The chocolate incident. What's in it for me?

Warning: There will be a test at the end of this post!

Recently, colleagues in our research group are commenting an unexpected incident involving students and chocolate (I hope the blog post does not to disappoint after this beginning). For totally random reasons, an instructor takes the left overs of a box of chocolates to a class of first year students. We worked on the poor thing (the box) at a research meeting previously that day, but skillfully survived the attack (I had to leave early that meeting). There were not enough chocolates for all the students, and it just turned to be one of those sessions with a bunch of exercises that are supposed to be solved by the students and commented in class. Needless to say, these two facts created a chemical reaction in the brain of the instructor.

Yes, you guessed it right. A chocolate in exchange for you solving correctly one of the exercises in the board. What was the reaction? I'm not sure you're going to guess this one as well. Participation skyrocketed. To give you a bit more information about the context, these first year face to face classes in which we try to apply active learning require an immense amount of creativity to come up with techniques to increase student participation (as this blog post I think clearly illustrates).

The surprise for the reaction translated into us discussing the event. But unexpectedly, after solving a few exercises in that session (and to my dismay), the box still survived. Another colleague that had the same session with a different class later that day took the box into action. And yes, he was able to "replicate the experiment", very accurately, in fact.

My surprise might be a logical consequence of my lack of pedagogical training, but for a person that claims to do research on how technology improves learning, it is at least ironic that a box of chocolates beats you to the punch. I am trying to see if the anecdote has something interesting inside. First I have to fight my instinctive analysis: I would've spent the whole class plotting how to hijack the entire box. After pushing aside my chocoholic point of view and regain objectivity, a large variety of funny jokes come to mind. My university just opened a call for proposals on teaching innovation (tough to resist). Should I start printing out coupons? Spring is around the corner, some cool drinks perhaps? Tickets for a concert? Ok, back to the serious stuff.

I think the interesting question behind the anecdote is "What do I have to do to get your attention". Because we are doing some interesting research on attention, I cannot avoid thinking about it from the point of view of the student attention being an elusive resource that is essential for learning, and yet, we don't alway succeed at attracting it.

The next step in my analysis is that it seems to be more and more certain that you may get students attention if there is anything in it for them. And I would put emphasis on the word "anything". An instructor then must see what would get the attention of the students. The first typical answer is "an increase in the score". True, I must confess that most of my "attention gathering strategies" rely on this. But we need to diversify, like the investors. And the landscape of choices is out there for us to discover (and goes at least all the way to a box of chocolates). I think I need an extra dose of the "why not" serum in order to tackle this one.

And to conclude, as promised, here is the quiz for you:

An instructor gets to class with a tricky set of activities to carry out during the session. Which sentence would you recommend this instructor to say at the beginning of the class to catch the attention of the audience? "We are going to do these activities because..."

1. "they are in the course syllabus."
2. Are you kidding! I would get right down to do the activities. There is no time for these stupid experiments of yours.
3. "everybody needs to know this! There should not be anybody out on the streets without these activities properly solved."
4. None of the above.

Oh, wait. You are not going to answer it, right? There wasn't anything in it for you.