Rovick A A, Michael J A, Modell H I, Bruce D S, Horwitz B, Adamson T, Richardson D R, Silverthorn D U, Whitescarver S A
Department of Molecular Biophysics and Physiology, Rush Medical College, Chicago, Illinois 60612, USA.
Am J Physiol. 1999 Jun;276(6 Pt 2):S93-101. doi: 10.1152/advances.1999.276.6.S93.
Teachers establish prerequisites that students must meet before they are permitted to enter their courses. It is expected that having these prerequisites will provide students with the knowledge and skills they will need to successfully learn the course content. Also, the material that the students are expected to have previously learned need not be included in a course. We wanted to determine how accurate instructors' understanding of their students background knowledge actually was. To do this, we wrote a set of multiple-choice questions that could be used to test students' knowledge of concepts deemed to be essential for learning respiratory physiology. Instructors then selected 10 of these questions to be used as a prerequisite knowledge test. The instructors also predicted the performance they expected from the students on each of the questions they had selected. The resulting tests were administered in the first week of each of seven courses. The results of this study demonstrate that instructors are poor judges of what beginning students know. Instructors tended to both underestimate and overestimate students' knowledge by large margins on individual questions. Although on the average they tended to underestimate students' factual knowledge, they overestimated the students' abilities to apply this knowledge. Hence, the validity of decisions that instructors make, predicated on the basis of their students having the prerequisite knowledge that they expect, is open to question.
教师会设定一些先决条件，学生必须满足这些条件才能进入他们的课程。人们期望具备这些先决条件能为学生提供成功学习课程内容所需的知识和技能。此外，学生先前应掌握的材料无需包含在课程中。我们想确定教师对学生背景知识的了解实际有多准确。为此，我们编写了一组多项选择题，可用于测试学生对被认为是学习呼吸生理学必不可少的概念的了解。然后，教师从这些问题中挑选了10个作为先决知识测试题。教师还预测了他们期望学生在所选的每个问题上的表现。最终的测试在七门课程中每门课程的第一周进行。这项研究的结果表明，教师对初学者所掌握知识的判断很差。在个别问题上，教师往往会大幅低估和高估学生的知识。虽然平均而言他们往往低估学生的事实性知识，但他们高估了学生应用这些知识的能力。因此，教师基于期望学生具备先决知识而做出的决策的有效性值得怀疑。
