SAMs, Version Two: What the Evidence Said About How We Study, and What We Are Changing

Last week I asked my own teaching the question I ask you to put to every claim: does it hold up?

The claim was the Student-Authored Module, the SAM you have been building since the first unit. I ran a review of the research behind it, close to a hundred studies from college biology courses, psychology labs and high school classrooms. Some of what came back confirmed what we already do. Some of it said I had the reason wrong. So we are changing a few things this year, and we are going to watch together whether the changes work.

Putting my own method to the Welcome Test

In Chapter 12 of Everybody’s Science, the book this site goes with, I describe the Welcome Test. A claim earns trust when it survives a test, and when the person making it welcomes the test rather than dodging it. I ask you to hold a headline, a lab result and an AI answer to that standard. My SAM method is a claim too, and I am the one making it, so it gets the same treatment.

You have also told me, in different ways, that you want ways of studying that actually work. Several of you asked for games. Several of you have said that rereading your notes the night before feels like studying and then does not show up on the Checkpoint. The research has something to say about both.

Three things the research backs

Answering questions from memory, later, more than once. Across 222 classroom studies with nearly fifty thousand students, answering practice questions beat studying the same material other ways, and the benefit grew with each round. Three or more rounds did clearly better than one. Questions answered after a lesson worked about three times better than questions answered before it.

Explaining why. Saying or writing why an answer is right, and why the tempting wrong answer is wrong, is one of the two best-supported study habits in the whole field. The explanation that pays off is about the biology (why does the enzyme stop working at that temperature?) far more than about how you feel about the biology (how sure am I?).

Starting from a good question stem. Students who wrote questions from prompts such as What would happen if… or How is ___ different from ___, and why does it matter? learned far more than students who were told to write questions and left to it. The effect with stems was roughly eight times the effect without them. The seed SAMs I hand you, like explain completely how carbon-14 and carbon-12 are different, are not training wheels. They are the part that makes the method work.

One more finding explains why SAMs will keep feeling harder than rereading. In a survey of students at a selective university, 84 percent listed rereading as a way they study and 55 percent ranked it first; 1 percent ranked testing themselves first. With real textbook chapters, rereading did very little. It feels like progress because the page gets familiar, and familiar is a long way from knowing it cold. When a SAM feels harder than rereading, that is the work happening.

Two things I had wrong

Writing the question is not the part that teaches you. In controlled experiments, students who wrote their own questions learned about as much as students who answered good questions somebody else wrote, and the writers took about twice as long. I have told you about my microbiology class at George Mason, where the student who wrote the questions earned the top grade. Bigger studies have tested that exact pattern, and most of the advantage turned out to be that strong students are the ones who choose to write questions. Finding your own gap is still a college skill worth building. The learning itself comes from answering, explaining and coming back.

Writing for an imaginary confused reader did not help. Talking to a real one did. One of my old prompts asked for two sentences written for somebody who got the question wrong. Researchers tested that exact move in a real college course, and plain self-explanation did better. Across many studies, explaining to another person helped when it was spoken and did nothing when it was written. The audience belongs in a conversation, not on the page.

The same research explains why I will not hand you a worksheet asking you to reflect on your study habits. Those worksheets have a weak record in biology courses, and one study found the reason: students who knew their habits were not working kept them anyway, because changing felt uncomfortable. A conversation is harder to dodge than a worksheet. That is why the oral part of your SAM grade stays, and why it carries more weight now.

Your Checkpoint misses are your study plan

Each chapter's Checkpoint on NOVA Canvas lists what you need to understand, so you never have to build a review of everything. Start there, every chapter:

1. Predict, then take the Checkpoint cold. Write down the score you expect first.
2. Make your miss list: every question you missed, and every one you guessed on.
3. Name the gap for each miss with the table below.
4. Do the work that fits the gap, plus every question I put on the board or give you as a seed SAM.
5. Talk it out in Ask Me Mine, the Wager Round and your oral.
6. Check that it is fixed. Wait at least two days, predict again, retake the Checkpoint, then answer the matching Checkpoint Companion questions.

The two-day wait matters. Checkpoint questions repeat, and a quick retake can test whether you remember the letter rather than the biology; the Checkpoint Companion asks about the same ideas in new questions. The same steps are on the one-page Study Map in Battlefield Canvas.

The SAMS2 loop, one chapter at a time

What I listen for in the oral

Four things, each scored 0, 1 or 2. You will see this same list every time we talk.

AI is still allowed for finding the gap. If you used it, tell me what it gave you and what you added. That part is not scored. It is the conversation, and it is where I can tell whether you took it farther.

Games, with a word on Kahoot

You asked for games, and you will get them. The ones we play most will be built for talking. Kahoot is fun, and a review of more than ninety studies found it generally helps students remember material and enjoy class. It also hands out points for speed. The fastest thumb wins, and the thinking out loud we are after never gets a chance to happen. So Kahoot is a treat now and then, and these are the everyday games:

• Wager Round. Teams bet one, two or three points on how sure they are. Now everyone locks an answer alone first, then the team talks and locks together, and the person who has to explain the team's answer is named when the talking starts, so you get to rehearse with your team.
• Ask Me Mine. Partner rotations with your own SAMs.
• Defend the Wrong Answer. Your team is dealt one option from a hard Checkpoint question, right or wrong, and has a minute to build its best case. The team holding the right answer then has to say what fact sinks each of the others.
• Say It Without the Word. Explain hydrolysis without saying water, break or polymer.
• Draw and Narrate. One person draws a chloroplast or a membrane while explaining it; teammates may ask questions but may not correct.

Betting on how sure you are is practice for the thing college exams punish most: believing you know something you do not.

When talking out loud is the hard part

For a lot of people it is. Research on college science classes names the reason as the fear of being judged in front of the room. Being called on cold only raised students' anxiety, while small-group work could raise it or lower it depending on how it was run. Here is how we will run it:

• You commit to an answer before anyone talks, so you have something to stand on.
• You talk to one person before you ever talk to the room.
• You will know you are reporting before the talk starts, not after it ends, and you report for your team: “we thought…”
• Sometimes you will be assigned a wrong answer on purpose and asked to make its best case. Nobody owns that answer.
• Each week one person on every team holds the Questioner card. Their only job is to ask: Why? How do you know? Which option did you almost pick? What would change your mind? They never give the answer.

When I taught at George Mason, we trained Learning Assistants, college students who helped other college students, for a full semester, and it was still hard to get anyone to talk. Research on Learning Assistants in introductory biology found the pattern: when the helper asked a question, students reasoned out loud, and when the helper explained the answer, the conversation stopped. The Questioner card is that one rule, handed to you.

I have worked on this before. At George Mason I co-authored a study of calling on students with notecards in a large biology lecture. Students said it made them come to class, pay attention and listen to each other more, and many of them also said they felt anxious being put on the spot. Notecards were a way to reach students in a room of hundreds. Our class is small enough for something deeper: you build your own understanding from guided questions, and I get to talk with every one of you about how you are making sense of the biology. You will not find that in a large college lecture, where it is easy to get lost in a sea of people.

If a live oral is hard for you, tell me. You can do it with a partner, or record it on your iPad and turn it in through Canvas. A recording still counts as talking it out.

An experiment we run together

Almost none of this research was done in a class like ours: a college biology course, taught in a high school, to juniors and seniors. So I am going to watch a few things across the year. I will look at whether your score predictions get closer to your real scores, whether the level of your SAMs climbs, and what you tell me in the orals. I look at those for the class as a whole, not by name. If something is not working, I will say so and we will change it. That is the deal I ask of any claim, and it is the deal I am making with you.

Twelve stems to start a question

1. Explain why ___ happens, step by step.
2. How does a change in ___ affect ___?
3. What is the difference between ___ and ___, and why does the cell care?
4. What would happen if ___ were blocked, removed or doubled?
5. How does ___ show up in this lab, food, disease or organism?
6. Which Checkpoint option did I almost pick, and what would have to be true for it to be right?
7. Why is the tempting wrong answer wrong?
8. Draw where ___ happens and label what changes.
9. What evidence would convince a skeptic that ___?
10. What do ___ and ___ have in common underneath?
11. What would a graph of ___ look like, and why that shape?
12. What question can I not answer yet about ___?

What a SAM is, where questions come from and how to find your gap are all in Student-Authored Modules: What They Are, and Why You Build Your Own. For Chapter 3 and 4 practice with a SAM question written from every wrong answer, use the Checkpoint Companion.

Find the gap. Say it out loud. Then take it farther.

For teachers: the case for SAMS2

SAMs began as a student-question-generation practice: students write items from the gaps in their own understanding, answer them, and explain the reasoning, and the graded object is the collection plus a one-on-one conversation about why those questions. Reviewing the evidence changed where I think the learning comes from.

The strongest support sits under the parts I had treated as supporting cast. Retrieval practice after instruction, repeated, is among the best-established effects in education research (Yang et al., 2021, 222 classroom studies). Question generation works when it is scaffolded with stems and barely works when it is not (Rosenshine, Meister & Chapman, 1996). The authoring itself is weaker than I believed: generating questions matched answering ready-made ones at about twice the time (Weinstein, McDermott & Roediger, 2010), and writing an explanation for an imagined confused peer lost to plain self-explanation, while the same audience-directed explaining helped when spoken (Lachner, Jacob & Hoogerheide, 2021).

That points at talk. Written metacognitive reflection under-delivers in biology courses, partly because students avoid the discomfort of changing strategy even when they know a strategy is failing (Dye & Stanton, 2017). A live conversation is harder to avoid. Getting students to talk is its own design problem, and the biology education literature is specific about it: questions from a peer helper keep reasoning going where explanations end it (Knight et al., 2015), and fear of negative evaluation, not reluctance, is what silences students (Cooper, Downing & Brownell, 2018). My own study of notecard cold-calling in a large-lecture biology course found the same tension: students reported more attention, attendance and discussion, and many also reported communication anxiety at being put on the spot (Broeckelman-Post, Johnson & Schwebach, 2016). Notecards were an engagement mechanism for a lecture hall. A small dual-enrollment section allows a deeper interface with student learning, in which students construct knowledge from guided questions and the teacher talks directly with every student about how they are making sense of the content.

So SAMS2 moves the weight. Teacher-seeded items and a published stem list carry the generation; games and a cold retake deliver the delayed, repeated retrieval; and every SAM is spoken to a partner, a team and then to me before it is scored. The fuller argument, element by element, with what is supported, what is not, what is untested and the complete reference list, is in The Evidence Behind SAMS2.

Sources: Yang, Luo, Vadillo, Yu & Shanks (2021), Psychological Bulletin 147, 399–435, doi · Rosenshine, Meister & Chapman (1996), Review of Educational Research 66, 181–221, doi · Weinstein, McDermott & Roediger (2010), Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 16, 308–316, doi · Lachner, Jacob & Hoogerheide (2021), Learning and Instruction 74, 101438, doi · Karpicke, Butler & Roediger (2009), Memory 17, 471–479, doi · Dye & Stanton (2017), CBE—Life Sciences Education 16, ar31, doi · Knight, Wise, Rentsch & Furtak (2015), CBE—Life Sciences Education 14, ar41, doi · Cooper, Downing & Brownell (2018), International Journal of STEM Education 5, 23, doi · Broeckelman-Post, Johnson & Schwebach (2016), Journal of College Science Teaching 45(5), 27–33, doi · Wang & Tahir (2020), Computers & Education 149, 103818, doi.