Using Excel as a Behaviorist Learning Activity

I stumbled across an interesting way to motivate students this week and when I say “stumbled across” I mean that I read about it as part of my assignment for my current technology class. The idea comes from a book called “Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works” by Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, and Malenoski. The idea is a fairly simple one. Most students think that their successes or failures in school are based on their intelligence, their genes, or just dumb luck (which is one reason why students love multiple choice tests). This is shown often in math class where students make comments like “I am not good at math” or “my parents weren’t good at math so I am not good at math either”. This idea is fostered in many ways, one of which is through parents. I often have parents come in for conferences and the first thing they do is make excuses for their child’s poor grades because the parents weren’t good at math either. Often these conferences are at the beginning of the year before their child even has a grade.

The solution to this is to show students that their successes and failures are based, not on intelligence, but on effort. When a student sees that putting forth effort leads to success and that they can reap the rewards that come with that success, they will be motivated to continue putting effort into their studies. One way to accomplish this is to use an Excel spreadsheet. You can identify ways in which students can put forth effort in your class (taking notes, interacting with other students, homework, studying, class work, etc.) and create a four point scale for each of those categories. Each week you can have your students rate their own effort and take a quiz or a test on the material covered that week. In the Excel spreadsheet students can put in their weekly scores and get a total effort score and a test score. Students can monitor their effort score and test score over the course of several weeks and see if their scores get better with more effort. In addition, students can create a chart comparing effort and grade to see the connection between the two. This is a good behaviorist learning activity that shows students the positive and negative consequences of their effort. It is also a good way to integrate technology into the classroom. One related idea that I need to think on more is creating surveys using www.surveymonkey.com, having students take the surveys, and putting the results in a spreadsheet. These surveys could be surveys on effort or could be surveys on any topic for which you could put the results in a spreadsheet.

Just this week I ran into one of my students and her mother. This student has struggled in my class all year and has continually said she couldn’t do well in math. I finally got her to believe that she was smart and if she started trying and focusing more in class she would find that she would remember things better. Recently she has been doing really well during our spiral reviews because she has confidence that she can remember how to solve problems we have done in the past. When I talked with the mother of this student she told me that her daughter was running around telling everyone about the good grade she got in her math class this quarter. It is nice to see what a little motivation and positive reinforcement can do.

Since I am on the topic of motivation and Excel I want to continue thinking along those lines. About half of my students do not have computers at home so I can not integrate technology into their homework. I can however use technology once students get back to school with their homework. I can set up a spreadsheet that keeps track of student grades throughout the quarter as assignments, test, and quizzes are completed. Each week when we do our effort spreadsheets we could also update our grade spreadsheets with all of the homework assignments that were completed by each student and any additional scores that they received throughout the week. This way students can see each week what their grade is and how much of an effect one zero or one 100% score can make for their grade. Seeing the clear consequences of a good or a bad score should motivate most students to make sure their scores are good.

Hopefully some of these ideas can be useful for you,

Ryan