Alexa Clemmons describes how Codon’s technology coerces students to learn how to learn

When I was teaching at the University of Washington, there were a few flavors of office-hours conversation that tended to repeat. The most common were homework help. My favorites were expounding on wild ideas students had extending something we'd talked about in class. My least favorite were the mini-therapy sessions. But the most meaningful were the ones about learning strategies.

In those, a student would come in genuinely distraught about a recent exam score. They cared a great deal about their success and were desperate for advice. I'd ask what they'd been doing to study, and it was almost always entirely passive: rereading notes, rewatching lectures, highlighting. So I'd talk them through what actually works:

• Make a plan (and start sooner than the night before!).

• Answer questions for real. Make yourself write out an answer before you "grade" yourself.

• Figure out what you genuinely don't understand, and spend your time there, not on what you already know.

As far as I could tell, most of them were hearing this for the first time, or maybe it was just the first time they were really listening. They'd usually leave feeling buoyed, at least a little, and I felt rewarded knowing that I might have nudged that student's trajectory.

But I never found out whether they actually followed through. And worse: for every student sitting across from me, I'm sure there were others feeling exactly the same way who were too scared or too busy to come have that conversation.

This is where Codon shines. We built all of those evidence-based practices into the platform, so students can't NOT do them:

• Students take multiple formative assessments spaced across the weeks, with due dates well ahead of the exam.

• Students commit to an answer, and flag whether they feel muddy or clear about it, before they find out if they're right.

• It tracks what they marked muddy or missed, then calls their attention to the learning objectives behind those gaps.

They still have to put in the effort and learn the biology. Codon just makes sure every student benefits from the most effective strategies, even if they haven’t had the opportunity to receive one-on-one mentoring.

Pedagogically Yours,
Alexa Clemmons, Product Director