MRU Institute for SoTL

Developing a SoTL Question

These video presentations from an October SoTL Exchange presentation at MRU have been waiting for a website redesign to find a permanent home, but in the meantime, you can also find them here!   In this series, 6 SoTL scholars talk about what got them interested in their question, their data sources and/or methodology, and their findings and impact, including how their inquiry informed their teaching.

Part 1:  Janice introduces the presenters and a brief description of the Taxonomy of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Questions.

 http://youtu.be/aCu8SnbPRKs

Part 2:  Glen Ryland, Assistant Professor, General Education discusses how he developed and analyzed his SoTL question about what sources and strategies students draw upon as they are developing as academic writers in general education.

Part 3: Margy MacMillan, Professor, Library discusses her project about student reading of scholarly articles, how she used a phenomenographic approach to analyze how students make connections between the text and their existing knowledge, and what she learned about their reading.
Part 4:  April McGrath, Assistant Professor, Psychology describes how she used an experimental design to see how a “learning check-in” (structured one-on-one appointment) could increase student engagement and success in a research methods class, and also how she uncovered useful information about the course topics that students were struggling with.
Part 5:  Melanie Rathburn, Associate Professor, Biology and General Education talks about how she investigated strategies to reduce student anxiety about science and math in her general education courses using surveys and reflective writing, and how she determined that making the content relevant to the students and giving them opportunities to reflect, were important strategies.
Part 6:  Janice Miller-Young, Director, Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, discusses her insights about how students visualize three-dimensional structures from two-dimensional textbook diagrams, which she gained through using a think-aloud interview protocol triangulated with data from students’ coursework.
Share

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.

Share