Teaching Old Instructors New Tricks : Education: A $2.5-million, five-year federal grant is funding a pilot class designed to find out if students are learning.

Carol Sigala once sat passively in a geology lecture course at UCLA, watching her confidence and grade-point average plummet. If the instructor had wanted to know what confused her, Sigala would have answered, “Everything.”

But he never did ask. He just lectured, day after day.

The teacher taught, but Sigala didn’t learn. Sigala got a D.

Now that Sigala is the teacher, she wants to make sure that story doesn’t repeat itself. That’s why the Rio Hondo College professor has signed up to teach a pilot class in a federal grant program with a very simple goal: to find out whether students are actually learning.

The methods Sigala uses are just as simple as the goal. To find out whether her students really understand something, for example, she just asks them a question.

This level of revelation, a skeptic might say, is hardly the stuff of a $2.5-million, five-year federal grant. That’s what Rio Hondo and four other area community colleges received to pursue this inquiry.

In some ways, what Sigala does is a modified form of the pop quiz. Near the end of her child-development class, she handed out 3-by-5-inch forms and asked students to define in one minute an “anti-bias approach” to research. The entire class period had been devoted to understanding that concept, which involves searching for materials that might project negative images of minorities and women.

Another day she might do it this way: “Write down the clearest point I made in class and the muddiest point.”

Or, she might say, “In one minute write down the main point of this class.”

The idea is to find out what students need to learn well before the final exam.

Community colleges have a mission that emphasizes teaching as much as possible to as many as possible, but college instructors receive little formal training in teaching, said Susan Obler, who directs the grant program at Rio Hondo, a community college that overlooks the San Gabriel River Freeway just west of Whittier.

Obler, who also teaches English, said her students have competing priorities that can disable their progress: full-time jobs, transportation problems, family responsibilities, economic pressures and changing work hours. Many students have had few positive experiences in school and little success. They lack confidence as a result.

“When I first started teaching here,” Sigala said, “I was reaching 15% of my students. With those students, I was doing an excellent job. As I became more familiar with my students’ backgrounds, I saw traditional methods weren’t going to work with them.

“I’ve redefined some of my goals. It’s not enough that I teach something, but that my students learn it.”

That goal demands more of Sigala, but she also asks more of her students day to day. Students save their responses to the quickie questions she asks, and Sigala reviews for the class what other students are writing. The method demands that students monitor their learning for themselves, that they learn to take control of their education.

Of course, the $2.5-million question is: Does this method work?

Consultant Thomas Angelo said he cannot tell for sure. He wrote a handbook on the technique with K. Patricia Cross, a UC Berkeley professor famous in educational circles. Nor can Rio Hondo researchers point to hard evidence, such as a big improvement in student grades.

But they have faith, and so does Angelo, if only because common sense tells them that the techniques can only help.

Sigala too is a believer. In her class, she said, students are learning more.

One thing the cards show: Students are learning something. On one card, submitted late in the semester, a student defined a term and added, “I got it right this time.”