How can I make my content more relevant?

Dear Aggie,

I am working hard to provide representative problems for students to work on in class, but they just don’t seem to be very engaged. It is frustrating because these are the types of problems that students are likely to encounter on exams. Do you have any suggestions to engage students with important coursework?

~Trying to engage

Dear Trying,

First of all, let me commend you for providing class time for students to work on practice problems! You are making them aware of the expectations to go beyond memorization of course materials.

With regards to engagement, making the content and the problems relevant to students can make a world of difference.

Why

• Increased relevancy leads to higher motivation, engagement and learning outcomes.
• Increased relevancy makes abstract information concrete.
• Increased relevancy enhances knowledge retention.
• Increased relevancy can allow students to see themselves (and people like them) in professional settings.

How

• Use real-world problems. Go beyond the abstract by providing data sets or scenarios that are relevant to students’ disciplinary goals. These are often referred to as “authentic assessments”.
• Design problems that emphasize the relevance to students’ careers. Illustrate how the skills that students need to use to solve the problems are the same skills that they will use in their professional careers.
• Use local problems. Even if you are teaching a Gen Ed course with a variety of majors, students are likely to be interested in problems that are local and impact everyone. In our area, water, climate, migration, immigration, K-12 student proficiency, and agriculture (to name a few) are likely to be of broad relevance.
• And if you really want to make your content relevant to students, consider asking students to identify the relevance and run with it. In an education or social work course, students may identify K-12 student performance outcomes and the Martinez-Yazzie Action Plan (https://web.ped.nm.gov/bureaus/yazzie-martinez-updates/). Or students in a variety of courses may want to explore Project Jupiter (https://projectjupitertogether.com/ ), which has garnered a lot of attention with relevance to a variety of content areas (economic development, AI, energy, water, jobs, regulatory agencies, etc.).
• Identify genuine data for students to work with, rather than made-up data sets. For example (my apologies to statisticians), instead of asking students to analyze a fictionalized and arguably irrelevant data set about how often goals are scored in soccer matches, help students access actual data sets to address questions relevant to their disciplines. Use actual weather/climate and flowering-time data for ecology majors, or research data on handwashing by health-care professionals and hospital infections for pre-nursing students. Or take advantage of “crossover” or transferable skills- for example, learning French grammar rules can help students with English grammar.

I hope this provides some food for thought, and welcome input on how our NMSU colleagues make content relevant across their classes (email me at dearaggie@nmsu.edu).

~Aggie