Starting with What Students Know
Welcome back! We hope the first few days of class went smoothly and that the semester is off to a promising start. Drop/add ends at 11:59 p.m. on Monday, so rosters will stabilize soon. You’re probably already getting to know your students, and they are getting to know you and their courses.
In addition to learning more about our students as people, it’s also helpful to get a sense of what they do and don’t already know at the start of the semester. Most of us have strong views about what students ought to know when they begin our classes, but what they actually know or are able to do can be quite different. It may be startling to find out how mistaken our assumptions about their prior knowledge might be.
Just like us, students also may not have an accurate sense of their own relevant prior knowledge. They may not yet know what there is to know about a subject, so they may not be aware of their own knowledge gaps. Alternatively, they might not realize that knowledge and skills they have from other courses, or from other parts of their lives, are relevant to the course. Sometimes students don’t recognize when it’s time to transfer the knowledge they have to a new context.
Our colleagues at CMU remind us that students’ prior knowledge can actually help or hinder learning:
Students come into our courses with knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes gained in other courses and through daily life. As students bring this knowledge to bear in our classrooms, it influences how they filter and interpret what they are learning. If students’ prior knowledge is robust and accurate and activated at the appropriate time, it provides a strong foundation for building new knowledge. However, when knowledge is inert, insufficient for the task, activated inappropriately, or inaccurate, it can interfere with or impede new learning.
If we want to help our students build knowledge over time, it’s worth taking time to gather more precise information about where they’re starting: Are they new to the discipline? What prior knowledge do they have that you can elicit and build upon? Are there some common points of confusion you’ll need to help them clear up? There are a wide variety of pre-assessments and diagnostics we can use to collect information about what our students know: surveys, concept inventories, in-class activities, writing prompts, and more.
These assignments and activities can also serve as opportunities for students to develop a habit of monitoring their own learning and development. Some faculty invite students to compare their knowledge at the end of a module, project, or course to what they knew at the beginning, so they can see how much they learned. Helping students develop effective metacognitive skills and strategies makes them more effective learners, and it can build their confidence too.
If you’d like support to assess what your students know at the beginning of a course, or to help them learn to self-assess, we are happy to assist! You can reach out for a consultation on this or any other topic related to teaching by emailing us at pro-teaching@fsu.edu. We look forward to working with you!