Course Format and Quiz Types

My classes have had this format for years:

Each week I lecture about a textbook chapter
The next week, there is a 10-minute quiz on that chapter. The quiz is closed-book, in-class, and short-answer, requiring the student to write a sentence explaining five concepts.

Last semester, I had two large classes: one covering Incident Response/Forensics, and another on Hacking Mobile Devices. I was troubled to see how terrible the quiz scores were--about half the students seemed to learn nothing from the lectures at all, and they couldn't explain the simplest things.

So I surveyed the students in class using iClickers to see how they were using the textbook. I was horrified to discover this:

Half the students didn't have the book at all.
Half the students who had the book did not read it at all.
Only half those who read the book did so before the lecture on that chapter.

I was under the impression that my students, who are all adults, knew that they needed to read the book before lecture. But that was clearly wrong.

This forced me to re-examine my procedures. My system used the quizzes primarily as a measurement of success, not as a direct aid to learning. And this was failing, because the students weren't learning well.

So this semester, inspired by another instructor's format, I am switching to this system:

Quizzes are multiple-choice, online, and completed outside class.
Student have two chances to take the quiz, but the later one counts, not necessarily the higher one.
Each chapter quiz is available for at least a week before class, but must be completed before the lecture on that chapter begins.

This makes the quizzes less effective as a measure of student accomplishment, but more effective as a way of forcing students to review the material. So my class is more like a sports team, requiring students to perform exercises, and less like a sports competition in which each strives and my role is merely to score them.

Student Diversity

I have learned that my students are deeply diverse--the grades do not have a Normal distribution at all. A far more accurate desscription of my students is "the quick and the dead." One third of the students are "A" students who will overcome any obstacle I place before them, and one third are "F" students who will fail any task I assign them. It doesn't matter what I do for those students. The ones in the middle are the ones I can help or hurt with my procedures.

I think the main obstacle for the students in the middle is time management. They are over-burdened and/or inefficient, but the end result is the same: they do the minimum I require, and at the last minute. It is therefore best to guide them into proper study habits, and using the quizzes as a way to compel them to study is more important than using them to measure their success.

I'll see how this works, and if I learn anything useful, I'll update this page.

--Sam Bowne, 1-14-16