class participation – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

Teaching Tip: How to Get Your OM Students to Participate More

What can we as teachers do to better promote student engagement? Here are a few ideas I extracted from Faculty Focus (June 29, 2016):

Redefine participation. Invite students to contribute electronically—with an email or post on the course website—with a question they didn’t ask in class, a comment they didn’t get to make, or a thought that came to them after class.

Cultivate a presence that invites engagement. An engaging teaching presence is communicated by behaviors that convey confidence, comfort, anticipation, and great expectations. The classroom space, whether it’s physical or virtual, is one you share. Move about in it. See who’s in class. Smile, extend a greeting, or comment on one of our recent OM in the News blogs.

Talk about why learning is important. This is not the same old lecture about how OM is such a hard course. Most students haven’t yet fallen in love with learning. They think they like easy learning, memorizing bits of information, or getting by doing the bare minimum. Let yours be the class that introduces students to learning that captivates their attention, arouses their curiosity, stretches their minds, and makes them feel accomplished.

Give students a stake in the process. We make all the decisions about learning for students. We decide what students will learn, the pace, the conditions, and whether students have learned it. You can give students some control. Let them start making small decisions—what topics they want discussed in the exam review session, whether quizzes will count 10% or 20% of their grade, whether their final project is a paper or a presentation—and watch what happens to their engagement.

Use cumulative quizzes and exams. For long-term retention of course content, student exposure to the material needs to be ongoing. Every time they retrieve what they’ve learned, that material becomes easier to remember. Students would, of course, rather have unit exams. We can help students prepare for cumulative exams by scheduling regular quizzes (and MyOMLab is perfect for this).

Guest Post: Class Discussion–From Blank Stares to True Engagement in Your OM Class

Our Guest Post comes from Dr. Jay R. Howard, who is the dean at Butler University. His most recent book is Discussion in the College: Getting Your Students Engaged and Participating in Person and Online (Josey-Bass, 2015).

Thirty years of research have demonstrated that when students are engaged in the classroom, they learn more. Classroom discussion is likely the most commonly used strategy for actively engaging students. Yet there’s always the possibility that our invitation for students to engage will be met with silence.

Sociologists have long contended that our behavior is guided by norms. Professors believe that one classroom norm is that students are expected to pay attention. But in most college classrooms students are not required to pay attention. The real norm is paying civil attention—or creating the appearance of paying attention. Students do this in a variety of ways. They write in their notebooks, nod their heads, make fleeting eye contact, and chuckle when the professor attempts to be funny. Why can students get away with only paying civil attention? The answer is that we as faculty let them.

We believe they should be self-motivated to complete assignments and prepare for class. Therefore, we don’t embarrass students into preparing for and participating in discussion. The result is that students can safely slide by, paying only civil attention in most college classrooms.

How do we get students to move beyond civil attention to true engagement in our OM classes? Perhaps the most effective strategy is allowing students to formulate their thoughts prior to being called on to verbally participate. The think-pair-share classroom assessment technique is one example: Ask students to take one minute and write a response to a question. Then ask students to share their thoughts. Another strategy is to structure your course so it requires students to come to class having read an assignment and prepared a short response paper or answer an on-line JIT quiz. In these ways, faculty can create new classroom norms, replacing the norm of civil attention with the expectation that all students come prepared to participate in classroom discussion.

Teaching Tip: Seven Ways to Improve OM Class Discussions

Would students describe your OM lectures as “transient instructional events?” If they are asked about the lecture a few days later, are most hard-pressed to remember anything beyond what they themselves might have said? Faculty Focus (Sept. 30, 2015) offers some simple suggestions for increasing the impact of the discussions that occur in our courses.

Be more focused and for less time – The EOQ model may be fascinating to you, having taken a whole course on the topic. But after 10-15 minutes, your students zone out. They do better with short discussions—focused and specific.
Use better hooks to launch the discussion – A pithy quotation, a short scenario that requires content application, a hypothetical case or situation, a synopsis of a relevant Wall Street Journal article—all of these can jump-start a discussion.
Pause – Stop the discussion and ask students to think about what’s been said so far, or ask them to write down what struck them as important. Think short pauses, 30-60 seconds.
Have note takers – Ask whether there are 2 or 3 students who’d be willing to take notes during the discussion. Then post their notes on the course website or distribute them. This could count as class participation.
Talk less – Too many classroom discussions are still dominated by our talk. Encourage students to speak. Point out good comments that merit response. Do everything you can to make it a good student discussion.
End with something definitive – Return to the hook that launched the discussion. Ask students to write a 1-sentence summary of the discussion. Use what students have written to help them bring closure to the discussion.
Use the discussion – “Remember that discussion we had about global supply chains? What did we conclude?” Refer to individual comments made during the discussion. “Paula had an interesting insight. Who remembers what she said?” And if you really want students to listen up and take discussions seriously, use a comment made in the discussion as a question on the next quiz.

Teaching Tip: Why Students Should NOT Skip Your OM Class

“Skipping class undetected for a game of ultimate Frisbee might become a thing of the past as more universities adopt mandatory-attendance policies and acquire high-tech trackers that snitch when students skip,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Jan.14, 2015). The moves reflect the rising financial consequence of skipping too many classes and, consequently, dropping out. More than 4 in 10 full-time college students fail to graduate in 6 years. Many are stuck with crippling student debt and no credentials to help them pay it back. In response, schools are under pressure from taxpayers and parents to increase retention and graduation rates.

“Attendance is the best known predictor of college grades, even more so than scores on standardized admissions tests,” says an Iowa State prof who studies the subject. The correlation is particularly high in science, engineering and math. And grades, in turn, seem linked to graduation rates.

At Villanova, student monitoring through ID cards has been in place in some form since 2007. At Harvard, lecture halls were secretly (and with some controversy) filmed to gauge attendance. Among lectures monitored, attendance averaged 60%, declining from 79% as the semester began to 43% as it ended. Attendance also fell more than 10 percentage points over an average week. Courses that incorporated attendance into the final grade averaged 87%, compared with 49% for those that didn’t.

As online interactions have grown, schools have realized they have a trove of new data to look at, such as how much a student is accessing the syllabus, taking part in online discussions with classmates and reading assigned material. MyOMLab can help with some of this tracking, benefiting both you and your OM students.

Teaching Tip: Dealing With Student Cellphone Use During Your OM Lectures

Students and their devices have become virtually inseparable, writes Faculty Focus (Jan. 8, 2014). They are using them constantly and find it difficult to disconnect for any amount of time. When they’re texting, looking at Facebook, or cruising on the Internet and listening to your OM lecture and trying to take notes, they aren’t dealing with the content as well as they would be if they just focused on listening and note taking. And the evidence of that keeps accumulating. The research below found: “. . . students who use their mobile phones during class lectures tend to write down less information, recall less information, and perform worse on tests than those who abstain from using their mobile phones during class.”

Can we get students to put away their phones and focus on learning? Even with a policy and overt attempts to enforce it, without constant surveillance, it is very, very difficult to ensure that students are not using their devices. If your class is large, it is all but impossible. And that kind of vigilant enforcement is not without costs to you as enforcer.

Here is an alternative: Give your normal presentation in class. Then 5 minutes before class ends, distribute or post a list of your 5 or 6 essential points made. Students could check their notes, or you could have students trade notes so that someone else is doing the checking, and see how many of those points they had. Some students may miss a few of the points because they aren’t all that good at taking notes. But were some of the students who missed most (all) of the points also texting or surfing during class? Encourage them to ask themselves the question and to look honestly at the evidence revealed by their notes. No, you aren’t going to be providing one of these lists at the end of every class, but you may consider doing it sometime during the next couple of weeks as the new semester begins. And if students are really interested in knowing how texting affects what they’re getting out of class, they should try listening and taking notes without doing anything else.

Reference: Kuznekoff. J. H. and Titsworth, S. (2013). The impact of mobile phone usage on student learning. Communication Education, 62 (3), 233-252.

Guest Post: Using “Clickers” at U. Tennessee to Draw in OM Students

This Guest Post comes from Dr. Bogdan Bichescu, Assistant Professor of Management Science in the University of Tennessee’s College of Business Administration. Bogdan teaches very large OM classes and has blogged for us before about his experiences in that environment.

Attempting to improve student participation, this semester I decided to tie grade curving to class attendance and participation in my large introductory operations class. I suggested that students who attend classes and participate regularly would receive a bonus of up to 1% of their final grade. To avoid the operational challenges of collecting and grading paper attendance quizzes typical of large classes, I decided to experiment with personal response systems, i.e., “clickers”. More than 80% of the students enrolled already had a clicker registered on their name. The rest could sign up for an online account and participate via smartphones, tablets, or laptops for a small fee.

Initially intended for tracking attendance, the clickers have gradually evolved into a mechanism for evaluating content retention and promoting student engagement. I was compelled to rethink my approach to class delivery and plan more carefully for student engagement. I include clicker questions throughout my class notes to engage students at several points during class. I sometimes include questions from homework assignments or from exams. I encourage students to work in groups to answer clicker questions and I may re-poll the students on a certain concept or technique that is particularly challenging. I give credit for incorrect answers and include questions that ask for students’ opinions.

While clickers have not resulted in higher class attendance (due to the small grade contribution), I feel that classes are now more fun and engaging. The questions have generated more animated discussions, student competition (I can track which major, or group has better attendance or scores; students often go “yeah!” when they answer correctly a difficult question), and a somewhat better exam performance for the more active students (but more data analysis is needed). Student feedback has been positive and I am thus encouraged to use clickers in the future, potentially increasing the contribution of clicker questions and quizzes to about 10% -15% of the final grade.