My senior has been taking classes at community college since her Jr year, and is at a local branch of our state University this semester to finish high school. She has had a mix of teaching styles at the 3 different schools she’s been at. Most frustrating for her is that many of the professors seem to have a pattern of assigning reading and work on that reading, even quizzes, before the lecture. Then the lecture on the topic and they move on. The classes where things are done more traditionally (reading before lecture, lecture, then work or quiz on topic) she does very well in, but she struggles with mastering the material when it’s done the first way.
She is concerned that this is a new thing and that when she gets to her 4 yr university next year she will have more of the same. We had thought that it was just the community college way of doing things and that this semester at the state university the teaching would be better.
Is assigning work related to reading and even having quizzes before a lecture on a topic commonplace at many universities? She has stated that she feels the lecture time in her current classes is more a way to review the material before moving on, and pointing out what was done wrong or missed on the work or quizzes.
Hoping to hear that this is the exception rather than the rule!
The quizzes are to ensure that the student does the reading beforehand. Otherwise most do not. Then the instructor can expand on what is in the textbook rather than having to repeat what the student should have read already.
Technically, all lectures should be reviews of the readings or clarifications of them. The only problem is that if the pre-class work is weighted very heavily in the grading, then a student who misunderstands the readings is at a disadvantage. None of the classes I’ve had in college lacked the post-lecture work/exams, but some did have pre-lecture work/quizzes as well.
I think the issue she’s having currently is that there is little post lecture work in one class. This happened last semester in a pre-calc/trig class of all things, they were expected to do the work online before the class explaining the concepts. We had to get a tutor in order to teach, so she could do the online work (heavily weighted) then go to the class, where the instructor taught poorly anyhow. Good to hear, so far, that there should be more post lecture work than she’s experiencing.
This isn’t a “new thing”; professors have been doing this forever. It’s a stylistic choice. Some professors like to give the quiz after the reading and some after the lecture…it kind of depends on the professor and not on the overall university itself. I would say most professors probably choose to assign reading, then lecture, and then ask for work on the topic but it’s not universal.
sounds like she is in classes with adjunct profs , who are not tenured or well paid.
I guess I thought it was a new thing as neither my husband nor I remember anything like this when we were in college. Granted that was a LONG time ago, since we’re old enough to have one going to college ourselves!
Honestly, I don’t every remember having quizzes in college. Your choice if you read the material, if you didn’t you wouldn’t understand the lecture, and then wouldn’t do well on the exam, and if there was a paper, you’d have a difficult time with that. Natural consequences of not doing the reading. We had suggested work, but things weren’t turned in and graded. This is feeling more like high school to me.
@fixingrocks , I understand that the deviation can be subjectively viewed as getting away from treating the adult student like a real (gasp!) *adult/i, but some professors like to give the incentive to students to help themselves. Meaning, by giving a quiz on a reading before a lecture on that reading’s content, it forces the student to read before the lecture or suffer a direct consequence to their grade (the poor quiz score). Of course, there are also the indirect consequences that educators think about just as you’ve mentioned with exams or papers. The idea is just how your logic flows above, except that the educator is forcing the student (by incentives) to be more active in the course in general: read, give a quiz on the reading, then lecture. A typical student is more likely to do the readings when there is an immediate direct consequence to not doing so in the form of a poor quiz score. In fact, some professors have been known to require short written summaries turned in of that week’s assigned readings as a qualifier to even take a quiz - no written summary that week, then you automatically get a 0 on that week;s quiz no matter how many answers you would’ve “guessed” correctly. Of course, keeping on your logic, if a student does well on the quizzes, then they are more likely to follow and absorb the subsequent lecture (and participate in the lecture!), which is more likely to also result in better grades on exams.
Basically, some professors like to incentivize students to actually choose to do the readings. Ideally, the quiz is supposed to be more objective in the sense that as long as the student actually did read the material (with effective reading technique for that particular student) that he or she should reasonably do well on the quizzes. The lectures, subsequently then, fill in gaps or allow the professor to point out items of particular interest, and may allow more in-class lecture time to answer more questions from the students rather than revisiting or re-lecturing some more nuanced details that the students should have picked up had they read the material beforehand, as assigned. Even better when a professor truly uses a text/assigned readings as supplements to the lectures only and really gives meat and substance to the material than what the texts may present initially.
And, TBH, while I’ve never taken a graduate-level course, I’ve talked to plenty of close friends who have and that is exactly the set up at graduate-level. The professors absolutely expect that you’ve done the reading for the upcoming lecture, and the graduate student is expected to actively talk about that material to the professor and the rest of the class (akin to a verbal quiz). If it’s obvious that the student didn’t do the reading for that lecture, then he or she would be penalized somehow. Some professors have been teaching college-level courses for a very long time, and they’re not new to college students skipping the readings.
Some of my more organized and memorable classes were of this very structure. Read that upcoming lecture’s assigned reading, type a summary of the reading, turn in the summary to be able to even take the quiz, knock out eh objective quiz, then kick-back for lecture by taking notes where there is particular emphasis and asking questions that I knew were not already answered in the readings or the lectures thus far to that point.