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Student Characteristics

This Page Includes
Relevant personal information Learning styles and preferences Relevant education or work experience Prior knowledge specific to the course Expectations of course outcomes Motivation for taking the course

Know your audience

Knowing your audience (your students), even if it's very basic information, will help you help them. It will also help you to prepare the students to help themselves. Student should learn the best strategies to improve their own learning, a process called metacognition. By encouraging students to take responsibility for their learning, you will increase their chances for success in your class and others.

Dr. Richard Felder (NC State University) Learning styles and strategies http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/ILSdir/styles.htm Metacognition for the student http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/students/learning/lr1metn.htm

Relevant personal information

Many aspects of students' lives play a role in their success in the learning process. You can gather information that will help you prepare your course materials by asking the following questions:

• Is English a secon, third, or fourth language for any students?
• Is any student a transfer student?
• Do the students work full-time or part-time?
• Are any students responsible for taking care of children, a spouse, or members of their family?
• Do all students have access to the technology required to perform course activities?

Learning styles or preferences

Many people tend to look at learning preferences through only one lens, input modality. Namely, they look at whether students prefer to learn through visual or auditory means. A smaller set of instructors consider tactile or kinesthetic students, and a very small handful split visual students into two categories: visual-verbal ( text-based visuals) and visual-nonverbal (graphic-based visuals). Even instructors who consider all four input modalities may be missing a lot. After all, once students get the information past their eyes, ears and hands, they still must use their brains!

In a comprehensive article about learning styles, Dr. Richard M. Felder (1993) states that "[a] student's learning style may be defined in part by the answers to five questions." These five questions lead to the five dimensions of learning style:

• perception (sensory or intuitive)
• input modality (visual-nonverbal, visual-verbal, auditory, or tactile-kinesthetic)
• organization (inductive or deductive)
• processing (active or reflective)
• understanding (sequential or global)

To compound the problem of determining the appropriate learning style, students often don't fall cleanly into one or the other of these paired-opposite categories, or into a particular portion of the input modality quartet. Rather, most students have different preferences in different situations. This may be due to experiences with previous teachers who did not accommodate any learning preferences other than their own, to experiences with teachers who were just "teaching how they were taught," or to some other influence. Whatever the reason, it is important to offer various experiences and resources to accommodate a greater number of student learning preferences.

As instructors, we must also consider that many students may not even know their learning preferences. It is important for students to practice metacognition, or learning how one learns. This allows students to take direct responsibility for their own learning success by adopting appropriate learning strategies based on their preferences.

If you are interested in reading more about learning styles, visit the Learning Styles module. Dr. Richard Felder (NC State University) Learning Styles http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Learning_Styles.html Richard Felder (NC State University) Index of Learning Styles http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/ILSpage.html Georgia State University Master Teacher Program On Learning Styles (based on Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator) http://www.gsu.edu/~dschjb/wwwmbti.html Dr. Richard Felder (NC State University) Active and Cooperative Learning http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Cooperative_Learning.html Dr. A.H. Schoenfeld Learning and Mathematics What's all the fuss about metacognition? http://mathforum.org/~sarah/Discussion.Sessions/Schoenfeld.html Dr. G. Schraw and Dr. D.W. Brooks (Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln) Helping Students Self-Regulate in Math and Sciences Courses http://dwb.unl.edu/Chau/SR/Self_Reg.html

Relevant education or work experience

Have any of your students worked in a lab for you or another professor?   If so, they may have learned some shortcuts that you may not want them to model for other students. More importantly, these shortcuts interfere with their ability to move forward in your course.

Prior knowledge specific to the course

How well did the students perform in prerequisite courses? It is a good idea to take a look at how students fared in prerequisite courses. San Francisco State University (SFSU) makes this information available to instructors via the online roster. For transfer students, it should be possible to determine how they did in prerequisite courses that are allowed as substitutes. However, letter grades alone may not give you a good understanding of what the students have taken from the prerequisite courses. You may want to talk briefly with the instructors from those courses to get their impression of the topics for which students could demonstrate proficiency.

It is important to identify and dispel misconceptions or preconceptions that students have related to the course material. The table below contains a list of common misconceptions that college science teachers have submitted:

Scientific fields or concepts and student misconceptions related to them

Field or concept	Misconception(s)
Anatomy	The entire human body is filled with blood.
Brain	We only use 10% of our brain.
Biology	Each person has only one set of genes in his or her entire body.
Botany	Trees grow from the base, so branches move farther away from the ground each year.
Cancer	Tissue grows fast. Tumors kill people.
DNA	Each DNA strand is a copy (diploid). Each chromosome is one long DNA molecule.
Gene therapy	Fatal disease carriers die due to gene therapy rather than the fatal diseases.
Genetically modified foods	If a fish gene is used to modify tomatoes, then the tomato is not vegetarian. Only genetically modified food has genes.
HIV	HIV is no longer a health problem, now that drugs can be used to control its effects.
Labs working with deadly materials (e.g., UC Davis)	A crack in the laboratory wall will "let out" something that will kill everyone.
Chemistry	Organic is natural, but inorganic is man-made.
Placebo effect	One out of every three people responds to a placebo.
Thermodynamics	Order is created from disorder (open versus closed system).

 

(Optional) Watch A Private Universe, an 18-minute video discussing students' misconceptions about why the Earth has seasons and why we see phases of the moon. (This video can be ordered online, through www.learner.org (pop-up) or by phone, 1-800-LEARNER.) List your field of study or a concept that you teach. Describe common misconceptions that students hold related to that field or concept.

 

Expectations of course outcomes

You may be surprised by what students expect to get out of the course. Ask them to state their expectations at the beginning of the semester, then you have a chance to revisit their expectations in a mid-semester course evaluation. This gives you time to make sure that you are meeting the students' expectations of the course, as well as to determine if they are meeting the expectations outlined in your syllabus.

Motivation for taking course

Students taking your course as a requirement may be less motivated to participate fully than students who have an interest in the course content, but this is not always the case.