Problem sheets M 2.1

Lecturer A included the problems at the end of the weekly gappy notes. She did not ask explicitly the students to work with the exercises but by including them in the notes she showed them implicitly that while doing the reading for the module outside lectures they need also to cope with the problems. In the interview she talked about the selection of resources she provided the students with and referred briefly to the problems.

Lecturer A: Problems, you need to be doing problems that’s about [it] really.

In one of the first lectures Lecturer A made clear to her students that they are expected to spend study time on solving problems.

Lecturer A: As I told you on the notes earlier on and as it says there, you will be expected to spend about an hour between Mon- day and Wednesday learning new material by reading or by work- ing on short problems.

The message that the lecturer wanted to transmit is that spending indi- vidual time working on problems is important for understanding the material taught. The power of the message was strong as the lecturer made clear her expectations by giving them these particular problems. The framing though varied. The control over the selection of the problems was strong - the lec- turer was the one to decide which problems would be included in the notes

- but the same did not happen with the sequencing and the pacing. The students were the only ones responsible for the order in which they would choose to solve the problems and also for the time that they would spend on each one. Consequently, the control over sequencing and pacing was weak and rested with the students.

Lecturer B chose a different way to provide his students with the prob- lems. He uploaded some exercises to the module’s webpage at the end of a set of typed notes for each topic covered in the module. He went through these selectively during the weekly tutorial sessions that students attended in addition to the lectures, and he expected that the students would work on the rest of them independently.

Lecturer B described in the interview in what ways he suggests his stu- dents should work outside the lectures; he said that he encourages them to work on the exercises and think over the things that, at first, might seem hard to understand in the lectures.

Lecturer B: Just the usual way, I advise them to spend some time and go over the problem sheets and if they miss something in the lecture come back home think about it again... You have to invest some time into this, just thinking, sitting on your own, thinking about it, so nothing special...

During the observation of lectures Lecturer B did not refer to the exercises. In module B the students were expected to spend time in tutorial sessions working on them. On the module’s webpage Lecturer B wrote that he expects students to try to tackle the exercises and devote three hours of work per week for this module:

You are expected to work at least 3 hours per week outside of lectures and tutorials on this module.

Spending individual time outside the lectures and thinking over the prob- lems to understand the concepts was the message that the two lecturers transmitted. Although the way that the message was transmitted differed, the means were the same for both of them; the problem sheets. The power exerted through this message was strong and the boundaries were clear; by getting a specific number of exercises to practice students would acquire a better understanding. But the framing was rather weak. Apart from the selection of the problems included in the problem sheets which was defined by Lecturer B, the students had complete control over this practice. They could work at their own pace, they could organize the work in whatever way they preferred, they could select which exercises they would solve and which not, and there was no evaluation purpose defined by the lecturer behind this practice.

The students commented on things that their lecturers asked them to do outside lectures. Seven of them referred to the exercises or problem sheets. Three students said that they were not told explicitly to work on the prob- lems but by being given to them they realized they had to. Two students mentioned just that they work with the problem sheets. And finally, two others talked about the differences that they identified between school and university and the ways they had to work when they were not in the class; at school most of the work was done in the classroom, students were told to work on the problems and then submit them for marking, the teachers checked the problems, there was no assessed coursework and they did not struggle for time. Jeremy expressed his thinking about it.

bothered to so I won’t... They don’t check really that you do the problem sheets and stuff, I’m just like: I am not doing them.

Elsa noted the difference between how students were monitored at college and less so at university. At university, you are expected “to work out yourself what you need to do” and that it is different from college where you had to “make sure you did it” because you were going to be marked. For her it is more important to prioritise what counts for the degree, like the coursework. The weak framing in the messages from both lecturers regarding the work on the problems in combination with the differences that arise between the two educational levels seem to influence students. The lecturers adopted weak framing in the transmission of this particular message. Lecturer A included the problems in the notes without referring extensively to them or telling explicitly that they need to be done. In this way she left the decision entirely to the students. Similarly, when Lecturer B said “the usual” in the interview he assumed that the students already know what this “usual” is. Or when he wrote on the webpage about the “3 hours per week” he assumed that students know that spending three hours outside of lectures is considered good for them. The students come from school to university and they are used to have the work that they need to do structured and indicated by someone else. With the lack of control in this message, it is more probable that students would ignore it and they would procrastinate until something that counts towards their degree, like an examination or assignment coursework, would arise. We note here how the weakly framed message did not prompt the students to take action and practice the exercises.