Teaching General Education Philosophy Courses to Underprepared College Students

I teach at Central State University (CSU), Ohio’s only state HBCU, where many students are first-generation college students and where most of our students’ high school experience does not prepare them for college. These sociological trends have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the availability of generative AI. Because I mostly teach general education philosophy courses to first- and second-year students, I am often on the frontlines of our university’s effort to help students develop the habits and skills necessary to succeed in college.

During my first semester at CSU, I found that I could not simply post readings in the Learning Management System (LMS) and expect my students to come to class prepared. Chronic absenteeism was a serious problem, but the students’ extreme disengagement also included a refusal or the inability to (1) study assigned texts and videos, (2) take notes on assigned materials, (3) take notes in class, or (4) study for exams. Troublingly, (5) more than one class told me that their strategy for passing classes entailed accumulating enough points on formative assessments (often graded on completion) to “balance” out their failure on the major summative assessments.

More than anything else, I teach PHI 2240: Critical Thinking, a general education philosophy course that covers reasoning skills broadly conceived. I have therefore spent the last four years engaging in a trial-and-error process of course development, radically changing my critical thinking class every semester and experimenting with new pedagogies. Each of the five sections below explains how I have addressed the five problems indicated above.

Social Annotation Homework Assignments

To get students to study the assigned texts and videos, I embed all content in interactive study tools. My university has access to the Feedback Fruits tool suite, which includes Interactive Document and Interactive Video, social annotation tools designed to foster active learning by requiring students to create or answer question cards and discussion threads.

I post PDFs of all assigned readings into Interactive Document, requiring students to annotate the readings and answer question cards I anchor throughout the chapter. Students also write a 100-word reflection on the reading, answering a prompt I provide them. Similarly, I post all assigned videos in Interactive Video, which allows me to embed quiz questions and discussion threads throughout the video, which students must answer before they can continue.

These assignments are completed online and graded by completion, so they are low-stakes and students are motivated to finish them. I make them due the night before class so I can review student annotations and responses before class to get a sense of what I should focus on explaining when we meet. Students report that they enjoy these learning activities, and I have observed a dramatic increase in students’ willingness to study the assigned material.

Class Preparation Assignments

To get students to take notes on the assigned materials, I require Class Preparation Assignments (CPAs), which I define as one-page of handwritten notes in a notebook. Studies have shown that there are cognitive benefits to writing information by hand, and I tell students that they are adequately prepared for class if they have at least one page of notes on each homework assignment.

CPAs are graded based on completion plus punctuality. I do not accept partial pages of notes, and CPAs receive full credit only when submitted at the start of class. Students who arrive late or who otherwise submit them late receive only partial credit for CPAs. Though students often complain about having to take notes by hand, many former students come to my office or stop me in the hallway and confirm that the CPAs helped them learn, for they remember course content even years later.

Flipped & Hybrid Format

Because my students ignore my lectures and don’t take notes in class, I changed my course to a flipped and hybrid format.

Flipped: Unlike the “traditional” course structure in which a teacher delivers information in class (lectures) and students practice skills outside of class (homework), my flipped course uses our LMS to deliver content outside class while using the course study packets I developed to practice skills inside class. I post lecture videos for every lesson in the class. Like homework videos, these are uploaded into Interactive Video with questions embedded throughout; like the quizzes, these are graded on correctness, so students receive feedback on their learning before the exam. Students also write one CPA on each lecture video. In class, I guide students as we work through practice problems designed to help them prepare for that unit exam. Using a combination of breakout groups and full class discussions, I can provide corrective feedback in real time.

Hybrid: I mostly teach Monday-Wednesday-Friday courses with 50-minute sessions. I now use Monday and Wednesday as in-person days and use Friday as an asynchronous online day, giving students time to complete the lecture videos and practice quizzes.

Students have responded well to the flipped and hybrid format. They prefer lecture videos to in-class lectures, and they find in-class time valuable because we are actually “doing something,” as one student put it. The interactive nature of the class increases their cognitive presence and improves my rapport with students.

Exam Preparation

To help students prepare for exams, I implemented three new learning activities. First, at the start of each class I give a five-question reading quiz, mostly multiple choice and true/false questions. Students are allowed to use the notes they write for their CPAs, which gives them reason to take good notes and prompts them to re-read their notes. Second, students are required to take two online practice quizzes during each unit, and they get three attempts on each, so they are incentivized to check their performance and review materials related to questions they missed. Third, students must create a handwritten exam review artifact for each exam—flash cards, mind maps, study guides, practice essays, or anything else that helps them study. These review artifacts are submitted for credit/no-credit during the in-class exam review in each unit. The reading and practice quizzes provide students with feedback on their learning before the exams, and the exam review artifacts supplement the CPAs and requires students to review their notes.

Definitional Grading System

In addition to all of the changes above, I abandoned a point-based grading system in favor of a definitional grading system (DGS). My course has five units, each of which has four grading categories: Homework (HW), Class Preparation Assignments (CPAs), Participation & Performance (P&P), and Exam. The HW category includes all Feedback Fruits assignments and the online practice quizzes. The CPA category includes only the CPAs. The P&P category includes lecture videos, reading quizzes, and the exam review artifact. The unit exam—taken with pencil and paper in class—is its own category. Because a DGS is new to students, I use one lesson in the first unit to teach them how the grading scale works.

Each category is graded out of 50 points, but the points are not averaged across categories. In a DGS, grades are defined by thresholds of performance across all categories. For instance, an A student is defined as a student who earns an A (at least 90%) in all four categories, a B student is defined as a student who earns a B (at least 80%) in all four categories, and so on. This means that students cannot “balance” poor exam grades by earning completion points on homework and CPAs; it also means that students cannot simply cheat their way through the exams without completing homework and CPAs. Because it is not possible to use AI to complete the Feedback Fruits assignments, in-class reading quizzes, or in-class paper exams, it is nearly impossible to cheat one’s way through the class.

The final grade for the course is calculated similar to a semester grade point average (GPA). Each unit’s letter grade is converted to a number on a 4.0 scale and averaged. A student who earns C, C, B, A, B in the units receives a B in the course. Students tend to hit a rough patch somewhere during the semester and inevitably fail a unit or two, but this final grading system insulates them from failing simply because they struggled through a couple of units. A student with C, C, F, F, A for unit grades, for instance, still earns a C for the course. Thus, while strict accountability is built into the definitional grading scale for each unit, the final grading scale accounts for the hardships many HBCU students face.

Concluding Reflections

Because most of my critical thinking students will never take another philosophy class, my aim is not to make them philosophers but to help them cultivate the habits and skills necessary for success in college. I developed pedagogical practices targeting each of the five problems I wanted to solve, and I have had overall success compared to previous versions of my course. More students are passing more exams, which means they are truly learning and truly earning their grades. And when students fail, my grading scale allows me to quickly identify target areas for improvement.

Developing this course took hundreds of hours, which was a challenge because I have a 4-4 teaching load with service and research requirements. It’s also enabled by my institution’s access to the Feedback Fruits tool suite. But the course saves me time while teaching because it minimizes grading time (under an hour per week, excluding exams) and it puts the responsibility on students to complete the work. My success with the course inspired me to similarly redesign how I teach PHI 2250: Applied Ethics.

Of course, no pedagogical innovations can remedy all the impediments my students face: economic and social hardships, mental health challenges, and so on. So, I still find myself reaching out to students who disappear from class or who go weeks without submitting any work. But most of my students who can and do stick with the course seem to become better students.