2024 AECT Reflection – Jargon, Memorization, and Understanding 

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Every industry has its jargon, and if you’re not familiar with the industry, it could sound like a foreign language. Maybe you don’t realize how much jargon you use, so step back the next time you’re in a department meeting and try to listen as someone who’s never been in the room before. It can be a very intimidating experience. That’s how students sometimes feel when they’re just starting out in their major. They’re navigating through unchartered waters in the middle of a storm, and they’re only understanding maybe every third word being shouted to them by their captain. 

So, how do you help students learn these terms? Sometimes the easiest way is through rote memorization. That works if the only purpose is to get them to recite, but if we want them to use the terms and move up Bloom’s to higher levels of understanding and to help it “stick,” we need to think of other ways. When I taught high school English, I thought I had solved the world’s vocab-learning problems by asking my students to use the words in sentences to prove that they knew how to use them. Yeah, I know…revolutionary. The struggle is: there are usually a lot of terms, so there’s a lot of ground to cover, but there’s limited time. So how do we help students be able to demonstrate their understanding in authentic and meaningful ways? 

You may remember my friend Dave Mulder, professor of education at Dordt University Two years ago at AECT, he did a presentation on using florilegium to help students synthesize readings; he talked about that and more when he was our guest on the Transform Your Teaching podcast. He’s also really tall and is an expert karaoke singer (I have video evidence). His presentation this year was on using podcasts to help first-year pre-service educators understand the vast terminology of the educational world.

He first crowdsourced his department to come up with the terms they felt students needed to know. They ended up with a list of 120 terms, which was then broken down to 10-12 per week. To teach the terms for the week, he gave students a list, then recorded a  approximately 5-minute podcast of him using the words in context. No definitions were given. The terms were also used in class lectures, but not as deliberately as they were in the podcast recordings. For assessment purposes, students took a formative, low stakes (overall 1% of grade) Canvas quiz. Questions were pulled from a bank, and students had unlimited attempts. This method continued on throughout this course until the end, where they were given a summative assessment to show mastery of 30 random terms pulled from the larger bank of all of the terms. They had two attempts to complete this assessment. 

Dave shared the analytics from Canvas, and the majority of the students took the weekly low-stakes quizzes once or twice. The results of the summative assessment showed that most students scored perfect or close to perfect after one attempt. He also collected some qualitative responses from them. Some students said that the podcasts were helpful, while others said they weren’t or they didn’t listen at all and just took the quizzes until they got all of them correct. 

I think this is a great, innovative way to introduce the new terms to students! What do you think?