Using Pre and Post-Tests to Close Gaps in Knowledge

A challenge most academics experience is delivering courses which assumes that the student has the required prerequisite knowledge. A great example of this is a course which assumes that a student has completed the prerequisite course at a previous level. This challenge more often than expected, occurs and with key topics, where the prerequisite knowledge is either missing or incorrect thus delaying the student’s progress as they pursue their course. When the student acquired the prerequisite knowledge the information may have been designed through different learning activities and was then organized into a specific schema (Minsky, 1975) to have meaning to the student. As this knowledge structure becomes complex, through the addition of new concepts, the encoding that occurs creates a schema for what was once an informational item (Rumelhart 1984; Rumelhart and Norman, 1978). What is of particular concern for this situation is the influence of an existing schema on new knowledge that is being encoded (Anderson, 1994). Knowing that as a student learns, any new knowledge will be guided by the categories and levels of abstraction that already exist and thus foundational concepts may be guided by either misrepresented or missing information – thus creating gaps in knowledge. This strategy is used in a second year quantitative methods course in an undergraduate business program as a blended learning solution. The course is a compulsory prerequisite for other core courses hence its high enrollment numbers (e.g. 900 students) . This course is also taken as a compulsory course by students from other disciplines as well as some students transfer into programs from other institutions, thus contributing to the diversity in knowledge and person in the student population.