By Rachel Cubas, Academic Trainer & Consultant

Knowing what you’ll cover in a lesson, unit or course is critical to the way you develop your course content. You put great effort into ensuring students know the topics that will be covered in each week and that their reading and assignments align with those topics, so as to aid their learning along a logical sequence. This design, albeit purposeful for the learning experience and effective for course organization, can fail to provide us with the knowledge of our student’s current understanding of the subject matter. In other words, we might set forth the outcomes at which we desire our students to arrive, but we don’t often have a great deal of insight as to their starting point, to what they already know (or don’t know). This is a critical piece of information if we intend for their learning to truly build from each course experience. After all, if we consider the essential idea espoused by Vygostsky with the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), we can entertain that knowing how much a student already knows (or does not know) about a subject is an important factor in the greater learning equation.

We’ve established that knowing what our students know about our course topics can be valuable information for us as educators. How can we collect this information on an individual student basis and then translate that into insight across all of our students? Certainly, there are many ways in which we can garner diagnostic information about our students’ knowledge. Let me share just one possibility:

In their book, Classroom Assessment Techniques, authors Angelo and Cross proffer the suggestion to design “Background Knowledge Probes” as a means to assess prior knowledge, recall and understanding. As you may have gained from its title, a background knowledge probe seeks to query each student on their current knowledge. This could include prompting students to self-assess their exposure and even current comfort level with a general topic, an event in history, a technology or tool, a mathematical theorem or virtually any other idea or concept related to the course. The idea is to gather feedback from students on what they already know (or don’t know) about the concepts that will be critical in your particular course. Would knowing what students already know (or don’t know) about your course topics be helpful to you as you facilitate your course?

If you use Pearson LearningStudio to deliver all or a portion of your course, you could build a background knowledge probe using the system’s Exam tool. To do this, you might review your course and select those ideas, concepts, theories, etcetera that are most important for the context of the course. Next, create an exam with each of those critical items and ask students to self-assess their current knowledge and comfort level with each item. Using the Pearson LearningStudio system, provide students with multiple choices/possible answers where they can select the statement that best describes their individual situation. You could offer statements such as “Know about this” “Know how to do this” or “Never heard of this” as choices in each test item. By offering pre-designed choices, you can create a consistent framework of responses that allows for student’s individual assessment on a Likert-scale. As a bonus, you can then set the Pearson LearningStudio system to auto-grade each item and tabulate results to produce Exam Statistics. Once at least two of your students have completed the exam, you can run Exam Statistics to gain comprehensive and item-level insights for all of your students.

Here are a few additional tips you might consider:

1. Remember that a background knowledge probe needn’t be a comprehensive exam of everything the student does (or does not) know about a concept. Rather than starting with a 50 question exam, for example, select the top 5-10 most important concepts, theories, ideas or topics and begin with those. Of course, some disciplines/courses may differ on the breadth and depth of topics covered, but narrowing the items to the most important ones for your course serves to let students know which concepts will be most important in the course.
2. Consider requiring the diagnostic exam but not penalizing the student for what they report they do not know. You might let students know they will receive credit for the assignment by simply taking the diagnostic exam, regardless of their actual answers for each item.
3. Try naming your Exam content item something that minimizes the anxiety or feeling students can have if they see it as a high-stakes exam. After all, you want their self-assessment to be an accurate picture of what they already know, without the threat of penalization. A name such as “Getting Started with ____ (course title or main idea, i.e. Social Psychology)” or “Knowledge Survey” can let students know that you’re interested in their current knowledge on the subject, without it appearing like a high-stakes exam.
4. Consider taking your background knowledge probes into more granular areas of your course. You might have brief diagnostic exams in each unit or major course section. Or, you might include a diagnostic exam when making major transitions from one topic/area in the course to another.
5. Utilize the Path Builder tool to require students to complete their diagnostic exam prior to entering the course or unit content.
6. Utilize tools at your disposal such as Exam Statistics to help you turn individual entries into insights across your students and test items. If you can use Exam Statistics to help you efficiently analyze results across students in your course, you can maximize the benefit of a diagnostic activity without feeling overwhelmed with the time required to elicit, tabulate and analyze diagnostic information in the absence of tools to support you.
7. Consider “closing the loop” with students near the conclusion of the course by providing an opportunity for review and reflection. If you used the Exam tool to launch a background knowledge probe, ask students to review their diagnostic exam results (stored in the LearningStudio Gradebook). Next, ask them to assess their own learning on those same key course topics now that the course is complete. Finally, ask them to reflect on what they’ve learned and on their learning process/journey (thoughts, surprises along the way, most valuable takeaways, etc). This end-of-course activity can be a qualitative reflection assignment based on a quantitative evaluation (re-issue the same diagnostic exam or review original results) or it can be a quantitative re-assessment using the original diagnostic exam questions. By “closing the loop”, both you as the instructor as well as your students, would have the opportunity to review starting points, assess current conditions and observe any progress made toward the intended outcomes for the course. That’s valuable feedback!

The strategic and progressive design of our courses relies on the intention to see student growth through (and as a result of) the course experience. Knowing what a student already knows about a subject, theory, idea, and etcetera can prove invaluable in helping us evaluate our course content in light of our audience and observing progress in what they know (and don’t know) as it relates to the course. Armed with insight across all of our students, we as educators can be better prepared to make the necessary adjustments to our course delivery as we seek to create meaningful learning experiences.