Greg and Kat's blog

For the last few semesters, we have been piloting a learning skills program in our first and second year classes. The program is called the “Academic Enhancement Program” (AEP), simply because we felt it had to be called something.

The deal is: each class that is touched by AEP (CMPT 120/126, 150, 225, MACM 101) dedicates one week of labs (or equivalent) and a couple of percent to a learning skills session.

On Wednesday, I went down to Surrey to facilitate sessions for CMPT 120 there. Diana Cukierman usually does the sessions (with somebody from Learning Commons), but she couldn’t go. I’m maybe the only other one who know the CMPT 120 session well enough to lead it. Thus, I had to miss CMPT 376, as I said earlier.

To give you an idea, the session for CMPT 120/126 is a bit of a sampler platter (since it’s the first one students typically see) and contains:

• time management: where does the time go, basic time management skills
• study skill scenarios: “Beth is a CS student who can’t… What is your advice to Beth?”
• learning hierarchy: levels of learning (recall, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create)

A lot of first year students get caught on these things. Time management is, of course, an issue for everybody. There’s no magic bullet, but we can give some tips.

The learning hierarchy stuff is more interesting (to me at least). A lot of struggling students get stuck on the first few levels of learning: “I understand what a for loop does.” But then, we ask questions at the higher levels: “Create a program that…”. The gap between the levels is really hard to bridge for a lot of students. The hope is that some students will realize that they’re living at the wrong level and start to step up.

There are different sessions for the other courses. The idea is that all students get four(ish) different learning skills lessons by second year.

I will admit that I was sceptical when Diana started doing these sessions. The turning point for me was realizing that the point isn’t to give an hour and a half of material that’s relevant for all students. If we can ramble on for an hour and a half and have most of the students take away one thing that’s relevant to them, then the whole thing is a huge success. There are a lot of students who are a few study skills away from an extra grade point.

I’m hoping we can turn some marginal students into reasonable students, and some reasonable students into good students. The top students are going to be good no matter what, and the bad students are going to suck no matter what: the ones in the middle might be able to benefit.

So there you go. I did, in fact, miss 376 for a socially responsible reason. Hopefully we can put the whole program into policy in the next few months.