Reaching Students What Research Says About Effective Instruction in Undergraduate Science and Engineering (2015) / Chapter Skim
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4 Designing Instruction
4 Designing Instruction
Pages 89-120
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The Pedagogy in Action Web portal of the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) ,1 for example, offers descriptions, course activities, and other information and materials for more than 50 such teaching strategies.
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These goals include general out comes, derived from research on how students learn, that apply across science and engineering disciplines, as well as more specific goals for a particular course or program of study. In engineering, the accreditation criteria for degree-granting programs devel oped by ABET, the accrediting agency, specify 11 general student learning outcomes.
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You may need to combine more than one strategy to meet the specific learning goals you expect your students to achieve. An Emphasis on Student-Centered Instruction The chemistry curriculum developed by Vicente Talanquer and John Pollard, chemistry professors at the University of Arizona, encompasses several of the out comes listed above from the NRC STEM workshop.
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He and Pollard began thinking about how to transform the curriculum and adapt the Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) approach, in which students work in small groups, to their own large introductory courses with enrollments of roughly 300 students.
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Students is a Let's Apply task from the module on analyzing were given data about Titan and asked to answer molecular structure: Designing Instruction 93
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took an introductory course with the redesigned Carly Schnoebelen,c who took Pollard's course curriculum get better grades in advanced chemistry as a freshman in 2009–2010 and became an under- courses than those taught with a traditional curricu graduate preceptor in the course the next year, lum. "That has become a powerful tool for changing found the active learning approach "absolutely people's minds," he adds.
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As noted in the 2012 NRC report on DBER, these approaches include these characteristics drawn from evidence about how people learn: • More time spent engaging students in active learning during class • Frequent formative assessment of students' levels of conceptual understanding • Attention to students' metacognitive strategies In this type of instruction, students are expected to be actively and cognitively engaged in their coursework. Rather than being told what they should learn, students often do activities designed to help them discover key concepts or draw their own conclusions before the instructor explains a concept.
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In any case, you can implement active learning without devoting the entire class to cooperative work, or flipping the classroom, or eliminating your lectures. Less sweeping approaches can be effective, as explained in the next section.
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Designing Instruction 97
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In Peer Instruction, the instructor gives a short presentation focused on a particular topic and then asks all students in the class a multiple-choice question, or ConcepTest, designed to reveal common student misunderstandings about a central concept related to that topic. Students are given one minute to arrive at an individual answer and report their responses to the instructor; often students respond with clickers, but this can also be done with colored cards or other means.
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"This is a great way for people to add an interactive component in inadequate spaces," says Mazur.2 "Not many people may have the opportunity to redesign both the space and the course." The case study in Chapter 2 of David McConnell's geosciences course at North Carolina State University describes an effective way to implement ConcepTests with peer interaction in a large enrollment course; hundreds of ConcepTests in geosciences are available online (Science Education Resource Center, n.d.)
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smaller than the force required to hold brick A in place. Correct answer: 2 Beth Simon,3 a computer science and engineering instructor at the University of California, San Diego, organizes her 80-minute classes around a series of four to six multiple-choice clicker questions, administered using Mazur's model of indi vidual answers, peer discussion, and a final vote.
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In an approach called Just-in-Time-Teaching with Interactive Learning (JiTTIL) , Stephen Krause and his engineering colleagues at Arizona State University and elsewhere have expanded on this basic idea by adding interactive classroom exercises and various forms of fast and frequent feedback (Krause, Kelly, and Baker, 2012b)
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But then after you've been in the class for a while, it's all the knowledge you've acquired in class," says Krause.4 "Then there's the previous day's prior knowledge, which is critical, especially if there's a progression of three to five classes for a particular topic." Evaluations of students taught with the JiTTIL pedagogy show greater gains in conceptual understanding than those in traditionally taught classes, as measured by the Materials Concept Inventory. The percentage of students who persist in the 4 Interview, July 9, 2013.
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. The most recent iteration of this pedagogy developed by Krause and other colleagues uses an even wider range of cyber-enabled tools to generate rapid and frequent feedback about student learning and includes more active learning exer cises (Krause et al., 2013b)
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Collaborative learning assumes that students learn best by construct ing knowledge within a social context (see Chapter 3) and encourages students to coalesce into a "learning community." While collaborative learning, like coopera tive learning, is intended to foster interdependence among students, it is less struc tured than cooperative learning and does not necessarily combine individual and collective accountability (Smith, 2011)
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Over the years, this technique has been the most popular cooperative learning strategy among participants in the On the Cutting Edge workshops in course design offered by Tewksbury and colleagues. As the example below demonstrates, the jigsaw technique emphasizes both indi vidual accountability and achievement of group goals.
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the Middle East, one of the topics stu dents study is the impact of climate changes on the development of Egyptian civilization When the students arrive in class, they are divided around 3000 B.C. She uses the jigsaw technique as a into four teams of roughly four people per team.
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began in college chemistry departments but has since been adopted by instructors in a variety of disciplines in numerous postsecondary institutions and high schools. Students in a POGIL classroom learn through a guided inquiry process in which they are pre sented with data or information, followed by leading questions designed to guide them in formulating their own conclusions (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning, 2014a)
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The activity also includes "extension questions," which require deeper thinking and might be used for homework or as an extra activity for groups that move quickly. Designing Instruction 109
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. Cooperative problem solving, an instructional approach that draws from research on cooperative learning, was originally developed for physics as a way to encourage students to develop expertise in problem solving while discouraging their tendency to use novice strategies (Heller and Heller, 2010)
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Groups are presented with contextual situations and asked to define the problem, decide what skills and resources are necessary to investigate Designing Instruction 111
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PBL activities can take up most of the teaching and learning time in a classroom or can be combined with a lecture. Although the most striking thing about the SCALE-UP (Student-Centered Active Learning Environment with Upside-down Pedagogies)
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Some of these approaches include laboratory experiences aligned with scientific practices in which, for example, students record observations, develop and test explanations, refine existing models, and build and refine their own models of a scientific process by experimenting. Another such approach is Modeling Instruction, developed by Eric Brewe and colleagues in the physics department at Florida International University.
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"If we think science is about building models, then we have to focus attention on getting students into authentic practices," says Eric Brewe,a who was instrumental in designing the modeling curric ulum. The "cookbook" method of doing lab experiments fails to help students see the con nection between their experi ment and the theory behind it, Eric Brewe engages in model building with his class at FIU.
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During his classes, which meet three times a Studies of Modeling Instruction indicate that week for two hours at a time, Modeling Instruction students taught through this method outperform students work in small groups in a studio-format those taught in lecture-format classes, with benclassroom with whiteboards and tables instead of efits for Hispanic and white students and for male desks. The longer class period has made it possible and female students (Brewe et al., 2010)
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If you asked questions about understanding, they turned out to have the same problems as the other students." This led McDermott to begin documenting common student difficulties and researching the impact of instructional strategies to confront them. Typically, tutorials target critical concepts and are designed to have students "elicit, confront, and resolve" common difficulties in learning, says McDermott.
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You likely became fasci nated by something you saw or did that opened your mind to bigger ideas, such as your first view through a microscope of the amoebas that lived in a water puddle 10 Interview, April 12, 2013. Designing Instruction 117
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A unique undergraduate engineering program in the Iron Range mining region of northern Minnesota uses authentic engineering design projects to devel op students' understanding of core competencies in engineering and professional engineering practices. 118 Reaching Students
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Designing Instruction 119
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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 Pedagogy in Action Web portal of the Science Education Resource Center (SERC)
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