EHHP Operations and Accreditation

Have your students requested that you provide them with your PPTs? Lecture outlines? Here’s a research-based must-read article from a couple of years ago by Maryellen Weimer from The Teaching Professor addressing the subject of  providing notes for students in your classes.

Should Instructors Provide Students with Complete Notes? By Maryellen Weimer

Course management software programs make it especially easy for instructors to provide students with a set of complete lecture notes. It seems that more instructors are doing this, as witnessed in the regularity with which students ask that the instructor’s notes be posted. But is giving students a complete set of notes a good idea?

Previous findings (like those of Kenneth Kiewra, highlighted some years back in this newsletter) recommend against this practice. Kiewra’s research demonstrated both a process and a product benefit of note taking. The process benefit accrues when students make selections about what to note and when they use at least some of their own words to record that material. When students record lecture content using their words, it becomes easier for them to connect new material with things they already know. This process benefit is lost when students are provided with complete notes. Even so, students prefer teacher notes because they think that having the content in the instructor’s words will better prepare them for exam questions.

The product benefit of note taking obviously comes as a result of having a product, in this case a set of notes, that can be reviewed and studied subsequently. It is generally thought that instructor-provided notes enhance this benefit because students don’t have to worry about losing notes (they are always available online) and because the material in instructor-provided notes is sure to be accurate.

However, a recent study confirms Kiewra’s earlier findings—but with an interesting elaboration. In this study, psychology students received either a complete or a partial set of instructor notes. The partial notes included major headings and titles made up of definitions and concepts, but students needed to write in the additional information. In both cases, students were instructed to download the notes and bring them to class. About three-fourths of the students complied with this directive.

The researchers looked at the impact of the complete versus the partial notes on exam scores, final grades, and attendance. They found that those students who received partial notes performed better on the third and fourth exams and earned significantly higher course grades. They did not find “differential effects of note type on class attendance.” (p. 10)

There was one other “noteworthy” effect. On the final exam, the students who received partial notes performed better on conceptual questions, those questions that involved “application of a theoretical concept to an example that required additional mastery of the material beyond the definition.” (p. 8) Researchers speculate that the students with partial notes had encoded material throughout the semester, and when confronted with the large amount of material they needed to know for the final, they understood more and so had to rely less on memorization.

Based on their findings, these researchers recommend providing students with partial notes. Giving students some notes conveys the instructor’s sensitivity to their concerns about getting the material they need from a lecture. If those notes provide the outline or structure of the material, students can concentrate on understanding the information rather than on trying to figure out how to prioritize and organize the material. Partial notes also clarify what students need to be writing and still retain the process benefit of note taking by forcing students to encode some of the content. The researchers summarize their results this way: “Partial notes … may provide a nice balance in terms of providing students with some notes, which they report as helpful, and still requiring encoding and higher-level processing of information, which will ultimately improve learning and performance.” (p. 11)

Reference: Cornelius, T.L., and Owen-DeSchryver, J. (2008). Differential effects of full and partial notes on learning outcomes and attendance. Teaching of Psychology, 35 (1), 6-12.

Originally published in The Teaching Professor, June/July 2008

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Algebra, according to the Great Schools website, “is frequently called the gatekeeper subject.” It provides a solid foundation for later learning by teaching abstract reasoning skills. What’s more, its lessons apply to an increasing number of jobs in our technologically sophisticated society. So how can you increase the chances your son or daughter will excel at algebra? A new study provides a surprising answer: Have them learn a musical instrument. Researcher Barbara Helmrich of Baltimore’s College of Notre Dame examined a sample of 6,026 ninth-graders enrolled in six Maryland school districts. All had completed an introductory algebra course in either eighth or ninth grade and taken the HSA, a test that assesses how well they learned the subject. Helmrich divided the students into three groups: Those who had received formal instruction on a musical instrument during the sixth, seventh and eighth grades; those who received choral instruction during those same years; and those who received no formal musical training. She found the students who studied music significantly outperformed their peers. “Formal instrumental instruction impacted algebra scores the most,” she reports. “Choral instruction also affected scores, but to a lesser extent.” This achievement gap was particularly pronounced among black students. “For African Americans, the means of all three groups represented failing scores on the fifth-grade MSA,” she said, referring to a standard assessment of math knowledge and ability. “However, after the middle-school years, the means of both the instrumental and vocal groups represented passing HSA scores, whereas the mean of the group receiving neither instruction did not.” While Helmrich notes the link between music instruction and algebra achievement “most likely lies in a combination of factors,” she argues the primary effect is a matter of enhanced brain development. Middle-school music instruction “takes place during a time (age 10-12) in which a proliferation of new synapses occurs in the developing brain,” she writes. “This study corroborates the opinion that these new synapses are formed and strengthened, at least in part, by activities — music in this case — that are undertaken during early adolescence,” she adds. The particularly robust results for African-American students suggests “offering music education in middle school might present an alternative strategy for narrowing the achievement gap” between students of different races, Helmrich writes in the Journal of Adolescent Research.These findings emerge at a time when many budget-strapped school districts continue to cut arts education programs. California students must complete one year-long course in the arts or a foreign language to graduate, but in early June, the state assembly voted to allow students to substitute a “career technical education” course for that requirement. If those technical courses involve any higher-level math, the legislation may be sadly ironic. This study strongly suggests that understanding constants and variables is enhanced by the study of congas and violins.

Mental Health Apps: Like A ‘Therapist In Your Pocket’ by MICHELLE TRUDEAU

Dr. Margaret Morris at Intel Corp. is designing a cell phone app to help manage stress in everyday life, in order to improve mental health and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. Morris calls the app “Mobile Therapy.”

As the computing power of cell phones increases, more and more sophisticated mobile apps are being developed for the mental health field. They’re seen as a way to bridge periodic therapy sessions — a sort of 24-7 mobile therapist that can help with everything from quitting smoking to treating anxiety to detecting relapses in psychotic disorders.

These mobile technologies let users track their moods and experiences, providing a supplemental tool for psychiatrists and psychologists.

“It gives me an additional source of rich information of what the patient’s life is like between sessions,” says University of Pennsylvania researcher Dimitri Perivoliotis, who treats patients with schizophrenia. “It’s almost like an electronic therapist, in a way, or a therapist in your pocket.”

Here’s how one of the apps, called “Mobile Therapy,” works: Throughout the day at random times, a “mood map” pops up on a user’s cell phone screen. “People drag a little red dot around that screen with their finger to indicate their current mood,” says Dr. Margaret Morris, a clinical psychologist working at Intel Corp. and the app’s designer. Users also can chart their energy levels, sleep patterns, activities, foods eaten and more, she says.

Gaining New Insights And Reducing Stress

Morris designed the app, which can be downloaded onto most cell phones, to try to help people manage the stress of everyday life, to improve their mental health and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Based on the information entered by the user, the app offers “therapeutic exercises” ranging from “breathing visualizations to progressive muscle relaxation” to useful ways to disengage from a stressful situation, Morris says. And the information the app captures can later be charted, printed out and reviewed. The idea is that users can look at a whole week of mood data to see if there are any connections between their mood and other factors happening in their lives, and record it into the app.

Morris’ Mobile Therapy app has been beta-tested in 60 people, and “everyone who used it described new insights about their emotional variability” and said it helped reduce their stress, she says.

Her research was recently published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, where she writes that by using the app, participants were able to increase “self-awareness in moments of stress, develop insights about their emotional patterns and practice new strategies for modulating stress reactions.”

Helping Teens With Behavioral ‘Homework’

Another mobile app being developed targets a large group of cell phone users: teenagers.

Alan Delahunty, a psychotherapist from Galway, Ireland, treats teens suffering from clinical depression using cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. An essential component of CBT is “homework,” which involves patients keeping a daily diary, charting their moods, energy levels, sleep, activities, etc.

Typically, patients will bring their paper charts into their therapist to discuss them during their weekly therapy session. But many patients — especially teens — balk at doing the CBT homework, and many stop doing it.

Previous research suggests that patients who do their CBT homework assignments and practice them between sessions are the ones who benefit the most and benefit the most quickly.

Knowing this, researchers Gavin Doherty and Mark Matthews at Trinity College in Dublin developed a cell phone app that’s being tested by a couple of dozen therapists throughout Ireland.

Delahunty, one of the testers of the “mobile mood diary,” says it’s a very useful tool.

“From a clinical point of view, I’ve found it a huge improvement over the pen-and-paper technique,” Delahunty says. He adds that his young patients love the app and rarely miss doing their daily homework. They’re pleasantly surprised that they can use their cell phones to help themselves in therapy. And when they come into therapy, he says, “You get a complete printout of their mood, their energy level, their sleep patterns, and any comments they’ve made over the week or two. And then you can put that down on the table in front of you, and use it to discuss the therapy with the young person.”

Because teens are so comfortable with texting, Delahunty adds, “I’m getting more comments. And in some cases, it’s really like narrative therapy, where you’d be getting a paragraph of text for each day, which brings out a richness in the therapy situation that you can explore then.”

Psychiatrists, too, find the mobile mood diary a benefit by looking at the graphs, monitoring the young person’s moods. “That was helpful to them, in deciding whether the young person should be on medication or change their dosage or whatever because it [the mobile mood diary] was a very accurate measurement of how the young person’s mood was moving,” Delahunty says.

Apps For Severe Depression, Schizophrenia

Another mental health app under development, called CBT MobilWork, is tailored to adults with severe depression.

It’s a collaboration between Judy Callan, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, and computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University that Callan hopes to adapt for use in mental health programs for anxiety, phobias, eating disorders and more.

Callan describes how a typical patient might use this app, which tailors CBT homework to each user: “Say a patient just starts therapy and they’re really depressed and they can hardly get out of bed. One of their homework assignments might be to, each day, just make your bed,” Callan says.

Once the patient has successfully accomplished that task, the homework on the phone app will change, prompting and coaching the patient to take the next step.

There’s also an app for one of the most intractable mental disorders: schizophrenia, which affects 1 percent of the U.S. population. It’s for these patients that the University of Pennsylvania’s Perivoliotis is developing innovative mobile technologies: palm-sized computers that chart a patient’s moods and activities, for example; and a digital watch that has personalized scrolling messages. The messages on the watch can instruct a patient who hears voices, for example, to do exercises like deep breathing or muscle relaxation “to reduce the stress triggered by their voices,” he says.

“One of our patients came in with chronic, constant auditory hallucinations that really controlled his life,” Perivoliotis recalls. “The voices would threaten him that if he would go outside and do fun things, then terrible, catastrophic things would happen to him. He felt really enslaved by them. He felt no sense of control whatsoever.”

So the therapist taught the patient a few simple behavioral exercises to reduce the severity of the voices. It’s an exercise called the “look, point and name technique,” Perivoliotis explains. “When a patient starts to hear voices, he applies the technique by looking at an object in the room, pointing to it and naming it aloud. He repeats this until he runs out of things to name.”

Perivoliotis says “the technique usually results in reduced voice severity [i.e., the voices seem quieter or pause altogether], probably because the patient’s attention is redirected away from them and because speaking competes with a brain mechanism involved in auditory hallucinations.”

So the mobile therapy watch that this patient wore was programmed to remind him a few times a day to practice this technique to control the voices.

“It really did the trick,” Perivoliotis says. The voices were dramatically reduced. “It kind of broke him out of the stream of voices and his internal preoccupation with them.”

Exercises like these not only give the patient temporary relief from distressing symptoms but also, importantly, “they help to correct patients’ inaccurate and dysfunctional beliefs about their symptoms — from, ‘I have no control over the voices,’ to, ‘I do have some control over them,’ ” Perivoliotis says.

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THIS DAY IN HISTORY: Dred Scott Emancipated by His Original Owners (1857)

Scott was an American slave who sued unsuccessfully for his freedom in the famous Dred Scott v. Sandford case. Though he argued that having lived in states and territories where slavery was illegal rendered him a free man, the Supreme Court ruled against him in 1857, finding that no person of African ancestry could claim citizenship in the US or bring suit in federal court. Shortly thereafter, Scott was returned to his original owners and emancipated. What did he do after he was freed? More… Discuss

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