I used to create these giant question sets covering an entire chapter. I found they can be a bit daunting for students and hard to manipulate. So I’ve begun breaking the sets into chapter sections. The only drawback is not being able to do a shuffle review of an entire chapter at one time.🤓
Years ago I used to hand out “skeleton notes”: an incomplete version of my notes so students would still take notes during lecture without me having to wait for them to copy everything down. I stopped doing it after a few years because I grew tired of having to revise them when I changed my presentations, which was often, and students constantly asking me for copies at the start of class when they missed class or lost theirs. I felt sorry for all the paper I used.
I taught my first hybrid biology class this past Spring. In a hybrid, students watch the lectures on line and come to class once a week for lab and quizzes. I hate hybrids because most students don’t watch the lectures. They come to lab unprepared and clueless. It is a recipe for failure. So my division chair convinced me to hand out skeleton notes they have to fill out and turn in for a grade. We’ll see.🤓🤞
Writing retrieval practice questions is slow going but highly rewarding. I wrote three dozen this morning based on one textbook page and a few sentences from a second page.🤓👍
I’ve noticed a trend in my A&P courses that students, if given lab time to study the practical specimens would rather leave since I have detailed pictures of everything on Quizlet. I haven’t found a dip in their practical scores. In fact, overall more of them do better.
My process for taking notes in chemistry class is to add marginalia to the text during lecture. After class, I read the text closely and create retrieval practice questions and add them to Quizlet. Yesterday I wrote 26 questions from a single page.
I am sitting in on General chemistry this semester to redeem myself from my poor performance I made 37 years ago as a freshman. I am also testing my study strategies. Here is my still incomplete question set in Quizlet. Five hundred fifty seven questions so far🤓👍
I’m sitting in on a general chemistry class taught by a colleague. It feels great acting like a student again. I wrote a bunch of retrieval practice questions on the first week of lecture this morning. More coming tomorrow 🤓👍
I am not teaching this summer so I am busy revising my Human A&P material. I finally finished writing a couple hundred practice questions on the Endocrine system and posted them to Quizlet. Next up is the blood🤓👍
I wrote 122 retrieval practice questions on photosynthesis yesterday and today. I still need to add more on the dark reaction but I have enough practice questions to adequately prepare my students for their quiz on Monday.
