In this post, I continue the dialogue we started last week about ways to use flashcards to foster higher-order thinking from students. Specifically, I explore another activity you may be able to adapt to your classroom and discuss how using digital flashcards presents your students with new, effective methods for assessing their own knowledge.

Flashcards require students to distill the “essence”

The act of creating flashcards requires students to (1) determine which idea is worth creating a flashcard for and (2) determine how to break that idea into term/definition so it fits into the flashcard format. These two steps drive students to distill concepts and ideas to their essence. Distilling complicated concepts to their essence is an indicator of deep understanding.

Let’s take an example. Let’s say you wanted your students to understand the causes of the Civil War. Tomes have been written on the subject. And for generations students have written papers on the topic. What if you gave your students the assignment of defining the causes of the Civil War in 20 flashcards? Students would be forced to distill the causes into 20 key ideas. In addition, they’d need to create flashcards that presented these ideas in a coherent manner.

Flashcards with questions such as: What were the five primary causes of the Civil War? or Who were the three key leaders in the South’s decision to secede?

This assignment wouldn’t work for all students. And I’m not arguing flashcards can replace the writing of term papers, but there is value in requiring students to distill complicated concepts to their essence. Frankly, doing so aligns with the way students operate today: short text messages, Twitter updates in 140 characters or less. Students know how to think in brief. Let’s ask them to apply those habits to something more difficult – distilling complicated concepts into brief chunks.

Digital flashcards help students assess their knowledge

There are many benefits to creating flashcards with a digital tool such as StudyBlue. One of the most important is StudyBlue’s ability to take the ideas students have distilled into flashcards and present them to students in different contexts. As you know, requiring students to apply knowledge in different contexts facilitates a deeper understanding.

Each flashcard is a mini-assessment on an idea or concept. Once those mini-assessments are created, a tool like StudyBlue can present them in different assessment formats. A multiple-choice quiz is one example. StudyBlue takes a flashcard deck and automatically converts that flashcard deck into a multiple-choice quiz.  With a quiz, students aren’t self-reporting their answers as they do with flashcards. It’s amazing how reluctant students can be about saying they answered a flashcard incorrectly, and a quiz takes away the temptation to miss-report. A multiple-choice quiz is just one format in which digital flashcards can assess students. Digital flashcards can also present concepts in true/false and fill in the blank formats. In addition, flashcards can easily be converted into interactive online games that challenge students to prove their knowledge.

In addition to providing students with a valid way to assess themselves, digital flashcard tools also help students diagnose where they need to study the most. They can track what students don’t know and then guide them to study this material.

Digital flashcards facilitate self-assessment

As you know, students have been making flashcards for eons. What’s exciting about digital flashcards is they allow students to assess themselves in multiple ways. As educators, we know the more we can get students assessing themselves, the better. They’re actively engaged in learning, not passively accepting the material.

Digital flashcards also go where students are – on their phones. Flashcards work very well in a mobile environment and they allow students to turn 15 minutes of what used to be downtime into studying.

To be sure, flashcards aren’t the end-all-be-all. But flashcards used the right way can develop higher-order thinking, and digital flashcards offer many exiting ways to engage and assess students.

I look forward to continuing the dialogue with you about how flashcards – digital and otherwise – can help students learn.

This is the third of a three-part series by Matt Messinger, Director of Learning at StudyBlue, a free online flashcard and note-taking tool.

Do you have a question for the editor? Would you like to suggest a topic for a post you’d like to read? Are you interested in writing a guest post? Please email editor Diane Trim.

Photo credits:
Study Blue Logo: StudyBlue.com
209. [flash cards]: d3b…*
nerd alert: drcw

Often, flashcards are associated with rote memorization. And accurately so.  A common use of flashcards is to help recall vocabulary and key terms. But flashcards can also help students develop higher-order thinking skills such as critical analysis and synthesis, and they can provide students with the foundational knowledge upon which deeper understanding is gained.

To be sure, flashcards alone are not enough to turn students into critical thinkers. But flashcards can, if used appropriately, help students develop essential higher level thinking skills. In this article, we’ll examine two specific classroom activities that use flashcards to develop higher-order thinking. I hope teachers can adapt these lessons to work in their own classrooms with their own curricula.

Chunking – The First Step to Critical Thinking
Research shows that “chunking” large sets of information into smaller subsets helps students learn. By partitioning information into different categories, students need to step back and classify what they’re looking at. That is, they need to think critically.

Here’s an example from the classroom: A high school world history teacher gives her students a list of 60 terms on a sheet of paper. She then tells them to take that list of terms and convert them into four flashcard decks of 15 cards each using StudyBlue, a free online flashcard tool. The four flashcard decks must have the following topics: fascism, communism, socialism, and totalitarianism. The students need to decide which of the 60 terms go into which flashcard deck. Categorizing each term forces students to analyze how it aligns – or doesn’t align – with the definition of each of the four categories. This extra level of thinking helps students better recall the information.

After students have done this exercise, the World History teacher has the students write a paper comparing and contrasting the different “-isms.” The flashcards become the basis for this paper.

All domains have content knowledge that has been categorized and organized in one way or another. The example above can work well in all subject areas.

To Understand – Change the Environment
Recent research on learning shows that varying the study environment increases retention. Studying in the quiet of the library coupled with studying the same information at the loud coffee shop helps students remember more.
One chemistry teacher created a flashcard lesson to put this theory into practice. She took her entire class to the computer lab. Then, she had her students sit quietly and study their flashcard decks on diffusion and osmosis. When they were done studying individually, she asked the students to partner up, with one partner standing behind the other sitting at the computer. As the students at the computer operated the online flashcard tool and flipped through the flashcards, the students standing said the answers aloud. The online flashcard decks are randomized so all of the students were answering different flashcards at once. The students were not only engaged in competition with their classmates, but they were also forced to focus on the answer amid the cacophony of the computer lab. After doing this for a few days, the teacher quizzed the students on the material and they achieved higher average scores than they did on most of her quizzes.

An important part of higher-order thinking is being able to take information in one context and apply it as appropriate in a different context. And while the exercise above does not get all the way in achieving that objective, it does help students move information into long-term memory, so they can better apply it in the future. Flashcards are conducive to studying in multiple environments because flashcards are mobile. With flashcard apps for phones, students can literally put their backpack in their pocket and study wherever they are.

One could argue that getting information into long-term memory is not a higher-order activity, but I think it is by definition. In addition, research shows that gaining domain-specific content knowledge is essential to becoming an expert in a field. One cannot become an expert in organic chemistry without having the foundational knowledge of the elements and their structures. Studying flashcards in different environments helps students get information into long-term memory.

What are innovative and effective ways you’ve used flashcards to help students learn? I very much look forward to hearing your comments.

This is the second of a three-part series by Matt Messinger, Director of Learning at StudyBlue, a free online flashcard and note-taking tool.

Do you have a question for the editor? Would you like to suggest a topic for a post you’d like to read? Are you interested in writing a guest post? Please email editor Diane Trim.

Photo credits:
Study Blue Logo: StudyBlue.com
unfinished flash cards: drcw
Chinese students surfing on the Internet: SCA Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget
Day 24.10 tablet testing: Frerieke

According to the Norton Online Living Report 2009, parents believe their children spend 21 hours online. The reality is that students in twelve countries reported spending 39 hours online. Don’t tell me these kids don’t have time to finish their assignments or clean their rooms.

Multitasking. Researchers for the Kaiser Family Foundation’s report, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds, found that our students aren’t just watching YouTube or downloading from iTunes. When they’re on the ’Net, they’re likely to be IM-ing, texting, watching TV, or listening to their music players.

The Kaiser Family Foundation’s researchers found that rates of teen media use (TV, cell phones, computers, video games, audio, print, and movies) are up an hour and 17 minutes over teen media usage five years ago. A teen’s cell phone, smart phone, or gaming device is never out of arm’s reach.

“[…] cell phones and iPods have become true multi-media devices,” the study’s authors wrote. “In fact, young people now spend more time listening to music, playing games, and watching TV on their cell phones (a total of :49 daily) than they spend talking on them (:33).”

The authors of the Norton Online Living Report found that, “[…] six in 10 adults worldwide say kids spend ‘too much’ time online, and what’s more 45% of kids agree.”

Students as digital trailblazers. In another study from the Speak Up National Research Project, researchers disagree with parents and kids: students aren’t spending too much time online; students are the early adopters and adapters of new technology. Our students are not wasting time, they’re innovating. The authors write that our students are the “digital advance team,” the people who will lead educators and other adults into the technology age.

“The findings illustrate how K-12 students are leading the way in re-thinking education delivery and career exploration,” the study’s authors wrote. “These insights can be used to inform our nation’s education leaders in communities all across the United States, as they plan on how to use the stimulus funds for education effectively.”

The researchers believe that our students are ready and able to show adults how to use technology in innovative and educational ways; it’s our responsibility to take notes and make the kids’ 21st century technology ideas happen.

Online use and academic success. The problem is that when kids are online, they’re not likely to be doing school work. The Generation M2 report’s researchers found that students from all races and from all family education backgrounds spent an average of just 16 minutes online working on classroom assignments. Most of the time (25%), they hang out on social network sites, play online games (19%), watch YouTube or other videos (16%), and IM one another (13%).

The good news from these studies is that all of this online time and short hand text message language isn’t rotting students’ brains as much as we might think. The Generation M2 report’s researchers did find that 8- to 18-year-olds are spending five fewer minutes reading hard copies of books, magazines, and newspapers for pleasure than they did in six years ago. However, they’ve made up about two minutes of that deficit with online magazine or newspaper reading.

They also found that the same number of students who read for pleasure six years ago is about the same number who do so today. It’s also an activity that prohibits a lot of multitasking. Students might glance at the TV or play music in the background, but for the most part, when they read print, they are focused on their reading.

The Generation M2 report’s researchers also found that the time students spend online doesn’t affect their reading time. Heavy screen media users (16 or more hours a day) and light screen media users (less than two hours a day) read about the same amount of time: about 41 minutes a day. Even kids who watch TV all night long read about as much as those who don’t tune in much at all.

Students who have a TV in their bedrooms or live in homes where the TV is always on read less than other students, by about 10 minutes. Ten minutes might not seem much, but it’s a significant number that correlates to classroom achievement.

“Contrary to what is found for other media,” the Generation M2 report’s researchers wrote, “young people who are heavy readers (those who spend an hour or more per day with print media) are substantially more likely to say they earn high grades than those who are light readers (those who report no print reading on a typical day): 72% of heavy readers report high grades, compared to 60% of those in the light-reading group.”

Media use and well being. Not only do the heavy media users earn lower grades, but they’re not as happy as the kids who are offline. Of the light media users (fewer than three hours per day), 22% reported that they have a “high level of personal contentment,” the Generation M2 researchers found. On the opposite side, 20% of the heavy media users (more than 16 hours per day) reported that they had a “low level of personal contentment.”

Twenty-one percent of 8- to 18-year-olds are heavy media users. The problem is that we need to teach these kids to channel their media use. According to the Norton Online Living Report’s authors, parents know that they’re responsible for their children’s media use, but just 7 in 10 kids have rules. Thirty-three percent of the parents in the survey said that it’s hard to make media rules because so much new technology wasn’t around when they were kids.

The Norton Online Living Report researchers found that one in five students admitted they did something online that their parents wouldn’t approve. One-in-five students reported that their parents caught them, too.

“Supervision is inherently difficult when it comes to the online world,” the study’s authors wrote. “Not only is the Web’s content available to anyone with a search engine, it’s easy for kids to bypass parents altogether by logging on from outside the household.”

Educators have the tough job of balancing the curriculum with the students’ digital obsession, of incorporating 21st century skills with 21st century safety, and encouraging academic success in a world of media excess. I think we’re up to the challenge, but our role will be more to guide the digital natives with their technology use while they lead the way.

References:

“Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year Olds.” (2010) Kaiser Family Foundation. http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/8010.pdf Accessed January 26, 2010

“Norton Online Living Report.” (2009) Symantec Corporation. http://www.nortononlineliving.com/documents/NOLR_Report_09.pdf Accessed January 21, 2010.

“Selected National Findings: Speak Up 2008 for Students, Teachers, Parents and Administrators.” (2009.) Project Tomorrow. http://www.tomorrow.org Accessed December 8, 2009.