Guided Notes & Weekly Quizzes

Complete the interactive activities in the Seneca app to work towards your CPD certificate.

Guided Notes

With guided notes, students are asked to restate concepts in their own words (“List the steps in long division”) and create examples (“List three mammals kept as household pets”).

Improving learning

While often overlooked as a formal assignment, teacher-prepared handouts with carefully designed blank spaces for students to write information have been found to improve student learning, particularly in school-age children.

Clear items

Asking students to relate two different topics is a great way to have students reflect on the content and learn (“Complete this chart explaining how Assyrian kings were caught in the prisoner’s dilemma”).
Limit instructions in skeleton notes to short, clear items like “define,” “list,” and “label.” This is not the place for critical thinking or answering complex questions.

Vocabulary

Having students copy definitions out of the textbook does not lead to strong learning by itself.
Instead, refine students’ understanding in the synchronous lecture, ask them to use the word in context, and expose them to the word through outside readings.
Students will need these words for their weekly assessment, either by directly identifying the definition or by retrieving the meaning as part of understanding a related question.

Note-taking strategies

One key point is that by assigning teacher-created skeleton notes, the teacher can explicitly teach note-taking strategies, such as adding drawings.
One way to do this is to review the notes as part of the synchronous lecture.
Teachers should emphasize color coding and drawing as mathematics skills during synchronous lectures.

Weekly Quizzes

Quizzes are one of the mainstays of an online course. By involving repetition, content and rewards, they help to create a study habit.

Routine

When setting the habit of completing assessments in the course, pick a day and make all the quizzes due that day.
Make sure students can always find the assessment on the same day in the same place, so there is no question about what’s due and when.

Rewards

Reward students for completing the assessment.
Courtney tends to make the assessments self-grading, as much as possible, for a quick sense of reward for completion.

Feedback

Assigning frequent, low-stakes quizzes helps students realize what they don’t know, and when the teacher directs them to how to find the needed information students learn the habit of looking up what they don’t know.
Referring to the notes creates a habit of taking notes and using them.
Always stay positive when offering feedback to students.
Don’t berate students for poor effort. Instead, scaffold support into the course