new project studying Concept Maps and Flipped Classrooms supported through the TransCanada Collaborative SoTL grants program
We are particularly excited about the potential of this project not only because it is an attempt to redesign a course to address high ‘DFW rates’, but also because of the preliminary groundwork already completed for this research such as piloting the pedagogy and assessment strategies, the initial impact that has already been demonstrated through preliminary data collection, and the planned implementation and collaboration across multiple years of the nursing program.
To see descriptions and updates for this and other projects funded through the TransCanada Learning Innovation and Collaborative Inquiry Research Program, see here.
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Impact of Concept Maps and a Flipped Classroom Model in Biology and Nursing
Collaborative Research Team: Michelle Yeo, Academic Development Centre; Sarah Hewitt, Department of Biology; Joanne Bouma, Department of Nursing and Midwifery
Anatomy and Physiology is a year-long, first year course taught in two parts – BIOL 1220 and 1221. This is a service course taught by the Biology Department and is a required course for first year nursing students. This first year anatomy and physiology course has traditionally had one of the highest failure and withdrawal rates at the university. It is an extremely content heavy course, historically taught with a lecture/exam-based model. Students take the course in their first year of the nursing program as a required course. Faculty in the Nursing Program, including co-investigator Joanne Bouma, have repeatedly observed that students who barely pass this course struggle in subsequent courses, especially pathophysiology which they take in their second year. Consequently, there is a lot of impetus to try to improve their understanding of the basic material in the first year.
Based on prior interviews with students, and the observations of faculty teaching the course, the students struggle to find the best approach to learning so much content. Their retention of material beyond the exams is very poor, and for this reason, they are unable to make connections between later concepts that are based on, or identical to, earlier concepts. In an effort to help the students develop a more structured approach to learning, retaining information, and making connections between concepts, Sarah Hewitt decided to radically alter the course delivery in the sections she was teaching. In consultation with Michelle Yeo, Hewitt re-configured the course by amalgamating shortened lectures and in-class group work, with some typical components of a flipped classroom – more work outside of class time that allows for more student engagement activities in class. The biggest change involved the development of skeleton concept maps. Von Der Heidt (2015) argues that concept mapping can powerfully contribute to deep learning for students. Furthermore, a series of video lectures were created that students watched outside the class and could view them repeatedly as needed.
Calls have been made in the literature for research to help build an evidence base to justify the implementation of flipped approaches, and to increase their effectiveness through a better understanding of what does and does not work (Vickrey et al. 2015). Our SoTL work intends to discover how well these new approaches in BIOL 1220&21 are working and why. Furthermore, a recent study (Van Vliet, Winnips, & Brouwer, 2015) suggests that the benefits of a flipped model are not maintained if the pedagogy is not continued. Thus the GOALS of this project are as follows:
1. To assess the success of the partially flipped classroom as a teaching tool in first year,
2. To see whether this method can be used in the follow-up pathophysiology course in second year, and finally,
3. To find out whether the combination of this teaching method on both first and second year courses is an effective way for the students to more thoroughly learn the material, increase their long term retention of concepts and/or their ability to apply the concepts in a clinical setting.
We are proposing a two-year project to accomplish these goals. The project represents a partnership between three faculty members from Biology, Nursing, and the Academic Development Centre.
Using and Interpreting Undergraduate Research Posters in the Literature Classroom
“What if we paid more attention to inquiry as the creation of knowledge through scholarly conversation, with each other and with our primary and secondary sources, rather than focusing almost exclusively on how to record the “results” of inquiry in the research paper?”
In an excellent example of a SoTL project which is also “scholarship of integration” (in that it integrates knowledge and pedagogy from various academic fields), Karen Manarin describes how she used research posters (typical of science and social science) to inspire a new approach to teaching literary research and to
- make visible different moments in the process of literary research – to both students and instructor
- allow students to create their own interpretations through creative and aesthetic choices
- allow students to distill their main points and receive feedback before writing the traditional research paper
- give students the opportunity and confidence to create something that would interest their peers as scholars
Manarin, K. (2016). Interpreting Undergraduate Research Posters in the Literature Classroom. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, the ISSOTL Journal, 4(1). Available at http://tlijournal.com/tli/index.php/TLI/article/view/128/80
Sept 10 SoTL Exchange presentation: Implementing Reflective Writing in Combination with Labatorials in Science
Dear colleagues,
Please join us for our first SoTL Exchange presentation of the year, presented by Mandy Sobhanzadeh, MRU Senior Physics Lab Instructor, and PhD Candidate in Physics Education at UofC:
Thursday September 10, 12-1 pm, Y324
Implementing Reflective Writing in Combination with Labatorials in Science
Students tend to memorize the materials that they see in science textbooks without thinking about their meaning, because they believe that language and words hold the knowledge and they need to use the same words and terms in order to show their understanding (Eger, 1993; Kalman, 2006). Such students who think that knowledge in science is a body of settled facts that comes from authority take a passive role in learning and become a receiver of knowledge. It is up to us as teachers to motivate students to think about the meaning of concepts rather than memorizing the terms and definitions. Thinking about the meaning of concepts is related to the topic of hermeneutics which is the theory of interpretation. Having a hermeneutical approach to science helps students gain a deeper understanding of the meaning (Eger, 1993). To help students approach science textbooks in the manner of hermeneutics, we use a writing activity called “reflective writing” in a new style of introductory physics labs called “labatorials” at Mount Royal University. Students interpret the concepts related to each lab and reflect their own understanding of them before doing experiments. We have studied students’ perspectives on reflective writing and labatorial activities. We used the disciplined-focused epistemological beliefs questionnaire (DFEBQ) developed by Hofer (2000) to find out whether the combinations of these activities can change students’ beliefs of knowledge and learning. This presentation will describe the activities and present data showing students’ perspectives on them as well as changes in their epistemological beliefs.
Special Issue: Doing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Measuring Systematic Changes to Teaching and Improvements in Learning
There is a new resource for SoTL that has just been published by New Directions for Teaching and Learning:
The book is written primarily by psychologists and, as you might expect from the title, they define SoTL as “an instructor asking questions about the impact of his/her teaching on students’ learning in an individual course”. This is a narrow definition, however they clearly and thoroughly address research design considerations for these types of studies (there is, however, an absence of theory). The chapters on designing SoTL studies take an empirical and quantitative perspective, addressing issues such as construct and internal validity, different types of comparisons (between participants, within participants, pre-test/post-test) and different experimental and quasi-experimental research designs . For any faculty member planning to do such a comparison study to assess a teaching intervention (or “treatment”, to use their language), Chapters 2, 3 & 4 are excellent resources to help you design your study.
Bartsch, R. A. (2013), Designing SoTL Studies—Part I: Validity. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2013: 17–33. doi: 10.1002/tl.20073
*If you’re new to SoTL and are considering an experimental design for your project, you may also want to read Fallacies of SoTL: Rethinking How We Conduct Our Research, Chapter 8 in The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning In and Across the Disciplines (I have a copy in my office if you’d like to borrow it.)
Back to NDTL: There are also two very useful chapters on writing which are quite applicable to a range of disciplines:
The Chapter on “Navigating the IRB” (Institutional Review Board) is quite American and there are better resources available for our Canadian context (see my summary here).
There is also a Chapter on Faculty Development Centres and the Role of SoTL, and I was happy to note a shout-out to MRU’s Nexen Scholar’s Program!!
Psychology colloquium – What are you looking at?
The next Psych colloquium will feature a presentation on the applications and potentials of their Tobii eye tracking software. **This could be useful for some SoTL questions!**
Deember 10, 2013
1:00-2:00 pm
EA 1031
http://psychtalksmru.blogspot.ca/2013/11/what-are-you-looking-at-want-to-make.html
Teaching with Tablets for Increased Student Engagement and Accountability
Hi everyone,
Please see the following announcement from the Chemistry Department and Brett McCollum:
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The 2013-2014 academic year marks the 5th year of the Chemistry and Biology Speaker Series! The Department of Chemistry would like to invite you to our first colloquium of the Fall 2013 semester,
Brett McCollum, PhD, will be speaking on “Teaching with tablets for increased student engagement and responsibility“.
Dr. McCollum received his PhD from Simon Fraser University in 2008, investigating chemical reaction mechanisms of organic and organometallic compounds using a light “isotope” of hydrogen, muonium. In addition to his research at TRIUMF, Canada’s National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics, he has been engaged in the systematic investigation of educational practices and the use of technology in chemistry. McCollum is a current Nexen Scholar with the MRU Institute of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and a Apple Distinguished Educator.
“Touchscreens are doing for education what books, chalk, computers, and calculators have done in the past. They are opening the doors of education, they are allowing us to acquire, create, and share knowledge faster than ever before. What we’re really doing here is building on the strengths of the traditional teaching model and modernizing it for technology available today that students are well-adapted to use.”
Date: Monday, September 23, 2013
Time: 1:00-1:45pm
Place: B-341
We invite you to join us for the best 45 minutes of your day.
Brett McCollum, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Apple Distinguished Educator, Nexen Scholar
Department Chemistry
Short- and long-term effects of cumulative finals on student learning
The following are excerpts from an interesting study which was recently highlighted in the Teaching Professor:
Khanna, M. M., Badura Brack, A. S., and Finken, L. L. (2013). Short- and long-term effects of cumulative finals on student learning. Teaching of Psychology, 40 (3), 175-182.
Mean scores on content exams versus a cumulative final were compared in introductory psych sections and upper-division psychology sections. The finding: “[C]lasses taking cumulative finals performed reliably better than classes who had noncumulative finals.” (p. 177)
Retention of course material was also measured using online content exams for courses taken one, two, and three semesters previously. “Regardless of type of course, students with cumulative finals did better on departmental content tests than students in courses with noncumulative exams. …” (p. 180)
“As a result of these findings, we believe using cumulative finals improves student learning, and we encourage instructors to utilize cumulative finals in their courses… [E]ven in our optimal study condition (immediate content exam administration in upper-division courses with cumulative finals) students only answered 82% of the content exam items correctly. In the worst condition (18 month time lag for introductory psychology courses with noncumulative finals), students retained just over half of the important information from introductory psychology.” (p. 180)
resources on starting higher education research
The field of engineering education research is active and quite well established. There are a number of resources written for engineers who want to get into education research, and they would be quite useful for anyone thinking about doing SoTL but not having an education or qualitative research background. Let me know what you think of them!
Planning, Implementing, and Reporting Quantitative Research in Education: A User’s Guide
Qualitative Research Basics: A Guide for Engineering Educators
A Guidebook on Conceptual Frameworks for Research in Engineering Education
For a more comprehensive overview of educational research methods, the following is an often-recommended resource. I have a copy if my office if you’d like to borrow it.
Do you have any resources from education research in your discipline? Please share!
– Janice
using Think Alouds in “Calculations and Expectations: How engineering students describe three-dimensional forces”
Miller-Young, Janice (2013) “Calculations and Expectations: How engineering students describe three-dimensional forces,” The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Vol. 4: Iss. 1, Article 4.
This paper resulted from my original project in the 2009 Nexen Scholars program. I am posting it here because I thought the think-aloud protocol was particularly useful, and others may want to consider using it in a study.
The purpose of this inquiry was to determine the difficulties students in a first-year engineering class experience in learning to visualize 3D statics problems from 2D drawings. The main data source was think-alouds using two visualization problems. Think-alouds are a type of verbal protocol and are a mainstay in cognitive psychology. They are used to infer mental models by observing students while they are actually engaged in mental activities. In short, participants are asked to talk out loud about what they are thinking, while engaged in a task which could normally be carried out alone. One advantage of this type of interview protocol is that students’ thinking is captured in “real time”, rather than a retrospective reflection. However, the logistics of conducting and recording think-aloud protocols are a little more complicated if you do it during the semester, as I did.
The data from the think-aloud interviews was triangulated with data from individual course work, and gave me new insights into the types of visualization problems students initially struggle with in my class. See the paper for more details and references.
Honourable mention for April McGrath, “Students’ Experiences Learning Statistics” poster at STLHE 2013
Congratulations to April, whose poster entitled “Students’ Experiences Learning Statistics” won an honourable mention at the 2013 Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) Conference. The abstract from the conference can be found here and is copied below:
Statistics is a core requirement for majors in different disciplines and pedagogical techniques developed to help students learn statistical concepts are valuable. Given the anxiety and self-efficacy struggles of many students when learning statistics (Onwuegbuzie & Wilson, 2003), it can be a challenging topic for instructors to teach. Research has focused on exploring the effectiveness of various pedagogical techniques to improve the learning of statistics (Christopher & Marek, 2009; Lesser & Pearl, 2008; Neumann, Hood, & Neumann, 2009; Segrist & Pawlow, 2007). One yet unexplored possibility is that the interaction between an instructor and student during office hours, followed by reflection on the part of the student, may also be a powerful pedagogical tool to help students succeed in learning statistics. Psychology students enrolled in two sections of an Introductory Statistics course volunteered for a research study (N = 45) that sought to determine the influence that office hour attendance and learning reflections can have on students’ statistics anxiety and their learning. As part of the requirement for this course, students attended one meeting with the professor and completed a learning reflection and study plan. The types of questions raised by students during their meetings and the themes found in their learning reflections will be presented. Student reaction to the scheduled meetings was positive and during meetings several participants expressed anxiety about the course and math in general. In line with past research, a negative relationship between anxiety and performance was found.
References
Christopher, C. N., & Marek, P. (2009). A palatable introduction to and demonstration of statistical main effects and interactions. Teaching of Psychology, 36, 130-133.
Lesser, L. M., & Pearl, D. K. (2008). Functional fun in statistics teaching: Resources, research and recommendations. Journal of Statistics Education, 16, 1-10.
Neumann, D. L., Hood, M., & Neumann, M. M. (2009). Statistics? You must be joking. Journal of Statistics Education, 17, 1-16.
Onwuegbuzie, A. J. & Wilson, V. A. (2003). Statistics anxiety: Nature, etiology, antecedents, effects, and treatments – a comprehensive review of the literature. Teaching in Higher Education, 8, 195-209.
Segrist, D. J., & Pawlow, L. A. (2007). The mixer: Introducing the concept of factor analysis. Teaching of Psychology, 34, 121-123.