Faculty Development for Medical Educators

One of the ongoing challenges instructors face is getting students to consistently complete pre-work, as many are hesitant or feel it’s not essential to their learning.

Strategies for Getting Students to Complete Pre-Work

• Redefine the roles - Just as you are learning to teach this way, your students are learning how to learn this way. The idea of student-led instruction may be confusing and they may not understand their role and responsibility in this type of learning environment.  Students might not be initially comfortable about taking ownership of their learning.  Have a conversation early on in the course about the structure of these sessions.  You can also do an activity to prepare students to learn in a flipped way.   One example is to embed questions into your syllabus.  In class have students read through the syllabus on their own and answer the questions embedded into it.  Then discus with the whole class.
• Explain why - Explain what students will gain from completing the pre-work and why it is important.  Make sure the way you explain it will resonate with students.  A good idea is to include a paragraph at the beginning of every pre-work document explaining what they are about to learn, how it relates to what they already know, and why it's important.
• Keep pre-work minimal - Don’t give students hours of lengthy material to go through.  This will overwhelm them and is a surefire way to have them not complete the pre-work.
• Make it relevant, valuable, and focused - Make sure the pre-work will help students engage with the in class activities.  Reference the pre-work during the in class activities.  Make sure the content is focused only on information students need to complete the in class activity.  Do not include a lot of extraneous information.
• Promote connectedness - One problem with pre-work is that it is done at home and students can’t ask questions or get clarification on content they are struggling with.  Encourage students to work together on pre-work.  Also set up a discussion board where students can ask questions that other student and you can answer.
• Vary the types of pre-work you give - students have different learning styles and may learn better with one type of media than another.  Also some content is better explain using a certain type of media.  Don’t always use the same format, i.e. video or audio.  Also if possible you should look for interactive pre-work, that is more engaging than just reading something or watching a recorded lecture.
• Assess pre-work - Make sure you provide a brief assessment that student are required to complete after engaging with the pre-work.  We will talk more about assessing pre-work in the next few slides.

• Pre-work quiz  - Using a tool such as ExamSoft you can give students a short quiz on the pre-work content.  They can either do it at home or at the beginning of the class session.
• Embedded questions - If you are having students watch a recorded lecture or other type of video you should embed questions in the middle of the video.  Using Echo360 Universal Capture you can add questions throughout the video.  They can be recall questions or reflection questions.  You can see if and how they answered the questions.  We will have a session on that tool next month.  
• Ticket to enter - Have students complete something and then had it in at the beginning of class as their “ticket to enter” the class.  Make it useful.  For example you can ask students to write three questions they have from the video or reading, including the time stamps or page numbers that correspond with their questions. As they enter the classroom, ask them to hand in and pull some of the sheets and review the questions they had. 
• Cheat sheet - This is very useful for CBLs, PBLs, and TBLs.  As students are reviewing the pre-work have them create a one page cheat sheet, which will be the only thing they are allowed to reference while completing the in class activity.  If they are doing a group activity in class, have them create this cheat sheet with their group.

The whole reason that we assign pre-work is to make sure students understand the content they need to know to engage in the classroom activities.  Therefore pre-work assessments should be formative and low-stakes

Formative - Formative assessments monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. 

Low-stakes - Low-stakes assessments are not worth a lot of points  The purpose of these assessments is to help students learn the material and received feedback.

• Give immediate feedback
  • Use the rationale feedback in ExamSoft.
  • When embedding questions in a lecture immediately explain what the correct answer is and why.
• Use data from assessments to determine if a review is needed.