Getting Students to Do the Reading: Pre-Class Reading Quizzes Using Blogs
CFT assistant director Derek Bruff authored a guest post on the group blog ProfHacker last week. In the post, he described his use of pre-class reading quizzes in the math courses he teaches to motivate his students to read their textbooks before class. By asking students to respond to open-ended questions about the reading before class, he finds that instead of maybe 30% of students doing the reading, more like 80-90% do the reading on any given day. In the post, he also describes his implementation of these pre-class reading quizzes on the course blogging platform he uses and discusses how he keeps the grading aspect of these quizzes from taking too much time.
Derek’s previous ProfHacker post was a defense of multiple-choice questions on exams.
(ProfHacker has been recommended here before. It’s a group blog that provides tips, strategies, and advice for being productive and effective college and university instructors. Three new posts appear each weekday, and the variety of topics covered means that you’re bound to find something useful several times a week.)
Image: “On the platform, reading” by Flickr user moriza / Creative Commons licensed
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