Category Archives: 05 min

Competitive Problem Solving

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Having students compete against one another to solve practice problems is a good way to keep everyone engaged and awake. This could be used as a warm-up or cool down depending on the SI session. The basic premise is to divide the students attending your SI session into equal teams, state or show the practice problem, and have a system for getting points. Here are some ideas for the design:

1. Have students work in groups, the first group to all raise their hands and has the correct answer wins

2. Have students work in groups, have a designated “runner” from each group to run up and high five you before giving the correct answer to get a point.

3. Have one student at a time from each team come up to the board, and whoever writes the correct answer first gets a point

At the end of the set of practice problems, the team with the most points wins. You can have the set of problems available at the session for students to take a picture if they would like to work all the problems out too.

Here is what I wrote in my SI session planner for this activity:

Of course, there are other ways to get creative and personalize this activity, this is just an example in case anyone would like to use it in their session😊

– Beth C. (BIOL 111)

One Minute Paper

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Materials Needed: None

Preparation: Develop a question on material that was reviewed in the session and for which you want to assess how
well students learned and understood what they need to know. You can also use the One Minute Paper
to assess what questions students still have about the material that was reviewed. For example: What
do you still find particularly confusing about ?

Procedure:
1. Ask students to use a blank piece of paper to respond to your question.
2. Provide 1-2 minutes for students to write a response.
3. You can present a question at the end of a session or during a session after a specific concept
has been reviewed.
4. Collect the students’ papers.
5. After your session, review students’ responses to evaluate how well they understood the concept
in question or to identify questions students still have.
6. Respond to the One Minute Papers when planning your next session.
7. Depending on what students presented in their papers, you may also discuss with your professor
the concepts that students identified were difficult or confusing

from Utah State University

G.U.E.S.S

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G.U.E.S.S is a problem solving method to help students organize their solutions and think critically about the process.

Example: A certain substance has a density of 1.69 g/mL and a mass of 24.0 g. What is the volume of this substance?

Daisy Chain

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Have participants take turns reading a portion of their notes aloud beginning with the start of the lecture. Another student should pick up where their peer left off. Pause between each participant to see if the student missed anything from the section they read. Give students time to add this to their notes before proceeding. The SI Leader can participate as well. Continue until you have a complete set of notes and have a short discussion in which participants can ask questions or share note taking strategies they find effective for this particular class.

Pro Tip: This can be duplicated weekly as a warm up or cool down activity with little to no prep on your end.

Pro Tip: Since students will be reading directly from their notes, don’t hesitate to challenge them to think critically. If they read a definition or concept that is particularly important, ask them if they can explain it in their own words or provide an example not given in lecture.

from Baylor University

Two Lies & A Truth

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  1. Prepare two false statements about a topic and one true statement.
  2. Read the statements out loud to the students or write them on the board.
  3. Ask the students to  identify the true statement.
  4. Discuss the true statement to determine why it’s true.
  5. Discuss the false statements to determine why they are false.
  6. Ask how the false statements could be re-written to be true.

If you want to turn this into a Main Activity, create and discuss a few examples as a group. Then, put students into pairs or groups and have them create their own. Each group presents their three statements to the class and leads the discussion as listed above.

Example Two Lies & A Truth Question: Right Angles

  1. Right angles are bigger than obtuse angles but smaller than acute angles.
  2. All right angles are congruent
  3. Parallel lines form right angles

Which statement is true?
2. All right angles are congruent. Why is that true? Congruent angles are the same size and degrees. All right angles are 90° so all right angles are congruent.

Which statements are false?
1. Right angles are bigger than obtuse angles but smaller than acute angles. Why is it false? All right angles are 90°. Obtuse angles are larger than 90° and acute angles are smaller than 90°. How could you fix this statement? Just reverse “obtuse” and “acute.”

3. Parallel lines form right angles. Why is it false? Parallel lines never cross. Angles are formed where two lines cross. How could you fix this statement? Rather than Parallel lines, Perpendicular lines form right angles when they cross. 

What’s the Big Idea?

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Students often feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information they’re presented with in a lecture or SI session & this technique can help them identify and organize the information presented.

  1. Ask each student to explain what they thought was the most important concept they learned during a particular lecture or SI session. (Basically asking: “If you could take only one thing from the information presented, what would it be?”)
  2. Have each student write their takeaway up on the board.
  3. Ask each student to offer a different takeaway, so most of the main ideas are covered. 

You can ask students to do this as they come into the session room to save time. As your warm up, you can have students come up to the board and read each other’s takeaways and generate questions they still have.

Pre & Post Quiz

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This activity works best as a paired Warm Up & Cool Down.

Pre-Quiz: Create a short quiz for students to take at the beginning of your SI session. This can be a few conceptual questions, a couple problems to work through, or an open ended short answer question. The questions you create should focus on content that is both (a) important for the upcoming exam and (b) that you will address today in your SI session. The quiz should take about 5-10 minutes to complete. Go over the correct answers with students so they know how they’ve scored.

Post-Quiz: Create a short quiz for students to take at the end of your SI session. The questions here should be similar to those on the pre-quiz, but not identical. Essentially, you want to see if they have gained a better understanding of terminology, processes, theories, etc. that you reviewed in the session. Give students 5-10 minutes to complete and review the answers with the students. 

Likely, they did much better on the post-quiz. If there are still some areas where they didn’t do well, now they have a better idea of where they need to focus their study time, complete practice problems, and ask questions about.

Skip the Paper: Depending on your questions, you could create a pre and post quiz via Kahoot! This would make responses anonymous, but students can see if other students struggled with the same questions – sometimes it’s good to see you’re not alone!

Make It Collaborative: Have students partner up to complete the pre & post quiz — 2 heads are better than 1.

Notes Review

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This is a method of getting the students to work together to review and compile their lecture notes in a complete and organized way. It’s a great warm up activity that you can even utilize every week.

  1. Pair students up (or allow them to choose partners). Alternatively, you could do this in small groups as well.
  2. Ask students to read aloud from their notes. Encourage other students to interject, ask questions, provide missing details, or clarify details about the topic.
    1. Alternative: Ask students to swap notes and read each other’s independently then discuss similarities or differences.
  3. As students find missing parts or holes in their notes, they add to them.

Why do this activity?

  1. Students talk about the content out loud, helping them remember details better
  2. Students can see other styles or approaches to taking lecture notes that may help them better their note taking.
  3. It’s tough to get down all the important details in lecture sometimes. Usually students are missing parts in their notes and/or have some details written down incorrectly. This gives students a space to review and make sure what they’re studying from is accurate and complete.
  4. If students have conflicting information in their notes, it gives you a chance to clarify for them and lead them to finding the correct information.

Variation: Ask students to bring notes in from their assigned class readings and do the same activity.

Setting S.M.A.R.T Goals

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Help your students plan for the year, semester, unit, or week by setting SMART goals. SMART goals are ones that meet the following criteria.

The SMART acronym is displayed with the meanings for each letter. S for Specific. M for Measurable, A for Attainable, R for Relevant, and T for Time Bound.

You can give students this SMART goals template to guide them in choosing a goal, or you can ask them to write it down somewhere where they’ll see it regularly as a reminder.

Ways to use SMART goals in SI session:

  • Beginning of the Semester: Ask students to create a SMART goal for the semester as a whole. What do they want to challenge themselves to achieve this semester? For a longer term goal like this, ask them to add in 3 concrete action steps they’ll take to get there. For instance, if a student want’s to earn an A, maybe one of their action steps is to “review lecture notes for 10 minutes every day before bed.”

    • Accountability Buddies: After students set a goal, have them find a partner and share their goals with each other. Suggest they exchange contact information so they have a buddy in the class for questions and someone who can hold them accountable for progress toward their goals.
  • Post Exam: After an exam is a great time to set a new goal. Students just had an assessment of how their progress has been thus far. What do they want to achieve by the next exam?
  • Weekly: As the semester goes on, you’ll likely have your regular SI attendance crowd. Make it a habit each week to have one warm up activity be setting a weekly goal. The next week, people share how it went and set a new goal. You can participate too! We’re all in this together!
  • Outside of Session: Maybe you don’t have time to set goals during your session, but introduce the idea of SMART goals and encourage your students to set goals on their own. You can even provide them with the blank SMART goals template to take home and let them know you’re available to discuss their goals with them as well.

Predict the Next Lecture Topic

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This short activity makes a great Cool Down/Closing Activity. It helps students prepare for new lecture material while forming connections with previous material. This can be a quick group discussion or done in pairs/groups.

  • Based on the last lecture, what do you think the next lecture will be about?
  • How does the last lecture’s content connect with the next lecture’s content?

Whether they predict the next lecture topic or not, talk to them about what’s coming up in next lecture. Prime them for lecture by mentioning tips for taking notes or particular terms/concepts that are usually challenging for students (i.e. “Make sure to read the section on _____ before next lecture. That’s something that gives students trouble every year.”)

A woman's hands hover over a crystal ball