Start Your Class with a 'What Do You Know?' Survey
In (Eds.) Victoria L. Crittenden, Kathryn Esper, Nathan Karst and Rosa Slegers. Evolving Entrepreneurial Education: Innovation in the Babson Classroom (2015). New York, NY: Emerald Publishing Ltd. pp. 365-374
Posted: 18 Aug 2016 Last revised: 6 Nov 2016
Date Written: 2015
Abstract
Introducing the course in the first session can be challenging. This chapter suggests an interactive intervention to address this issue better. The intervention is for the students to answer a short survey of well-chosen questions or short cases, on the first day of the class, that are based on the topics covered in the course. In addition, the students will be asked a question that will reveal their learning styles. On the last day of the class, they will revisit their answers to this survey.
This intervention achieves four aims: 1) it introduces the subject of the course to the students directly and sets clear expectations about the course, 2) it gets the students involved in class from day one by offering experiential evidence on the value of the course in their career or daily life, 3) it provides a data point of the knowledge level of students before taking the course; at the end of the semester these data can be revisited to reveal how much the students learned, and 4) it identifies students learning styles on day one.
The effectiveness of this intervention depends on the quality of the survey. This chapter offers a step-by-step guide on designing the right survey for any course. It provides several examples and discusses how to implement the survey.
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