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Teaching
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My students are having a hard time in my class, and I'm trying to figure out why and how to help them.
Quick background: I teach anatomy and physiology to undergraduates in an A.A. program at a Catholic women's college in LA.
My students recently took their first physiology midterm exam, and not one of them scored over 50%. Now, usually, when the whole class does that badly on an exam which is not designed to be extremely hard, the cause is one or more of the following:
1. The test was badly written or too difficult
2. The professor failed to get the material across well
3. The students are unmotivated
In this case, there are elements of all three, I think. Some of the questions were poorly designed, I admit, and I tried to cover too much material for one test. However, there is another problem area. These students are way overloaded. Most of them are taking this, microbiology, two other electives, and then work part or full time. They simply don't have enough time to both study and sleep. I know that working one's way through college is a time-honored tradition, but looking at it from the professor's side, I feel sorry for these students.
The other problem they have is thet they really don't know how to study. Most of them are capable of memorizing lists or phrases and regurgitating them on demand, but if asked to actually use the information in the memorized phrase or list, they are frequently helpless. Memorization is helpful in anatomy (name the four muscles which make up the quadriceps), but not so useful for physiology (compare the functioning of nicotinic and muscarinic acetylcholine receptors). Thus, this term is much harder for them. It's not so much that they aren't interested in learning, and they're not stupid--it's more that they don't know how to learn. Or maybe it's that I don't know how to teach.
I don't really know how to help them learn to take sensible notes (rather than just copying everything down verbatim), figure out which information is critical and which is peripheral, and actually understand concepts. They are polite and respectful, for which I am profoundly grateful, but I would trade some of that for some creativity. I need to find a way to reach these folks, or I have failed too.
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