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Teaching Excellence Handbook

Knowing Your Students

Teaching Ideas

What matters and why

Student demographics make a difference. Characteristics of students influence how they think about what is being taught. Some faculty provide a survey at the beginning of the course to learn more about their students, keeping FERPA guidelines in mind. This student information can influence your choice of examples to illustrate your content, sensitivity you should maintain, and the focus of your work with them. You need to learn about characteristics that most students share in the class as well as differences. 

Social-emotional, and intellectual development

UNT students represent a wide variation of age and interests. They have diverse life experiences, many of wich directly impact their learning. Development is dynamic and is highly individual. Intellectual development affects our students’ ability to think critically, use information to make decisions, solve problems, develop personal goals, accept feedback, etc. Social-emotional development relates not only to age but also to past experiences and coping skills students have developed. 

Life experiences and beliefs and values

Students come to class with many different life experiences. Their backgrounds are varied. They come with beliefs and values stemming from these earlier life experiences. Respect for these differences allows us as instructors to provide learning experiences that are relevant and varied.

Prior knowledge and assumptions

Students can bring prior knowledge into our classes that is accurate and sufficient or they can bring inappropriate backgrounds that can distort new learning. Misconceptions can come from myths, poor understanding of prior learning, and stereotypes and assumptions. 

Organization of knowledge

As novice learners, our students often organize their knowledge in ways that make information difficult to retrieve and link to new information. They arrange concepts and link them together, but sometimes in ways that don’t allow them to build upon this knowledge. Sometimes the ways our students have organized their knowledge do not assist them with performing tasks they need to accomplish in our classes. 

Student motivation to learn

Students’ motivation is influenced by the value they place upon the learning as well as their expectations of how well they can succeed in learning. Motivation to learn comes from beliefs that the learning challenges provided by the course are worth the time and energy they must expend to learn (Barkley, 2010). Students bring with them a variety of goals for their learning which impact their motivation. Some are motivated to master content and perform while others tend to avoid negative appearances and focus on self-protection and not taking risks. 

Examining your own assumptions about students

Some of the assumptions we have about our students are conscious, and some are less conscious. Uncovering these assumptions with evidence can have an impact about how we relate to students. It is important to know your students through evidence provided through continual assessment and interaction (Brookfield, 2012).

How you can learn about your students

You can begin to know your students on the first day of class. It’s important to protect the students’ privacy so you could ask for information from them in writing to you. Have them focus upon one or more of the following:

  • Their interests and backgrounds related to the course content
  • Their names and majors as well as other identifying information
  • Their reasons for taking this course
  • What they plan to do after they graduate
  • What a previous instructor did to help them learn or hinder their learning
  • What they would like for you to know about them

You could also have students write a paragraph about themselves or a personal experience related to the course to help you assess not only their prior experiences, but also their writing and use of vocabulary.

During the first week of the course, you can also assess their background knowledge by using a simple multiple choice questionnaire for no credit. Tell the students that you are administering this questionnaire so that you can tailor your instruction to their needs. 

You can also assess your students through observation. Watching for attention, willingness to seek assistance, class participation, etc. is valuable. 

More assessment tools are available from these resources: