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Lane,

Two thoughts in response to your question:

1)  I allowed my Genetics students to bring in a 1-page cheat sheet,
since they also had a lot of information to absorb.  I required that the
sheet be handwritten and was very strict about it.  I did on one or two
occasions have to tell a student who had annotated the reading guide
that they could not use it; after that the 'handwritten' requirement was
a non-issue.  The result  was that students did a very careful reading
of the material prior to coming to class.  I suspect that, in order to
create the cheat sheet, they read the chapter more carefully than they
would have otherwise.

2) That said, I tried to keep the RAT questions more conceptual than
factual, so they would encourage more discussion/learning during the
team RAT.  If the questions are recall, then the team simply defaults to
the person with the most accurate notes.  Making the questions more
complex then "demotes" the cheat sheets to a useful reference guide.
The students must have done some mental processing of the content while
reading in order to do well on the RATs.

hope this helps,
Fran


Lane Lester wrote:
> One person whose TBL experiences I read allows students to bring a
> single handwritten sheet of notes to the RATs. I'm going to be teaching
> human anatomy & physiology (in one week!), which has an awful lot of
> minutia behind the concepts. So I find the idea of letting the students
> use a "cheat sheet" rather appealing.
>
> Do you do anything like that for courses that are heavy on facts? Or do
> you make the students "tough it out"?
>
> Lane
> ---
> Lane P. Lester, Ph.D.
> Biology Instructor
> Southwestern Community College
> Macon Campus, Franklin, NC

--
Francine S. Glazer, Ph.D.
Professor, Biological Sciences
Kean University
Union NJ 07083

Ph:  908-737-3661
Fx:  908-737-3666
http://www.kean.edu/~fglazer