What I learned about student learning

First, I haven’t yet done any serious review of my students’ work, so I’m writing based on general observations.  I want to focus on one central issue:  how the on-line discussion boards facilitated student learning.  I do this because I think I can make some reasonable generalizations about this, but everything I’m about to say is tentative.  I’ll try to extrapolate some general statements from the specifics.

What specifics?  Well, here’s what happened.

In my undergraduate course, I used a discussion board to which students posted comments, usually responses to my questions about the text we were going to discuss each day.  Postings were usually due by about 8 pm on the night before class.  In some cases, students posted to the whole class (28 people), and in some cases, they posted to smaller groups.  I encouraged them, too, to respond to each other’s postings, though they didn’t always do this.  I would then read their postings and use their ideas and questions to shape the class discussion.  I sometimes quoted specific postings, or reported back on patterns I noticed, or simply used some of their questions to begin the discussion.  

In the graduate course, students responded to various kinds of prompts, posting responses to questions and assignments to the class – again, sometimes to the whole group and sometimes to small groups and sometimes just to me.  That class never really met face-to-face (we had informal, Inner Circle conversations, but no class sessions per se).  So instead of having discussions, we wrote back and forth to each other.  That group also did one real-time on-line chat.  I read their postings, though in many cases I did more skimming than close reading.  It was like getting 8-10 short papers a couple of times a week – LOTS of text.   I responded both individually and collectively, though I posted nearly all of my responses to the class as a whole.  That is, a typical response might comment on something a specific student wrote, but I sent the message to everyone.  A few times, I posted mini-lectures to the discussion board, too.  

How did these approaches affect student learning?  And how do I know?

I’m convinced that the strategy I used in the undergraduate course enhanced student learning significantly, if only because it created a sense of connection between the readings, their individual thoughts, and the full-class discussion.  That is, it created coherency.  It also allowed us to move the classroom discussions further along than I suspect we could have without the preliminary on-line discussion.  In many cases, I was able to think about what students had to say, consider options for responding, and carefully craft follow-up questions that would help all of us dig deeper.   This happened both because students came to class better prepared (they had read, been given an initial task, thought at least briefly about how to respond, and in many cases read other people’s responses – all before class started) and because we were able to begin further into the process of analyzing the texts.  It also happened because it allowed me to slow down, to think more strategically about what I wanted to have happen in class, what ideas I wanted to highlight.  In other words, this process made them more thoughtful, engaged students, and it also made me a more thoughtful, deliberate teacher.  For someone who is very good at improvising in the classroom, that’s a dramatic change.  

It also leads me to question one of my long-held assumptions about student learning – that all they really need me to do is ask good questions, and that simply by responding to my good questions, they will discover the deeper issues, themes, and problems involved in studying American culture.  I still believe that good questions are at the core of good learning, but I’m also coming to understand that students need more from me in the way of thoughtful guidance through the process of digging deeper.  It’s not enough to ask a good question and point people toward resources.  If I get more involved and pay more attention to what students are thinking, then I can ask a next round of questions that will help them get even farther.  Part of this also suggests the value of on-the-fly assessment, some kind of tool that helps me see what students are thinking all along, not just in papers and class discussions.

The other thing that happens in the discussion boards, and this was true in both of my classes, is that everyone had to participate.  The discussion board was a course requirement, and even those who would usually never speak in class discussion had to do the postings.  For me, this provided a way of looking into the minds of all of my students, not just those few who talk.  What I discovered, not surprisingly, is that silence often hides good ideas.  I always suspected this, but I believe even more than I ever have that the class as a whole benefits when quiet but thoughtful students join in the discussion.  Students told me that this aspect of the course was difficult, uncomfortable, and scary to them, but some of those who were most reluctant to post provided some of the best ideas in the class.  For example, in the undergraduate course, the student who at first was most frightened to post turned out to be the person whose postings generated the most responses from other students.  I haven’t done the data processing on the grad course yet, but I think the same it true for that course.  

Something else to note:  students in the undergraduate course expressed a very high level of satisfaction with the course as a whole and in general with how the discussion board tied into the class discussions.  They pointed out that having the discussions happen before class meant that everyone was prepared.  I suspect, too, that people liked the idea that the discussion built on their ideas, and that their ideas became springboards for very interesting discussions – not just passing references but starting points for serious interrogation of the readings and ideas of the course.  There’s an affective element to this, in other words, as well as an intellectual one.

As I head into the process of reviewing the evidence, I wonder if I will see connections between the discussion board postings and students’ papers.  Is there any way of linking these?  Did students write better papers if they had been more active in the on-line discussion?  And if they did, does the discussion board cause that, or is it simply that better students are more likely to participate actively in the discussion?  
Another way to think about it, for the course as a whole, is about the value of quantity – does writing a lot help students learn?  Is articulating their ideas good for them?  Intuitively, I think this must be true, but how would I know?  I’m thinking, too, about Paula Berggren and other VKP-ers’ work on discussion boards and how to identify key moments in the discussion.  What should I look for when I start re-reading the postings?  

And how do I deal with the overwhelming amount of data that I have?  I have to figure out a strategy for making this manageable – I just can’t reread the 1300 messages that these two classes generated.  

A few preliminary generalizations from all this:
Students can address ideas and materials in more complex ways if their interaction with those ideas and materials is stretched out over multiple iterations – in this case, preliminary postings, class discussions, and in many cases, follow-up postings.
The more I know about what my students are thinking, the more carefully I can plan class, and more careful planning helps us all dig deeper.  Off-the-cuff isn’t good enough for my anymore, nor is “generic” preparation (as in just knowing a lot about the topic).  The difference this semester was that I could make thoughtful choices about how to move things along further, based on the specific ideas and issues that I saw in students’ postings.  And I could do that better when I had time to think about it – even just an hour, rather than doing it on the fly.
Student learning is probably enhanced by articulating their thinking throughout the process, not just in a paper at the end of a unit.  I think part of why both of these courses worked is that students began putting their ideas into writing from the start.  While writing can have the effect of freezing one’s thinking – people have the sense that once they’ve said something, they’re committed to it – there’s also the possibility that putting ideas into words clarifies what students think and pushes them to give shape and focus to their ideas.