Reaching Students What Research Says About Effective Instruction in Undergraduate Science and Engineering (2015) / Chapter Skim
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5 Assessing and Adapting
5 Assessing and Adapting
Pages 121-152
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From page 121... ...
She had also begun to develop lecture tutorials in geosciences with her colleague Karen Kortz and was using them in her classes. With her move to a new community college with a high ly diverse student body, Smay wanted to fine-tune some of her teaching strategies.
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From page 122... ...
The second is the effective use of technol ogy, which has become commonplace in science and engineering classrooms. A third issue, the redesign of classroom spaces to support active learning, is by no means a prerequisite; many instructors have implemented research-based strategies quite well in whatever learning spaces are available, from large traditional lecture halls to smaller rooms with fixed desks.
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From page 123... ...
Formative assessments also serve an important purpose for students by providing them with information they can use to gauge their own learning and adjust how they study. Summative assessments, which evaluate students' performance against a standard or benchmark at the end of a unit, in midterm, or at the end of a semes ter, continue to have a place in research-based instruction.
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From page 124... ...
. If you want your students want them to tell you back." But in a classroom that to actually get better at something, you need stresses process skills, critical thinking, problem solv to find ways to provide them with construc tive formative assessment that is independent a Except where noted, the information in this case study comes from an interview with Richard Moog, May 1, 2013.
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From page 125... ...
Students learning activity while the instructor facilitates. To receive no points for a correct true or false answer; explore the concept of atomic number, for example, instead, credit is based solely on their explanation students analyze diagrams of atoms that identify of their reasoning.
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From page 126... ...
. A similar approach that used Peer Instruction with clicker questions in four introductory computer science courses reduced the student failure rate by 67 percent (Porter, Bailey-Lee, and Simon, 2013)
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From page 127... ...
In his physics classes at FIU, Eric Brewe6 also espouses the principle that "assessment should reflect what you're teaching." In addition to including questions about content that prospective physics majors would be expected to learn, he assesses how students use and interpret models or representational tools. And because he teaches an integrated laboratory and lecture course, he also asks exam questions that require students to use some type of lab apparatus.
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From page 128... ...
For for mative classroom assessments, they use clicker questions and tutorials to pinpoint and address student difficulties. At the end of the course, they use a standard vali dated post-test and faculty interviews to assess student learning and evaluate the impact of the changes.
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From page 129... ...
ConcepTests, discussed in Chapters 2 and 4, are short formative assessments of a single concept. Student writing as formative assessment Many science and engineering instructors use short writing assignments to assess students' understanding and to develop their metacognitive skills.
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From page 130... ...
Here are a few examples of prompts for five-minute writing assignments that Prather uses in his classes and offers in his professional develop ment workshops on interactive learning (Prather, 2010) : • Explain how light from the Sun and light from Earth's surface interact with the atmosphere to produce the Greenhouse Effect.
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From page 131... ...
These approaches require students to direct their collaborative skills toward an end result that "counts" -- just as professionals collaborate on work products -- and enables instructors to assess collaborative skills as well as individual knowledge. As students work together on assessment questions or problems, they must defend their reasoning and listen to others, so the assessment itself becomes a group learning activity.
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From page 132... ...
It's really kind of satisfying to watch them engage with each other. If you think about it, it becomes an active learning environment where they're discussing and debat ing and trying to convince each other of what the right answer is." While the few students who might be reluctant to "give away" their answers to others are not required to talk during this phase, most students a Except where noted, the information in this case study comes from interviews with Mark Leckie, March 22, 2013, and Richard Yuretich, April 4, 2013.
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From page 133... ...
In her biology classes at Michigan State University, Diane Ebert-May9 bases her exam questions on daily learning objectives. The exams are aligned with the types of activities students do in class, such as analyzing real data, developing welcome the opportunity.
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Robin Wright10 and her University of Minnesota colleagues who teach active learning biology courses based on the Student-Centered Active Learning Environment with Upside-down Pedagogies (SCALE-UP) model (see Chapter 4)
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From page 135... ...
In addition to assessing academic learning and cognitive processes, some instructors also assess the affective domain -- students' attitudes, beliefs, and expectations -- which can influence their motivation to study science or engineering and their performance in these disciplines. An awareness of these characteristics can help instructors adjust their teaching to improve student learning, reduce attri tion, and keep students in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)
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From page 136... ...
, he had already seen earlier teaching innovations come and go -- in some cases because they lacked sufficient evidence to demonstrate their effectiveness to colleagues and to students who complained about the changes. Belcher recognized that having good assessment data could help increase the staying power of an innovation like TEAL, which uses media-rich technology to help students visualize and hypothesize about conceptual models of electromag netic phenomena (Dori and Belcher, 2005)
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From page 137... ...
In addition, technologies for learning, when used well, can advance research-based instruction through their capacity to engage students, facilitate interaction, and enable students to use hands-on approaches to explore scientific phenomena. Many technological tools Assessing and Adapting 137
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The 2012 NRC report on DBER concludes that technologies for learning hold promise for improving undergraduate science and engineering but with this important proviso: Research on the use of various learning technologies suggests that technology can enhance students' learning, retention of knowledge, and attitudes about science learning. However, the presence of learning technologies alone does not improve outcomes.
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From page 139... ...
tions and which tools work best with his teaching In later versions of the curriculum, students approach and student learning objectives. watch videos of experiments for about half of the "You have to have your own pedagogical goals class period and do hands-on experiments for the and other goals for engaging the students, and that other half.
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From page 140... ...
Whether this behavior whiteboards is a valuable record of their thinking, stemmed from a desire to have a useful and clear but this record is lost when the whiteboard is erased. photo archive or from an effort to avoid embarrass Price and his colleagues hit upon a technological ment, the act of photographing the whiteboards solution to this problem, which they tried out in an "initiated a final round of instructor feedback and introductory physics course for biology majors.
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From page 141... ...
He suggests that instructors think beyond According to an evaluation by Price and colwhat a particular technology enables them to do and leagues (2013a) , students taught with the Learning also consider "How is it going to restructure the roles Physics curriculum learned significant physics content of the different people in the classroom?
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From page 142... ...
Clickers Using clicker questions is often the first step that instructors take toward a more interactive style of teaching. But "a clicker is a technology, not a pedagogy," as pointed out by Alex Rudolph,13 a physics and astronomy professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and an experienced clicker user.
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• Give students time to think about the clicker question on their own and then discuss with their peers. • Listen in on the student discussions about clicker questions in order to under stand how students think, and address student misconceptions on the spot.
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From page 144... ...
the students were awake." Another common failing occurs when a large percentage of students answer incorrectly and the instructor quickly gives the correct answer and moves on; a better approach is to give students time to discuss and rethink their answers, and then to follow up with additional clarifications if necessary. Simulations, animations, and interactive demonstrations Other popular learning technologies used in science and engineering courses include simulations, animations, and interactive demonstrations.
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From page 145... ...
Abraham, Varghese, and Tang (2010) have also studied the influence of animated and static visualizations on conceptual understanding and found that two- and three-dimensional animations of molecular structures and processes appear to improve student learning of stereochemistry, which concerns the spatial arrangement of atoms within molecules.
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From page 146... ...
These interactive simulations enable students to make connections between real-life physical phenomena and the underlying scientific concepts. The PhET simula tions are based on research findings about how students learn in science disciplines and have been extensively test ed and evaluated for educational effectiveness, usability, and student engagement (University of Colorado Boulder, 2013)
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The simulations can be integrated into class instruction in various ways, says Perkins. She often recommends that instructors start by allowing students to explore the simulation on their own for a few minutes, which helps students gain some familiarity with how it works and generate their own questions.
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From page 148... ...
The process encourages students "to make predictions, discuss their predictions with each other, test their predictions by doing real activities, and then draw conclusions," says Laws.16 In addition to directly observing real phenomena, students in Workshop Physics use computers to collect, graphically display, analyze, and model real data with greater speed and efficiency than they otherwise could. Recently, Laws and a group of colleagues have created and are evaluating Web-based, interactive video vignettes that dem onstrate physics topics like Newton's third law.17 In many undergraduate geosciences courses, students are using Google Earth to support hands-on projects, create maps and models, measure features, organize geospatial data, and accomplish many other purposes (Science Education Research Center, 2013)
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From page 149... ...
Early examples of redesigning learning spaces in conjunction with reforms in pedagogy include the Workshop Physics approach described above and Studio Physics, an integrated lecture/laboratory model developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1993. The best known example is the SCALE-UP approach, which as of 2013 was being implemented at 250 sites in the United States, including North Carolina State University, MIT, the University of Minnesota, Old Dominion University, and many other institutions.
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From page 150... ...
and interaction between students and faculty. Robert Beichner,a an NC State physics professor who was frustrated with the stadium seating, wooden chairs, and wobbly paddle-shaped desks in his institution's lecture halls, approached his depart ment head about designing an optimum space for the types of research-based strategies he wanted to use.
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From page 151... ...
At the University of Minnesota, another institution that has adopted or adapted the SCALE-UP approach, the biology department's plan to transform a course using an active learning approach coincided with the Office of Classroom Management's plan to remodel a learning space. The biology department offered to combine one of its classrooms with an adjacent room controlled by Classroom Management in order to create a larger classroom patterned after NC State‘s SCALE-UP design, says Minnesota biology professor Robin Wright.b The result was the creation of the university's first remodeled active learning classroom.
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From page 152... ...
Resources and Further Reading Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering (National Research Council, 2012) Chapter 6: Instructional Strategies Interactive physics simulations http://phet.colorado.edu Interactive video vignettes in physics http://ivv.rit.edu Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment (National Research Council, 2001)
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