Student-Authored Modules: What They Are, and Why You Build Your Own
A Student-Authored Module is the way you find a question you need to work out.
Not a question handed to you. One you located, because something you read or heard did not sit right and you decided the gap was worth closing. The module is what you build around that question, and then keep.
If you do not know where to start, start by taking notes, and watch where you want to underline something or stop and read a little more. That tells you a lot. It says there is a challenge between what you know now and what you think you should know. A SAM question starts where you feel you need a study guide and do not have one yet.
We build these together. Some I will assign, especially early, because a good question is hard to find before you know enough to go looking. Most of them will be yours.
Two words worth keeping straight, because I use both. A SAM question is one question: the thing you wrote, its answer, and the reasoning underneath it. A SAM module is the whole collection of them for one unit or one learning target. When I ask to see your SAM, I mean the module.
Finding the question
Nobody hands you the question. You find it, and the finding is most of the work.
If you do not know where to start, take notes and watch your own hand. Where do you underline? Where do you want to stop and read a little more? Where does the note trail off because you are not sure what comes next? Each of those marks the distance between what you know now and what you think you should know, which is the only place a useful question can come from.
Talking works too, and it works faster. Get into a conversation about the content with somebody else and listen for where your end of it falls short. If they know things you do not, the question is already in front of you: what do they know that I do not know?
Four places a question is waiting
- The slides. The questions built into them are there for a reason.
- The Checkpoint questions on NOVA Canvas, all of them, open all year.
- The clicker questions from the book.
- Whatever gets asked out loud in class that you could not answer. Those are the best ones, and they evaporate unless you write them down in the moment.
Take a form of that question for yourself. Better, find the part of it that does not make sense to you and build on that, because the part that confuses you is more specific than the whole question and it points somewhere.
One move worth knowing: when you miss a Checkpoint question, do not stop at the right answer. Look at the options you were choosing between. Some of those questions are vague, and the vagueness is useful — the gap between two answers that both looked reasonable is a question of its own, and students who mine that gap get a long way on it.
What they look like
There is no single correct shape. Three that show up every year:
- Outline, then ask where it broke. Work through the content comprehensively, then write the question from the place you could not remember or could not follow. One student's was how is DNA different from RNA — also a study guide question, but theirs because they found it. The answer ran through the two ribose sugars, uracil, and the number of strands, and they built a table and a drawing to sit alongside it.
- Aim the question forward at your paper. Rare, and it lands hard when it happens. A student working toward a paper on cancer asked which molecules cause it, found the answer was proteins, and went deep into protein structure during this early unit because they already knew where their own work was heading.
- Mine a Checkpoint question you missed. Build the question out of the options you were weighing, not the one that turned out to be right.
Many are built alongside notes, where the question is about the notes themselves, because the first problem was organising what was being taught. Others are worked problems, or drawings — a mitochondrion or a chloroplast with the molecular change marked where it happens, which is a constructive way to ask a question by mapping where the activity actually is.
Memorising and understanding are different jobs
Some content has to be memorised and some has to be understood, and telling which is which is hard. Functional groups are memorisation: flashcards, and know them cold. That work in Chapter 2 is what makes Chapter 3 possible, because carbon chemistry gets much easier once bonding and molecular shape are already in your head.
Some SAM questions are assigned rather than found, and that is deliberate. Explain how carbon-14 and carbon-12 are different, completely. Answering that one properly pulls in isotopes, carbon dating and half-life together, and a mountain of content arrives quickly because it arrives attached to a scenario. From there the next question is yours. Some students go after half-life. Some ask how anyone measures it at all — which is off to the side of what the assessment wants and central to how science is actually done.
The scaffolding is already there
The Checkpoints, the study guide, the flashcards, the slides and the readings are a scaffold, and working across them while writing your own questions is a concept inventory: you find out what you have by asking for it. The self-checks are built to show you where the gaps are — Carbon Check for Chapter 3 and Chemistry Check for Chapter 2, with everything else listed on the DE Biology 101 resources page.
Not being able to write a question is not laziness and it is not a verdict on you. Usually it means there is content you have not met yet, and the answer is more input rather than more effort. Come and get tutored in Flex. That is what the time is for.
Using AI on a SAM question
You may. AI is good at generating questions, and a SAM question does not have to be invented from nothing. The condition is that you talk with me about how you used it. The capacity being built here is finding the gap — on your own, with a friend, or with AI — and then taking it farther, and that conversation is where I can tell whether that happened.
What a good score is
The module, not any single question. A SAM module is good when it covers your gaps and you can explain why those were your gaps and why these were the questions to ask. The explaining is not a formality; it is most of the assessment.
Come talk to me about them as you go, in Flex or in class. Show me what you are building. You will know where you stand on quality because you will be the one telling me what you understand and what you do not, and I will tell you where the points are as we go. If something is not there yet, it is not finished rather than failed, and you can keep working on it.
Why this is worth your time
Nine years ago I taught a 300-level microbiology course at George Mason. The students who did best were the ones writing their own questions about the content, multiple choice and all, out of the material they were studying — and then handing them round. This was before AI, and Google returned very little. The students who studied from those questions learned a great deal. The student who wrote them learned the most and finished with the highest grade.
Practising in the right spot is the whole thing. After an injury you do not train every muscle; you train the ones that need it, and you need a physical therapist to tell you which those are. There is a great deal you can do at home, and you still need someone who knows where the weakness is. Growing as a scientist means gradually taking over the writing of your own exercise plan.
What I want you carrying out of here is the ability to see what is missing in complicated content, and to stay honest with yourself about what you do not yet know. Scientific information asks for understanding, application and evidence at the same time, and it gets harder the moment you apply it to a real situation. Learning to ask a question around a deep idea, with some wonder and some invention in it, is how you end up seeing farther than the people who only answered the questions they were given.
- Take your lowest tile from the self-check. Build three things on that idea, with your answers on the back of the page. Questions are the usual form, but a drawing that explains the concept counts, and so does any other mechanism that gets you what you need.
- Under one of them, write two sentences on why the right answer is right — written for somebody who needed to explore the topic to understand it.
- Find a question already in your collection that you can now answer without thinking. Rewrite it so you cannot.
- Write one question you cannot answer yet. Leave it open and bring it to the next block.
When a chapter's set is where you want it, photograph or screenshot the work and upload it to the matching box in NOVA Canvas.
When you learn to design your own checkpoints, you are building a major college skill. On your own you have to work out what you need to learn, and nobody is going to hand you that list. Once you have the questions that surround where your knowledge needs to go, other people can teach you.
Find the gap. Then take it farther.