The Generation Effect and How to Leverage it in Your Online Courses

Last week I wrote a blog post a video by Dr. Robert Bjork called Using Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning. I talked about how this was a great concept that really exemplified why gamification is so beneficial when teaching concepts. Today I want to talk about another concept he mentioned in the video called the Generation Effect and share how I am planning to use this in my online teaching to not only enhance student success, but really improve knowledge retention and student outcomes. 

In this video, Dr. Robert Bjork describes how students would benefit much more from generating an answer rather than the course instructor giving it to them. While I know this does not sound earth shattering, the AHA moment came when he stated that the student may not have adequate background (foundational knowledge) to generate an answer. Again, not earth shattering, but let me take you on a journey with me so you can understand why this meant so much to me.

I created a Virtual Gaming Simulation (VGS) activity that we gave to some Med/Surg pre-licensure students. Aside from using a completely free tool (Google Slides) to create the activity, we really pulled out all the stops! We hired standardized patients to act out different scenarios, we went to a Simulation Center to record them, we added sound effects, a storyline and plot, a progress bar. I was so proud! It was over 200 slides of interactivity! I just knew the students were going to be blown away! We even decided to break the students up into groups to compare how students with the enhance VGS did compared to student with a more traditional VGS.

Well, I'm happy to share that students with the extra bells and whistles did significantly better than students that got the more traditional VGS, the overall scores on the assessments were not impressive at all. In fact, they were dismal. 

So now back to the Generation Effect that Dr. Bjork was talking about. After watching that video, it reinforced that the reason why students were still not excelling was not because of the amazing simulation I developed (obviously it couldn't be that). It was because they were not bringing the appropriate knowledge to simulation. They were not able to succeed at the generation of knowledge. At that point, my simulation became an undesirable difficulty.

So how do we fill that gap? Well, that's what I'm working on, and I'm so excited to be able to share it with you when I have a working prototype in place, but lets just say the answer has a lot to do with what Pooja Argawal and Patrice Bain call the "Power Tools"- they include retrieval practice, interleaving, spacing and feedback driven metacognition. You can read more about it in their book Powerful Teaching. You can also hang around this space for all the fun online teaching strategies that I'll be sharing about how to keep your students engaged in the online world. 

Overall, the generation effect can lead to improved knowledge retention. How can we leverage this in our online courses to develop material to help our students be successful? 

Share your thoughts, experiences and ideas in the The Online Nurse Educator Facebook group!