We have interviewed students who have been exceptionally successful in learning CHEM 210 and 215, and we have done years of course-wide, large-scale surveys. We wanted to know:

WHAT learning resources they were using, and we wanted to know HOW they were using them.

QUESTION 1: Did WHAT they were using matter? No, as long as it was a mix of things done alone and with others.

Here is what we know: successful students in CHEM 210 and CHEM 215 will end up identifying 6-7 different learning resources, from the large number that are available, that they are able to use effectively. However, there is NO magical set of resources that work the best for these students, except that they use a combination of things they do alone and things they do with others (remember the buffet metaphor!). We have studied this topic quite deeply and we can tell you as a matter of fact: there is no ideal combination of resources, and what is good for someone else might be bad for you (autonomy rears its head again: you need to find what works for you, not copy what works for someone else).

QUESTION 2: Did HOW they were using resources matter? Definitely: yes. Using a sharp knife the wrong way leaves you with injuries.

In addition to asking these students how they were using their resources, we asked a clever question: Please criticize your peers, and tell us what you think they are doing that is ineffective. They gave us four answers, and in one way or the other, they all said the same thing. Remarkable!

Their four answers are the most important words you can read.

ANSWER 1: My peers confuse understanding someone else’s answer with understanding how to solve the problem.

Everyone loves answer keys. We get that. But if you cannot tell with some degree of confidence that your answer is correct, then you are missing a chance to learning something about the process of how the answer needs to be created. When you look at the end product only (the house where you live), you can barely infer the process of how it was created (building it) and whatever you think, most of it will be wrong. What we know from psychological research on this point is truly interesting: when you rely on existing authoritative answers, you create a mental state of self-deception, namely, you create a sense of false self-confidence that you actually understand how to solve the problem because you have the ability to understand someone else’s answer. To read more about this, see: Chance, Z.; Norton, M. I.; Gino, F.; Ariely, D. Temporal View of the Costs and Benefits of Self-Deception. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2011, 108 (Supplement 3), 15655-59. LINK: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1010658108

ANSWER 2: Even the knowledge of an available answer is a distraction that gets turned to too early, and prevents my peers from digging deeply enough into their learning, particularly in never starting to work with others. Conversations about chemistry are critical.

If you know there are authoritative answers out there (an answer key, a peer leader, a professor), you will not engage your learning as deeply. It is a simply fact of human behavior. If you want to read more about the value of challenging problems, see: Kornell, N.; Hays, M. J.; Bjork, R. A. Unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 2009, 35 (4), 989–998. The “working with others” part of that reply is addressed more completely, elsewhere. LINK: doi.org/10.1037/a0015729

ANSWER 3: My peers too readily forgive themselves for small errors; whereas I understand that small errors point to something important that I need to focus on.

It is easy to forgive yourself for small errors. You will convince yourself that you will remember not to do that again, but the fact of the matter is that you really do not know when you did it and why. In fact, when you did it, you thought it was the right thing to do. The students who answered our question told us that they used errors as a source of FOCUS. They did not forgive them, they assumed that these errors were an important signal for some hidden misunderstanding that they needed to dig deeply and discover. The larger category here is the idea that it is just as important to be able to explain why the wrong answers are incorrect as it is to explain why the right answers are correct. You must move beyond “That is wrong, so let me see the right answer,” to being able to explain why something is wrong by suggesting what the misunderstanding was that led there. To read more about this, see: Taner, K.; Allen, D. Approaches to Biology Teaching and Learning: Understanding the Wrong Answers – Teaching toward Conceptual Change. Cell Biology Education 2005, 4 (2), 112–117. LINK: doi.org/10.1187/cbe.05-02-0068

ANSWER 4: Getting a little bit ahead and going to class is the easiest way to focus and pay attention. And it takes the least amount of overall time because class time is efficient, concentrated, completely relevant, and led by the people in charge of testing! It takes much more self-motivation and determination to use recordings effectively as the primary interaction. Recordings are best suited for review. I have yet to meet someone who binge-watched this class and did even close to average.

There is universal agreement on these points no matter how you look at them: (a) reading ahead and having a sense of what the lesson is about results in higher achievement than not preparing; (b) attending a live class session and attending to it distraction-free results in higher achievement than not going, using recordings, and trying to learn in a more distraction-filled settings; (c) using recordings to review and revisit, filling in the blanks, results in higher achievement than not reviewing the original lecture; and (d) the total time invested in achieving mastery is less when these strategies are used because the time on task is more efficient and productive.

You can shake your head, disagree, and think that none of this applies to you because you are excellent at multitasking.  Thanks to everything that gets recorded, we can monitor student footprints through the Canvas site and the Lecture Recordings. Access and time of access is correlated with performance; indeed, during one of the COVID terms we saw a greater than two standard deviation difference between students who were accessing materials on a regular basis and those who were not. And as stated earlier: you have all the autonomy in the world to make a bad choice and no one is going to come running after you and make you change your mind. You are totally able to exercise your freedom to fail.

Is that statement starting to get annoying? Good. As an educator, I can shape the environment and provide the best opportunities and advice that I can. The fact that we see 70-75% of students landing in the A/B range is as heartening as it is disheartening to see the remaining group. I learned a long time ago from a wickedly smart person: you cannot take credit for the students who have done well, and you cannot take the blame for those who do not; they were all in the same class.

Resources and How to Use Them Effectively (just because you have a great hammer, it does not mean you are using it properly)

Lecture – The face-to-face time works best when you make the social commitment to pay attention, listen, follow, and think ahead about the arguments. Ineffective if you are not listening and following along. Research shows that even having your phone out, in view, diverts your attention. Being in class is also (obviously) immediate. You can pose questions before, during, or after class, face to face.

Lecture Recordings – An excellent way to revisit the live session and fill in the blanks. A more risky way for primary learning.

A Second Lecture – We often have 2-4 sections of our classes running at the same time. There might be nothing more efficient to your learning than hearing another instructor go through the same material from their perspective. You might find a person from whom you like to take notes, while for another you might want to sit back and listen.

Open Faculty Discussion – It is not the answers that are important; it is the questions asked by others. In addition to your own questions, you should pay close attention to the questions others ask. Before the instructor has a chance to construct a reply, you should always see if you are able to formulate your own answer, in your mind.

GSI-Led Discussion & Tutors –The best use of any instructor’s time is when you come in with work done, and you have questions on your work about which you are not confident. An effective GSI will spend some time getting students up at the board, practicing their explanation skills at the same time the student is thinking through how to solve a problem. The same thing is true for tutoring and peer-to-peer interactions, by the way: the most effective tutor (or peer collaborator) is one who will let you talk and listen carefully to what you are saying.

GSI Office Hours – A set of high quality questions (I was working on this problem and both of these options seem equally correct to me, let me play these out for you…) is better than low quality ones (I do not understand anything in Chapter 4; I haven’t looked at this material in two weeks, what have I missed?).

Science Learning Center and informal groups – If you only go and listen, then you are missing out. Every group member should be presenting ideas and engaging in debate. Whether it is in the groups, or in informal study groups with your friends, the key opportunity you have is to explain things to one another.

Alone time – Quality alone time can serve many purposes: first looks, preparation for class or for working with others, reflection and review, deep and undistracted focus, a chance to practice wild ideas while unobserved.

Textbook and Answer Key – The CHEM 210 and 215 books are custom-written for the U-M courses, they are paced to the courses, and every section has a set of precisely relevant questions that dig out the details needed for moving forward. The workbook format invites engagement, and even staying a day ahead yields dividends. Results from a small-scale interview project appear to support this. The positive skewing of the A:B ratio towards “A” is the combination of the strategic use of the text (staying ahead) and the answer key (using it after discussion with peers), while the group that is not advancing past the D/E level exhibit a diverse set of behaviors that are disengaged from the class, and universally they are behind in using the text and always transcribing answers from the keys and not answering questions independently.

Tutors – The best tutor is the one who talks the least. They are therapists. A good tutor will listen to you and then pose a key question that gets you to recognize for yourself where the problem is. If you are not talking much more than the tutor, you are wasting your time and money.

Internet resources – Over the past decade, there has been a huge growth in diverse Internet resources for all sorts of subjects. Please note that while we surely endorse the idea of getting multiple points of view, some of these resources are incorrect, and some of them make different assumptions about the subject than we do. Thus, you need to constantly consider the actual course you are taking when you use these resources. Buyer Beware: free stuff can be worth exactly what you pay for it – nothing.

Explore, Exploit and Prune: The freedom to optimize resources.

Finally, as mentioned elsewhere, we have collected hundreds of thousands of data points about students’ use of resources, and here is what we know: (a) settling in on about 6-7 seems to be the ideal number, provided they are split between things you do alone and things you do with others; (b) if something is not working, it either needs to be approached differently or eliminated (we call this PRUNING); (c) if something is working, figure out why and make it work even better (we call this EXPLOITING); and (d) get outside your past habits and try something new (we call this EXPLORING). As a matter of statistical reality, students who, between exams, explore one new resource, exploit one old one, and prune one that is not working, will realize about a +4% average gain in exam score, and the effect is cumulative. Doing these behaviors well over the term can yield a +12% gain over what would have otherwise been achieved. See: Chen, P.; Ong, D. C.; Ng, J. C.;. Coppola, B. P. “Explore, Exploit, and Prune in the Classroom: Strategic Resource Management Behaviors Predict Performance” AERA Open, 2021, 7(1), 1-14.
LINK: doi.org/10.1177/2332858420986180

Essay 1: You have autonomy
Essay 2: The learning skills you enter with
Essay 3: Post-COVID dialed up autonomy
Essay 4: Resources and their useful use
Essay 5: Practice explanation: Control over when you make errors
Essay 6: Testing: It’s called performance for a reason
Essay 7: Transformational Learning: Resistance is Futile
Essay 8: Grading: Scales are good; curves are bad.