A powerful capability of StudyMate Class is allowing students to contribute items that will appear in the learning activities viewed by classmates. But sometimes students don’t take the time to review what other students have already added to the project, resulting in duplicate items showing up in the activities and games.
In general, it’s good for students to review the work of fellow students because it contributes to the learning process. Here are a few tips to encourage students down that path.
Project Information
On the Settings tab, the Project Information feature allows the instructor to include directions that appear in a pop-up window each time the project is started. It’s typically used to provide students guidance on what they are supposed to do (or not do) with each project.
If students will be contributing questions and items to the project, be sure to tell them that they should not duplicate items from other students. Include specific instructions like, “Be sure the items you enter are not similar to ones entered by another student. If the items you enter are not fully unique from items entered previously, it will count against your grade…” The instructions might include information about the Search feature (as discussed under Search below).
Search
The Search feature in StudyMate Class is the fastest way to see if another user has entered a similar item. For example, if you are about to enter an item about “mitosis,” then do a quick search to see which items (if any) contain this word. Show students how this feature works, and encourage them to use it on collaborative projects.
Topics
An easy way to avoid duplicate items is to assign students (or groups of students) to specific sections of material from the course. For example, a group of four students might be responsible for entering items based on Chapter 2 in the textbook, another group is responsible for Chapter 3, a third group is responsible for items based on last week’s lecture, and so on. By having individual students or groups focus on particular content from the course, there is less chance that duplicate items will occur in a project.
A variant of this approach is for the instructor to create “Topics” in StudyMate Class and divide the course material among these topics (e.g. textbooks readings, lecture, supplemental readings, etc.). Once the topics have been added by the instructor from the Settings tab, students can be instructed to select the appropriate topic before they enter an item. If the topics rotate each week, the instructor might want to attach the group name to the topic itself, for further guidance:
Ch 4 Glossary-Group 1
Ch 4 Mult Choice-Group 2
Lecture2-Week2-Group 3
Etc.
Note that students within a group will still need to review the items within their topic to prevent duplication. To quickly see which items have been entered by other students in the same group, search on the Topic name (e.g. “Ch 4 Glossary”) from the Edit tab. All items from that group will be displayed.
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