Response to Student Feedback
HSTY2634: American History from Columbus to Lincoln (2008)

Unit Coordinators: Dr Frances Clarke & Dr Michael McDonnell

Mike McDonnell and Frances Clarke co-taught this unit for the first time in 2008. Both had taught it separately in the past, but we felt that students would benefit from a unit that combined the perspectives of an 18th century specialist (Mike), and a 19th century specialist (Frances).

To deal with students’ enlarged workloads after the introduction of 6 credit point units, and to take advantage of our differing realms of knowledge, we amended the syllabus in several ways.

• First, we reorganized the tutorial readings around specific events, issues or historical debates, each chosen with regard to the length, relationship to lecture topics, and potential impact on students. We tried to create a set of tutorial readings that students couldn’t wait to pick up, read, and discuss this week.
• Second, we changed the nature of our assignments. Our challenge was to replace the two assignments we’d taught in the past with a single assignment that would serve students equally well in building generic skills, developing their research expertise, and teaching them how to read historical sources. We came up with a new assignment that asked students to choose a single primary source. They then had to construct their own essay topic around that source (they could either contextualise the source; look at the way different scholars approached the same souruce; or read the source itself as a form of evidence. Students first selected a source and created an essay plan, which was graded. They then completed a research essay. This assignment worked fairly well for some students, but less well for a minority, as we note below.
• We also pioneered new tutorial participation methods this semester. In order to ensure participation, we came up with two strategies. The first involved administrating half a dozen pop quizzes (created to be simple and fun for those who’d done the reading); the second involved requiring students to bring to tutorials a response to each weeks reading. In particular, we asked them to come up with a question in relation to the tutorial readings, and to explain why that question was interesting and/or important. The goal here was to create active readers, rather than passive note-takers; to have students thinking about formulating questions as they were reading. The second objective was to start tutorials with students’ own questions; to involve them by structuring the discussion around their particular interests.

We had a great group of students, who’ve provided some excellent feedback. We’ll detail the suggestions and complaints below. Before we do that, we should note that we also got a huge number of compliments, all of which are sincerely appreciated. In fact, a very healthy 91% of students who filled out the end of year evaluations said they agreed, or strongly agreed that they were satisfied overall with the quality of the unit of study.

Students complimented us on the following:

• “very well organized”
• “clear outline”
• “informative and interesting”
• lecturers were always available for consultation
• taped lectures and lecture outlines; “fantastic”
• many students loved the tutorial assignments “we had to think!” wrote one, another commenting: “weekly questions/pop quizzes really motivated me to do the readings – as painful as it was occasionally.” (we got far more positive comments about this aspect of the course than negative ones)
• “Michael and Frances are very effective communicators & very enthusiastic & approachable scholars. They made the content interesting & tutorial discussions meaningful.”
• “This has been a fantastic course!... presenting very interesting subject matter in a lively, well-structured manner. The combination of political, economic, social & cultural history has enabled a more holistic understanding of history & the preparation tutorial questions have been very useful.”
• “staff fantastic and very helpful”
• “essay was excellent in engaging learning due to large choice.”
• “the assessment is great in that it got you thinking about the essay early on. Keep the assignment the way it is.”
• “please make the submission of tutorial questions and quizzes compulsory for all history courses.” (comments of this nature far outweighed negative ones)
• website tremendously helpful “especially links”
• “tute readings relevant, interesting and inslightful.”
• “he research essay made me think outside the box to apply what I knew”
• “great great tutors/lecturers. Some of the best I’ve had.”
• “one of the best history courses I’ve taken. And I’ve been here 5 years.”
• “Frances and Mike taught this course in such an engaging way that I was even motivated to do extra reading.”
• “really enjoyable lectures covering both social and political topics.”
• “assessment focusing on a primary source BRILLIANT. I actually felt like a historian analysing a sources rather than summarising other peoples’ arguments.”