By Erica Kosal Ph.D.
Office for Faculty Excellence Presents
Exercise of the Week
Cognitive Climbing
Number two in a series
Cognition is defined as “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses” (Oxford Lexico). We all strive to help our students with their cognition through various techniques in our courses: lectures, class activities, problem solving sessions, homework questions, papers, and laboratory work are just a few of those ways. We work to stimulate interest for the students and aim to provide clarity on topics with reinforcement, often by involving multiple senses – we can have students listen to us in lecture, speak and discuss with one another in groups, read articles and chapters, and conduct hands-on experiments in the laboratory. We carefully craft test questions to assess whether they have achieved understanding in the content topics of our courses. We consider how the scores reflect the learning objectives we set up for our courses and students. We are constantly revising, revamping, adjusting, adapting, and working to improve the courses. We are consistently engaged in cognition ourselves in the pursuit of improving our teaching.
What about the students? Are they accustomed to self-assessment in this same way? Are they viewing their outcomes and critiquing what worked well for them and what didn’t? Are they considering how to adapt and adjust their study habits? Are they involved in growing their cognition?
Part of reflection comes from reading and learning from consistent assessment and feedback on papers, tests, and homework. If we offer students a midterm and a final, or only a few high-stake assessments in a course, a disservice is being presented to our students. They won’t have enough retrieval practice to solidify their understanding of a topic. They won’t have enough practice to test themselves and improve their studying strategies in order to cement their comprehension of a subject.
If we offer other smaller staked assignments to students to supplement the big tests, this is an improvement. Students can check their knowledge. Students will have more practice before the “real test”. These smaller stakes activities, such as homework and quizzes, are a precursor to the big stake tests. These small stakes activities can keep topics fresh in a students’ mind and keep them engaged with the material. And they definitely do that. But can these smaller stakes help them achieve their cognitive climb to “owning” the material? To learning and remembering for longer than one test cycle? To moving content from the short-term into the cognitive long-term memory?
I decided to put this to the test as COVID came on the scene and we moved into remote learning and stressful times. During the spring semester of 2021, I gave my students weekly quizzes in my large introductory biology class. The quizzes started off with 10 questions, worth 20 points, and from there they increased in content and number. The quizzes were cumulative in nature and by the end of the semester, they were worth 50 points each. Students responded positively to these quizzes in general. They commented that they loved being held accountable and that this format would “force” them to study and stay on top of the material. Many of them also commented that the quiz format was less stressful to them (compared to exams).
The education literature supports the claim that retrieval practice of new content reinforces learning and comprehension of that information (e.g. Rowland 2014). The constant quiz assessment has been shown to improve people’s memory of the material to allow for a more effective learning process on subsequently presented material (Wissman et al 2011), which will help make connections between topics and give a more holistic understanding of course content. I was excited to try this numerous small quiz technique over a few large tests to see if it could help with my students’ cognitive climb.
What I learned from that semester was two-fold. The goal of helping students more solidly learn the course content seemed to be met. We had better discussions during class; I could tell the students were connecting topics with one another. The scores on the quizzes were on par with what they normally would be in the traditional large test format, and, in some cases, I could argue, the scores were better. There seemed to be improvement on each subsequent quiz.
The second lesson learned was that weekly quizzes were just too much for the students. They were overwhelming. What turned out to be welcomed at first as “not as stressful” became stressful with the other requirements of the course (such as lab reports and homework) as well as the other demands of life.
So students seemed to be learning, truly learning – they were holding on to information, really understanding content, and making connections across topics. They did seem to be making that cognitive climb. But, students were getting burned out by the end of the semester.
To avoid falling off the cliff, I decided to restructure this format for the current semester (spring 2022) based on the lessons learned. Instead of weekly quizzes, we are doing biweekly quizzes. It is still the same format of cumulative material on these quizzes, with each quiz getting more lengthy, covering more topics as the semester progresses. Review content is on each quiz, but the questions are new. This assures students are not simply memorizing answers from previous quizzes, but are learning material and applying their knowledge to new questions. This shows mastery of the material; students are learning and growing in their skills and comprehension.
While it is too early to tell, with only half the semester underway and only 3 quizzes taken so far, the current biweekly pace seems about right. Students are engaged in class, they are receptive to this format, and they are doing well on the quizzes. The goal is for the cognitive climb to occur in my class and for the students’ lessons to be applied in their other classes as well.
References
Rowland, C. A. (2014). The effect of testing versus restudy on retention: a meta-analytic review of the testing effect. Psychological Bulletin, 140(6), 1432–1463. https:/doi: 10.1037/a0037559
Wissman, K. T., Rawson, K. A., & Pyc, M. A. (2011). The interim test effect: testing prior material can facilitate the learning of new material. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(6), 1140–1147. https://doi.org/10.3758 /s13423-011-0140-7
•Article: The Asha Leader ( 2015). GO climb a tree (to improve cognitive skills) Research in Brief. volume 20, issue 10 https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.RIB2.20102015.16