When designing a course, many educators are familiar with the concept of backwards design: start with the end in mind—what skills and knowledge do you want your students to gain? From there, you can work backwards by first defining your learning objectives, then crafting your assessments, and finally selecting the instructional materials that will support student success. Your instructional materials should prepare students for the assessments, and those assessments should clearly reflect whether the learning objectives have been met. A great tool for ensuring everything aligns is a course map, which we discuss in our on demand webinar and in our articles on course mapping.
However, there’s another important element that often gets overlooked: context. Context is key at every level of your course—from the big picture of the entire course, to each module, and all your instructional materials. Students need to understand why your course matters (whether it’s within their degree program or how the skills they’ll learn apply to the real world), how the modules connect to form a cohesive narrative, and how each piece of material plays a role in achieving the course’s goals. When you provide context, you help students see the bigger picture, making it easier for them to understand the course goals, understand your approach, and see how all of the pieces of the course relate to one another. In this post, we’ll explore why context is so vital and share strategies for how to create and present it effectively.
Chunking: Breaking It Down for Better Understanding
A helpful strategy in course design is “chunking.” Chunking refers to breaking down larger pieces of information into smaller, more manageable units that are easier to remember. Think about how you remember a phone number: it’s much easier to recall “(216) 555-0413” than a long string of numbers like “2165550413.” Similarly, when reading, most of us prefer text that’s divided into sections rather than a big block of uninterrupted text.
This same principle applies to the instructional materials you assign. Ideally, each chunk of material should align with specific objectives—addressing one or two at a time. The goal is to eliminate unnecessary information that doesn’t directly contribute to your learning objectives. By doing this, you help reduce cognitive overload for students, making it easier for them to focus on what truly matters.
Chunking naturally happens when you create a course map, ensuring that each chunk of material is in sync with your assessments and objectives. However, even though you might understand how all these chunks fit together, your students might not. This is where the concept of “expert blind spot” comes into play.
Understanding Expert Blind Spot
As an expert in your field, you see how skills and knowledge interconnect naturally, but your students, who are novices, might not be able to make those connections naturally. To you, the relationship between different chunks of material seems obvious. But students may struggle to see the connections without a clear framework. Experts can easily recognize patterns and know how new information fits into the broader picture. They can recall information quickly because it’s all part of a well-organized knowledge structure. Novices, however, might only see isolated pieces without a meaningful framework to tie them together. This can lead to difficulties in understanding, remembering, and applying new information.
Expert blind spot refers to when instructors are unaware of or ignore the struggles that their students have in incorporating new information. One way to compensate for this is to provide context for everything your students must learn.
How to Approach Providing Context
When thinking about how to present context, keep this simple mantra in mind: Review, preview, motivate. Providing context at every level of your course (course, module, materials) is crucial, so let’s break down how you can do this.
Review
Start by connecting new content with what students have already learned. This is called activating prior knowledge. According to educational research (Norman et. al., 2010), linking new information to what students already know can significantly enhance learning. Given how effective learning is when you scaffold knowledge and skills, it’s essential that students have an accurate “scaffold” beneath them. Your context statements should help students see how what they’re about to learn builds on their existing knowledge. Research indicates that even token efforts to activate students’ prior knowledge can have a positive effect on learning (Ambrose et al., 2010, p. 16).
Context Statement Examples: Review
When you’re online, do ads pop up that seem tailored to your own tastes and buying habits? We’ve already seen the methods that marketers use to gather this information, but is it possible to stop them? In this module, we’ll reexamine these tactics with a more critical eye and also address …
Up to this point in the course, we’ve focused on normal adolescent development; now, let’s turn to an examination of abnormal adolescent development. In this module, we’ll be focusing on …
We looked at several works of Freud in previous modules and examined his influence within the realm of psychology and behavioral health. You may not know, however, that his work heavily influenced literary analysis and literary theory. In this module, we’ll look at back at what you’ve read already and instead explore …
Preview
Give students a clear idea of what’s coming up. Whether it’s the material they’ll be studying, the assessments they’ll face, or the learning goals they’ll achieve, previewing helps them understand how everything fits together. Providing an organizational structure before diving into the content can improve understanding and recall. You can continue “reviewing” what you’ve done so far and how the current content builds on their prior knowledge, and also give students guidance on how to consume the material and how it all fits together. This is one of the key strategies in addressing your expert blind spot. Learning research indicates that when students are presented some sort of organizational structure (or “advance organizer”) that contextualizes material they’re about to encounter, their understanding and recall improves (Ambrose et al., 2010, p. 53).
So, ask yourself, “Are there particular arguments that link the materials together? Should they pay attention to particular pages of a reading? Are there ‘red herrings’ of which students should be aware?” Though, presumably, the order of your course components (or their due dates) will dictate a chronological order to their consumption, students should have an idea of how the course materials in the module relate to one another and what they should be on the lookout for.
Context Statement Examples: Preview
In this classic article, Clifford Geertz uses the concept of “deep play” to describe the symbolic importance of cockfighting in Balinese culture. As you read, ask yourself: What are some forms of deep play in this culture, and what do they say about us?
The learning goals for this session are for you to be able to (a) solve optimization problems using MATLAB and (b) explain the reasoning behind your problem-solving strategy.
The four essays you’ll be reading all address the topic of postwar feminism. Some of them aren’t explicit about it, though, so keep an eye out for opinions they express either directly or indirectly.
Motivate
Finally, make sure to explain why the material matters. How does it connect to course goals, real-world applications, or future material? Students’ motivation is heavily influenced by the value that they assign to the course and its content, and explicitly articulating that value is key to building your students’ motivation and, in turn, promoting engagement and retention. One way to consider the “motivation” piece of your context statement is to create a hook. Begin your context statement with a demonstration of a real-world process, a discussion of common incorrect prior knowledge, a discussion of a relatively current event, or an observation of a phenomenon that relates to the upcoming material. This piques students’ interest and can enhance their motivation to consume and engage with the material more deeply.
Context Statement Example: Motivate
In 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge began to pitch and buck before collapsing into Puget Sound. In this lecture, we’ll learn how a proper understanding of eigenvalues and oscillation might have prevented this disaster …
On your final exam, you’ll be asked to apply negotiation principles to a case study in international business. In this lecture, we’ll examine two of these principles in depth …
[Video] Have you ever wondered why ice floats on water while other solids usually sink? [Performs demonstration on camera by dropping ice into a bowl of water, which floats, then small pebbles into a different bowl of water, which sinks.] Water molecules do some interesting things as they approach their freezing point. In this module, we’ll explore the unique thermodynamic properties of water, and you’ll be able to …
Conclusion
Context should be provided at every level of your course: the overall course, each module, and within every piece of instructional material. You can start with your syllabus or a course introduction, use module introductions to set the stage, and include context statements within your instructional materials. Providing context will help scaffold your students’ skills and knowledge and illuminate your course narrative. If you’ve chunked your material appropriately and compensated for expert blind spot, the context you provide will foster a metacognitive perspective, which will consequently help students take more ownership over their learning. While it may take some extra time to provide the right level of context, the payoff is well worth it.
References
Norman, M. K., Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., & Lovett, M. C. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Meyer, K. (2016). How chunking helps content processing. Retrieved from https://www.dropbox.com/s/o7ljmj1cbj6bl4r/How%20Chunking%20Helps%20Content%20Processing.pdf?dl=0
