I am continuously working on helping students learn and practice strategies that apply to their work in the classroom or therapeutic setting, as well as transferring skills for other settings. I find that my students are still hesitant when asked to apply knowledge and ideas they have learned in class to come up with proactive strategies for the clinic or classroom setting. While they seem to enjoy experiential learning activities, they are not always able to transfer and/or synthesize experiential and didactic information that relate to one another. These issues have improved as a result of strategies learned and implemented as a result of my participation in the Center for Teaching Excellence Best Practices Institute and Service Learning Institute. I am now thinking about what additional changes in this course I can make that will increase the efficiency and accuracy of relevant student outcomes.
Students’ attitudes have varied from year to year and are affected by the feedback and information that they receive from their peers prior to taking the class. In addition, students whose advisors teach performance-based or applied music courses may feel they are less prepared for the application of research to the broader population. The current arrangement has helped students complete their preparation for a broad range of skills with courses that focus on music performance aspects as well as pedagogical or therapeutic aspects. Addressing this issue from the first day of class and continuing to incorporate writing and discussion opportunities for students to think about and articulate how research applies to them has helped this problem tremendously.
One of the last writing activities that I asked the class to complete was a page that asked them the following questions:
I began using this as a measure for what students were taking away from the course, as opposed to relying solely on scores on the student evaluations required by the university. Students are generally able to articulate purpose and learning in their answers to these questions, and I am able to get a better sense of things that I need to focus on in future offerings. That being said, course evaluations have gone up each year, with the fall 2006 ratings being above the departmental mean. The changes made in the course over time have really helped to clarify the process and importance of research for these students, and they feel more comfortable in the skills they are acquiring. It is also important to note that the fall 2006 group had an overall more positive attitude than students in previous years. They had a positive attitude at the start of the course, and their attitudes may also have been attributed to changes made to the course. Students responded favorably to the assignments, came to class prepared and participated in discussion and peer feedback.
Student comments about the research posters were superficial, or they had a hard time finding constructive ways of evaluating their peers. This is definitely an area for further expansion in future course offerings.
As far other changes, I would still like to add a service learning option that puts students in front of a classroom or therapeutic setting in order to collect data. Service learning would provide students with real-world applications of the course materials in addition to assisting the community. However, there are some logistical issues in the way of time and scheduling constraints and approval from the school district and KU Human Subjects Committee that need to be addressed in order for this to be feasible.| << Student Performance | ^TOP^ | Comments >> |
