpretive questions. In our freshman composition courses, we use a book called Rereading America, which asks students to rethink assumptions about cultural myths and invites rereading. You can also teach a unit on literary parody, adaptation, or retelling -- there are even textbooks available, like Retellings, which incorporate literary revsionism as an archetecture for the course. And literature teachers can also craft assignments using methods mined from Reader Response Theory; perhaps even teach the criticism itself in upper division courses. (I invite you to share your own methods by leaving a comment below.)

A final point worth considering: How do (or can) online materials invite rereading? Sure, we can bookmark and return to pages, but I bet most people do so for information rather than for rereading a literary work online. (And there's a degree of serialization and deletion to online texts: how often do you reread, say, a blog entry?) There's a good article by Marcel Cornis-Pope and Ann Woodlief
on the University of Virginia Commonwealth site, called "The Rereading/Rewriting Process: Theory and Collaborative, On-line Pedagogy," which you might find of interest if computer mediated teaching is of interest to you.

If it seems like I'm blogging about my quiz techniques all the time, it's because I'm experimenting with approaches and seeing what works. I've already told you about my "Quiz Grader/Note Taker" routine and the time I borrowed David Droppa's "collaborative quiz" routine. Tonight I did a variation on the latter: after everyone finished the quiz, I partnered them up and had them consult with one another about their answers before grading it as a class. This, I felt, solved the problem of "peer pressuring me into the wrong answer" which the students reported the last time I did a collaborative quiz (where students worked together in generating answers). What I liked about this latest method was that it encouraged the students to recognize the authority they already had (or didn't) over the material.

And it eased the tension in the room, too... a little levity was necessary, I think. It's that time of year. I want the students to put their energy into their term essay (a shot list and analysis) rather than basic material from the textbook. In fact, I typically design my courses so that by midterms the students will ideally have learned the basic discourse of the field of study (in this case, cinema technique and discourse terminlogy) and in the second half of the term they put it to use through some creative application, critical essay, or independent research project. This allows the class to be come progressively student-centered over time; as much as I try to "dive right in" to a student-centered classroom, they resist it until they warm up to the class dynamic.

The New Media Journalism at SHU blog today uncovered an article on the effectiveness of pop quizzes (from OSU Research News), suggesting that evaluating students over shorter intervals of time produce better-prepared students.

I don't think anyone who teaches would disagree. Sadly, in some ways quizzes are the only way to ensure that students will read assignments according to the class calendar -- if at all. I'm still not sure if quizzes are better if "pop" or pre-announced... I'm doing one of each this semester in two different classes (my poetry class is "pop" quizzed; my film class has a quiz every two weeks (upon which students are held accountable for two weeks worth of material). I think the pre-announced quizzes are generating better results if only because students know they HAVE to study, whereas with pop quizzes, you can always roll the dice or pray that today won't be the day the teacher decides to test me.

I like playing around with quiz formats that make them not simply a means of evaluating or disciplining, but also a method for educating (see "Quiz Grader...Note Taker" from last month). A few weeks ago, I borrowed an experimental approach to assigning quizzes that I picked up from my colleague, David Droppa: having students collaborate on quizzes by taking them in a team, or as partners. I thought this would be a WONDERFUL idea for allowing the quiz to become a teaching moment, where collaborators could teach one another not only the content but maybe even the thinking and literacy necessary for taking a test well. But I was surprised when I received a few complaints from students who felt pressured by their partner into giving answers that were then marked incorrect. Peer pressure, it seems, was more of an influence than grade points. I don't find this a sufficient reason to never use collaborative quizzing again, but there might be a better way to do this.

I use quizzes as ways to not only spot check that students are doing the work, but to organize a class conversation or lecture. In my Art of Film course last Wednesday, I quizzed the students over the readings and pulled a surprise on everyone....