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Make a Prediction

A pendulum-type desk accessory, where one ball is pulled and swung toward 5 additional balls.

Incorporating opportunities for students to “make a prediction” into your teaching toolkit is a simple way to increase student engagement and learning. When students are asked to predict, both cognitive and affective learning is sparked. As they consider possible responses to the prompt, they activate prior knowledge that is relevant to the topic. When students are able to connect to past learning, they are better able to retain the new information while reinforcing their past knowledge through retrieval practice. Additionally, their curiosity is sparked, as they wonder whether their prediction was close-to-accurate or off-base, and more importantly, why.

Building prediction into your teaching practice can be incorporated in a variety of ways:

  • Ask students to form a hypothesis about what would happen when a variable is changed within a familiar system.
  • Provide an image and ask students to predict something about it (what caused something or what is about to happen next or who are the people/what are their roles).
  • Show a series of data sets over time and ask students to predict the current data.
  • Share a real-world case study and ask students to predict the ending.
  • Begin solving a problem and ask students to predict the next step.
  • Before introducing a new topic, ask students to take a “pre-test,” giving their best-faith effort to answer a series of questions.

When asking students to make a prediction, ensure that you provide sufficient pause time for students to think hard about the question or scenario. Encourage students to write or sketch as they consider possible responses.

Students may be eager to turn to a classmate and compare their own idea with someone else’s. This can be an easy and relatively low-stakes way for students to talk through their thinking.

However, it can feel high stakes for students to reveal their predictions in front of their full class of peers. One way to minimize this self-consciousness is by having anonymous ways for students to share their ideas. Technology can assist with polls or low-stakes live Canvas assignments. A low-tech solution is to have students jot down their ideas onto sticky notes.

As an instructor, it can be advantageous to collect all students’ predictions, as a way to gauge prior knowledge of the group.

When utilizing prediction in the classroom, it is important to quickly reveal the correct information and allow time for students to process any cognitive dissonance they experience between their prediction and the actual answer. Create opportunity for students to ask clarifying questions.

If you notice that there are common misperceptions, it can be helpful to explore the incorrect predictions. Rather than putting a student on the spot, you can ask, “Whether or not this was your prediction, why might a reasonable person expect X to be the answer?”

In an online class, anonymous discussion boards can work well for surfacing predictions from students (based on the settings, the instructor can see the author of these posts, but peers cannot).

A learning module in an LMS can also used to guide students through a sequenced scenario with interspersed, required predictions, that students must complete prior before revealing the next component. In Canvas, you use the requirements feature to force students to complete an activity before moving to the next step in a module.

For example, a mini learning module might have 6 components, with two forced predictions, that must be completed before moving to the next step:

  1. Page of instructions
  2. Page with foundational scenario information.
  3. Multiple choice quiz (1 question) asking students to predict the next step in the scenario (students must answer this quiz before they can see #4).
  4. Page revealing the correct answer to the quiz, explaining the answer, and then presenting the next bit of relevant information in the scenario.
  5. Short answer quiz (1 question) asking students to describe the best response from the perspective of one person in the scenario (students must answer this quiz before they can see #6).
  6. Page revealing the recommended response and why.