April 9, 2009 Creating More Effective Course Handouts For most
of us, handouts are a staple of instructional life, but as
Teresa Sakraida and Peter Draus (reference below) point out,
their “development is often a trial-and-error process.” (p. 326)
Like so many other aspects of instruction, we take the
construction of handouts for granted, their creation guided
largely by intuition. The article referenced identifies a range
of purposes and functions for handouts, including the ability
to: - Serve as advance organizers, previewing and preparing
students for what’s to come. - Introduce activities, describe
the task, offer advice on process and identify outcomes. -
expedite progress through material by providing students with
drawings, graphs or other data that take excessive time to
replicate by hand. - Provide a break during a lecture, allowing
students to read instead of listen. - Serve as study guides,
containing summaries and highlights of key points covered in
class or in the text. - Convey other messages,