Microinterventions for Student Success

Hello and welcome to the Hub. This website is a collaborative effort to provide the College with a virtual space where we can collect and share teaching resources by and for MC faculty.   The purpose of this article is to ignite collegewide discussion about a powerful set of classroom focused academic success tactics called microinterventions.  A microintervention is “a brief, focused, high-impact exchange between students and faculty and staff members that fuels student success”.  Examples include making timely and effective referrals, welcoming students to class early in the semester (or even before the semester begins), employing learning focused exam reviews and debriefing techniques, and setting students up to learn during the first five minutes of each class.

During the 2015-16 academic year, Carol Moore in the ELITE Office organized some workshops on microinterventions.   It was very energizing to spend time with faculty and staff colleagues talking about our core business here at MC, the teaching and learning process.  Teaching can be a lonely task sometimes. I think my colleagues appreciated the chance to share ideas about how to address the challenges presented by our students.  One consistent thread emerged from these discussions.  My colleagues and I became very interested what makes a microintervention effective.  Our discussions began to focus on questions like these:

what makes a microintervention work? 

how does it make students more successful? 

why are some microinterventions more powerful than others?

So I went looking for some answers to these questions.  They sounded familiar and I soon discovered why.  Early in my career as a faculty member, a colleague of mine and I did some work in a field called the scholarship of teaching and learning.  Research in this area tends to focus on answers to questions like:

what conditions enable students learn most effectively?

what can faculty members do to create these conditions in the classroom?  

So it seems to me, that the answers to the second set of questions would be very useful in helping faculty and staff members discover answers to the first set.  Scholars of teaching and learning generally agree that students learn best in learning environments that:

• provide sufficient time on learning tasks
• contain clear expectations
• build on prior knowledge
• actively engage students in the learning process

Let’s take a quick look at each of these ideas and how microinterventions might be used to create a more effective learning environment.

Time on Task:  At first glance, the idea underlying this principle seems rather obvious.  The more time students spend studying a topic, the more they learn, right?  Sounds good, until you actually think about how time is allocated in most college courses.  First, let’s consider what happens in most college classrooms.  The most prevalent form of instruction is still the lecture and lectures are just not a very good use of the time students spend with faculty members.  For example, studies show that students retain about 70% of what they hear during the first ten minutes of class and just 20% of what they hear during the last ten minutes.  Seems to me like the last 10 minutes of a lecture might be really fertile ground for active learning based microinterventions.  And there is more bad news.  The most prevalent form of out of class instruction is still the unstructured reading assignment.   Studies show that most college students stop reading their textbooks as soon as they encounter a concept, an idea, or an explanation that they do not understand.  They assume that the instructor will explain that material during the next class period.   So even if students plan to spend two hours studying or reading outside of class for every hour they spend in class, these plans often go awry very quickly.  Sounds like more fertile ground for lots of microinterventions.

Clear Expectations:  Studies show that students learn best when they are provided with clear expectations about the tasks they need to the complete, the degree of mastery they are expected to exhibit, or the skill level at which they are expected to perform.  Perhaps the most famous and still too common example of this lack of clear expectations is the “ten page, double spaced, term paper on a topic to be determined in consultation with the professor” assignment.  Learning should not entail mindreading or guesswork and setting clear expectations is an area ripe for microinterventions.

Prior Knowledge:  Students learn best when they posses some prior knowledge of the subject matter at hand.  Prior knowledge impacts how students perceive new formation, how they organize it, and how much of it they retain. (Svinicki, 1993-94).  Unfortunately, far too many instructors fail to explore their students’ prior knowledge of the subject matter of a course.  (Mathematics instructors are notable exceptions.)   This tendency to “teach in the dark” can be frustrating for both faculty and students.  There are numerous ways to use microinterventions to help instructors and students understand how to use prior knowledge to learn more effectively.

Active Learning:  The research on the efficacy of active learning is clear.  Students learn more and more deeply when they are actively engaged in the process.  But too often, the college classroom is a passive environment.   No wonder many employers complain that students are not prepared for the world of work.  Transforming our classrooms into active learning environments all at once is a daunting task.  Using a microintervention here and there seems like a far more reasonable strategy.

An Invitation:  I would like to invite everybody at Montgomery College, especially faculty and staff, to engage in a conversation about how microinterventions might be used to create a more successful teaching and learning environment.  Nobody does anything awesome alone anymore.  We need to cooperate and collaborate on this crucial task.  Our students deserve the best learning environment we can give them.  Please visit the Hub often and participate vigorously.

Take care,
Brad

Submitting Your Ideas
Microinterventions for Student Success

You may submit your ideas in the comment section below.

In narrative format, please address the following as appropriate:

• What was the issue you were addressing with this microintervention?
• Describe what you did.
• How did your students respond?
• How did you incorporate this into your teaching?

Please suggest 3 or 4 prompts for discussion/comments.