Design: How do we convey basic information to students?

Today's post is part of a series discussing how educational design is, or is not, or can be adapted to the humanity of the end-user.  See the introductory post here.

I’m asked at institutes, how do I give students notes?  Well, I don’t.  I've been too frustrated on the user end by the whole concept of "notes".  

See, in fifth grade, I was taught to watch a teacher write information on a chalk board, then to copy everything she wrote into a notebook.  This was an important skill… in CE 1100, when transcription-by-monk was the only available alternative to the Xerox machine.

In seventh grade, I was required to make notes of what the teacher had said orally in class - with express hints like “now write this down.” This was an important skill… in the days when the teacher was the sole font of information.

Even thirty years ago, information was hard to come by.  Students had textbooks, and they were the primary and authoritative source of information.  Libraries were available to some, but even a great college library required significant effort in order to find useful references - in any subject.  The added value of a good teacher then was that the teacher had (presumably) read and investigated references beyond just the textbook, and so could deliver context and deeper knowledge through lecture.  The prize, as our headmaster stated in his first ever address to the faculty, went to the people who learned the most information.

Now, information is trivially easy to come by.  Yeah, yeah, no one can learn physics just from a bunch of wikipedia pages, but really, that’s just as useful in isolation as the old-style textbook was.  Enough good content is available (again, in any subject) for an interested student to find out whatever information they want.  The prize nowadays goes to the people who can:

     (1) sort good information from bad

     (2) assimilate what’s relevant and ignore what’s not

     (3) construct useful stories from the glut of plentiful information.

How, then, do we convey basic information to students in the most user-friendly way, while helping students with these three goals?  

Don’t be thinking in terms of what students “need for college.”  Yes, I know, some college professors require students to read antiquated textbooks, or to listen to boring lectures with badly-constructed powerpoint slides.  That doesn’t mean you should follow suit.  On one hand, you shouldn’t use ineffective pedagogy with which students are generally uncooperative merely because other teachers do - I mean, if a bunch of college professors all jumped off a bridge, would you?  But more than that, you do your student far more of a service if you show them *effective* pedagogy that they can fall back on for themselves when their future teachers are useless.  Teach them how to learn physics in a way that works for them.  You’ll find that your students become adaptable to any professor.

But, how do I “give notes?"  Think of the minimum information that students need to know RIGHT NOW, for today’s topic.  That’s what my fact sheets are for - I’ve already filtered dense textbook pages down to just the most necessary facts.  I hand out a hard copy of the day’s new facts.

Then, I have students use these facts in context.  It’s tough to memorize six different facts about velocity-time graphs.  It become easy when the class has spent an hour-long class period writing them down as they apply to different creative lab exercises.

Finally, I give regular quizzes on these facts.  Not as a “gotcha” game, but as a reminder, as a way of learning the facts through repetition and use.  These quizzes are just as effective without them “counting” in a grade book.  Give the quizzes, “grade” them, put a score on them, collect them.  If someone is consistently stinking up the joint, have them come in to redo some until they do better.  That’s good enough.  Your students will have enough background to spend most of their physics time engaged in interesting lab work and problem solving.