the advantages of stable teams

Two recently published articles (Walker et al 2017, Zhang et al 2017) provide evidence that the Team-Based Learning (TBL) practice of keeping learning teams stable throughout the course produces improved student learning outcomes than if the teams are made ad hoc each time group work occurs during class.

The study by Walker et al (2017) is from Kentucky. I like that this study does not spend time on establishing whether or not cooperative learning works but simply cites the existing evidence. Instead, this study is focusing solely on the impact of stable vs shifting teams on the efficacy of cooperative learning. Their results suggest that stable teams are more effective in producing better learning outcomes. The student population being studied was a freshman undergraduate sociology course. What is interesting is that it is not only the stability of the team that produces improved student learning outcomes but also the time on task similar to what the study from Mazur found below to explain why females had greater gains than males. In the Walker et al (2017) study, there were no differences in the first term comparing stable vs shifting teams. There was, however, a significant difference in the second semester when time spent discussing material in teams was increased (the amount of time viewing a film was reduced). Note that although this study involved large enrollment classes (150-175 students) the study was conducted in the tutorials (recitation sessions) that were smaller subsets of the class lead by teaching assistants (TA) rather than faculty. Also, note that the one TA choose to shift teams due to pedagogical beliefs that all students deserved to have a chance to work in a high-functioning team. In contrast, the other TA created stable teams based on their reading of the TBL literature which suggests that stability develops stronger relationships which enhance the learning environment.  I have some issues with the introduction in the Walker et al paper (2017): they make many blanket statements about the typical university student experience (large classes, relatively unengaged) without citing any evidence that this is in fact, the case. I am sure it is the case, but in a peer-reviewed publication, I expect the evidence to be cited that this is true.

Mazur's paper studied the effect of peer instruction (PI) on science students' beliefs in physics and towards learning physics. The effects of a stable team environment in the PI groups was also investigated. Students' attitudes were measured using the Colorado Learning Attitudes Toward Science Survey. The students were at a university in China. The results indicate that PI improved students' attitudes and that this increase was greater when the PI teams were stable throughout the term. It seems to me that the study was undertaken in order to determine why many studies indicate that students' attitudes toward physics in undergraduate physics courses deteriorate becoming more novice like. This is similar to what I have seen in my 1st-year biology course with the Learning Environment Preferences survey (paper in preparation) when students are not assigned the task of developing their learning philosophy. I found Mazur's results interesting because, in both of my courses, PI instruction was occurring in the form of TBL. In the class in which a learning philosophy was not assigned students' cognitive complexity index decreased (becoming more novice like). Zhang et al (2017) also determined a gender effect in which females seemed to make greater gains than males in the PI courses. Further study suggested that this may be a result of females discussing to a greater extent during team discussions of the in-class questions set by the instructor. The only criticism of the study that I have is that in the variable team PI group, the researchers are assuming that the students formed teams randomly during each class. However, it is possible that students may sit in the same place in class from day to day and sit with their friends. Thus, although team stability was not enforced, neither was team variability. 

Regardless, these are interesting results and provide evidence for what many TBL practitioners have observed in their courses: Over time, stable learning teams become more effective at learning.

Resources

Michaelsen, L. K., Watson, W. E., & Black, R. H. (1989). A realistic test of individual versus group consensus decision making. Journal of Applied Psychology, 74(5), 834–839.

Sibley J. 2016. Using Teams Properly. LearnTBL.

Walker, A., Bush, A., Sanchagrin, K., & Holland, J. (2017). “We’ve Got to Keep Meeting Like This”: A Pilot Study Comparing Academic Performance in Shifting-Membership Cooperative Groups Versus Stable-Membership Cooperative Groups in an Introductory-Level Lab. College Teaching, 65(1), 9–16.

Zhang, P., Ding, L., & Mazur, E. (2017). Peer Instruction in introductory physics: A method to bring about positive changes in students’ attitudes and beliefs. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 113(1), 10104.

pre-testing and expectations in team-based learning

Last Friday I gave my 2nd-year biochemistry class its first readiness assurance test or RAT in team-based learning (TBL) terminology. It was a mix of new material (amino acids) and material they should have learned from their pre-requisite chemistry courses on pH and buffers. Typically, TBL RATs aim to be reading quizzes to encourage students to prepare for practicing to use their newly learned knowledge in class in subsequent classes in what TBL terms Apps (for applications). The design of RATs aims to produce a class average of 70%. My average last week was 49%.

So, what happened? Interestingly, when I analyzed the marks, it appears to me that students did better on the new material: recognizing amino acid structure and calculating pI of amino acids. What students had the most difficulty with was their understanding of their prior learning on pH and buffers. This surprised me and so I checked with my chemistry colleagues and they suggested that my questions on pH and buffers were more conceptual and that first-year chemistry courses tend to focus on calculating pH. In addition, my chemistry colleagues reminded me that our students prefer to plug and play (calculate) rather than think. I don't think our campus is unusual in this regard - thinking is difficult work!

But it does raise an interesting issue for the implementation of TBL as a teaching and learning strategy. My understanding of TBL practice suggests that RATs should focus more on the conceptual than on calculation style questions. As a result, this should promote discussion of the questions during the team phase of the two-stage style of testing that is inherent in RATs. In readiness assurance tests, students first complete the test (10 MCQs in my classes) individually and then repeat the same test as a team using IF-AT cards so that students receive immediate feedback about their understanding. It is great at immediately revealing misconceptions. I have been using this technique since 2011 and can attest that it works well.

However, there does seem to be an apparent tension in the Readiness Assurance Process of Team-Based Learning. The RAP is what makes TBL a flipped classroom teaching strategy. In the RAP, students are assigned pages to read from the textbook (or article, or podcast, or whatever students need to initially prepare themselves to learn in class), and then during the first class of the course module/topic, students are administered a RAT in the two-stage testing style I described above. The RAP is intended to encourage students to do their pre-class preparation and hold them accountable for that preparation. It is not intended to be the end of teaching and learning for the particular course module, but rather is supposed to mark the beginning of teaching and learning. Thus, the RAT should be considered to be, in essence, a reading quiz. It is suggested in the TBL literature that a typical RAT could be constructed based on the topic headings and subheading in the assigned textbook chapter. However, the TBL literature also suggests that the questions should generate discussion and debate during the team portion of the RAT. What I have difficulty in implementing TBL in my classes, is that there seems to be a tension between producing a RAT that is a reading quiz vs producing a RAT that generates discussion and debate. Typically, a reading quiz is designed fairly low on Bloom's taxonomy of learning (mostly questions testing recall). In contrast, questions that foster debate and discussion need to move beyond simple right/wrong answers. Hence, it seems that there is a tension inherent in the design of RATs: they should be designed as reading quizzes that are able to foster debate.

I have a hard time constructing these sorts of tests and I believe that is what produced the poor class average on my first RAT of the term in my biochemistry class last week. What I thought were simple recall questions based upon what students had learned in prior courses, ended up exposing some fundamental misconception about their learning. I guess that is what RATs are supposed to do. I was just surprised how many misconceptions students had about pH and buffers given they have been learning this since high school. On the other hand, if you don't use it, you lose it. And I suspect that for many of my biochemistry students they have not had to consider pH and buffers for over a year or two.

The way I handled the situation is that I made the RAT out of 9 instead of 10 (there was one question that no one answered correctly - a couple of teams got it correct on their second attempt) and I have also informed students that I will not include their lowest RAT result when I calculate their final grade for the course. Hopefully, that is sufficient to press the reset button so that students feel like they are not stumbling right out of the gate in the first week of classes.

Resources

Dihoff, R., Brosvic, G. M., ML, M. L. E., & Cook, M. J. (2004). Provision of feedback during preparation for academic testing: learning is enhanced by immediate but not delayed feedback. The Psychological Record, 54(2), 207–231.

Haide, P., Kubitz, K., & McCormack, W. T. (2014). Analysis of the team-based learning literature: TBL comes of age. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3&4), 303–333.

Metoyer, S. K., Miller, S. T., Mount, J., & Westmoreland, S. L. (2014). Examples from the trenches: Improving student learning in the sciences using team-based learning. Journal of College Science Teaching, 43(5), 40–47.

the influence of TBL in my teaching

Last term was a gong show for me. Not that things didn't go well - they did go well. I simply chose to implement or tweak too many things in my courses. Thus the reason for so few posts (two!?) last term. In the Fall term, I taught three courses: a 4th-year course (History & Theory of Biology), a third-year course (Biochemistry: Intermediary Metabolism), and a second-year course (Molecular Cell Biology).

The history and theory course I have been teaching since the late-1990s and it chugs along just fine. I have always taught this course with the students taking an active role in the teaching of the course. I hadn't realized when I began teaching it in 1998 that I was trying to implement active learning. In this course, students are assigned journal articles from the history and philosophy of biology and are required to write a two-page double-spaced response to the particular day's article in preparation for class. In addition, a student is designated as the seminar leader and leads the initial portion of the class in a consideration of the implications of the article in light of what has been discussed prior in the course and also in terms of their own experience with biology in their previous three years of our biology program. The remaining half of each class consists of me mopping up the discussion and ensuring that what I consider to be the salient connections are discussed by the entire class.

This worked ok for a few years until the class began to grow in size from an initial enrollment in the 1990s of five or six students to now typically 18-22 students. One of the things I found was that the student-led seminars became really boring for the class because student seminar leaders were simply presenting what students had already read. So in the mid-2000s I began asking student seminar leaders to direct a class conversation rather than doing a formal presentation. This worked until the class became larger than 15 students. At that point, it became difficult for students to manage the class conversation.

A few years ago, I began implementing Team-Based Learning in my courses and this experience influenced the structure of my history and theory course. What I learned from implementing TBL in other courses is that student conversations work well in groups of 4-7. Smaller or larger than that and the conversation suffers: students are either too shy or there are too many voices. So, in the 2010s I began splitting my classes into groups for the student-lead seminars. After a couple of iterations, I realized that it is most effective if the teams are stable throughout the term. This is such a simple tweak with its effectiveness established in the TBL literature and I really don't understand why I didn't start doing that sooner. This made a huge difference in the quality of the student-led conversations resulting from students being more comfortable with their team-mates and also as a result of the peer-pressure to produce a good seminar for team-mates. In addition, the stress of leading a seminar diminished because it was a presentation to the team rather than to the entire class.

I have not completely implemented the TBL structure into this course: it does not have RATs or formal Apps. But it follows the spirit of how a TBL course is delivered: The teams are randomly constructed by me transparently with the students on the first day of class; although there are no RATs, students are held accountable for their pre-class preparation through the required written responses to the assigned reading; although there are no formal Apps in the TBL sense, I do have students consider my questions after the student-lead seminars to ensure that what I consider to be the salient points are raised for students before the end of the class.

My friend and colleague Paula Marentette who also uses TBL in her classes and was one of the people who suggested that I try implementing TBL in my own courses; she explained to me a few years ago that for her, implementing TBL in her courses transformed her approach to teaching such that even now when she teaches a course without TBL, she finds that she still uses elements of TBL in all of her classes. I find the same to be happening with me. For many people, TBL is too constraining for them. For me, I have found it to be a great structure in which to begin implementing active learning and learner-centered teaching in my courses. As these approaches to teaching and learning have soaked into by being, I am finding that I may no longer need to formally implement TBL in my courses and instead pick and choose those elements to use when the need arises for my students' learning.

Resources

Haave, N. (2014). Team-based learning: A high-impact educational strategy. National Teaching and Learning Forum, 23(4), 1–5.

Farland, M. Z., Sicat, B. L., Franks, A. S., Pater, K. S., Medina, M. S., & Persky, A. M. (2013). Best Practices for Implementing Team-Based Learning in Pharmacy Education. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 77(8), 177.

Wieman, C. E. (2014). Large-scale comparison of science teaching methods sends clear message. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(23), 8319–20.

Weimer, M. (2013). Learner-centered teaching: Roots and origins. In Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice (2nd ed., pp. 3–27). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint.

ACUBE 2016, Milwaukee, WI, Oct 21-22

Dr. Annie Prud’homme-Généreux was the keynote speaker for ACUBE 2016 and is the reason I received the TLEF PD grant from the UofA. She is one of the founding faculty of Quest University. I wanted to hear what she had to say about teaching biochemistry and molecular biology in the Quest block system because Augustana is beginning its hybrid program in 2017 in which the first three weeks of the term consist of one course (one course enrolled by students and one course taught by faculty) with the subsequent 11 weeks being a little more typical in which students enrol in 4 courses and faculty teach two or three courses (dependent upon whether or not they taught a course during the initial three week block). I was also interested to hear how Annie used Team-Based Learning to teach her biochemistry and molecular biology courses, something I have implemented in my own courses. I learned a couple of things from her:

1. Biochemistry and molecular biology are best taught with TBL using case studies during the App phase. She ran a workshop at ACUBE where we experienced a case sutdy using a genetics problem (mother finds out her son has an incompatible haplotype to hers yet she remembers giving birth to him!). I can really see how this works well and is what my Apps are attempting to be. But the ones she showed us are a much more engaging story! She suggested I review what is available in the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science. I'll have to investigate it. It seemed to me that they were more geared toward 1st and maybe second year. But that could work well for AUBIO 111- Integrative Biology I and maybe AUBIO 230 - Molecular Cell Biology.
2. Annie suggested that teaching a course in a three week block period is a great way to get students to dive into a topic in depth, but that it is not very good at giving breadth to students. She opined that survey courses do not fit well with a 3 wk block. Thus, I am not sure that any of my courses will really work in the 3 wk block. They are all survey courses to some extent. The only ones that I could see working, as I suspected are AUBIO/AUCHE 388 - Biochemistry Laboratory, and AUBIO/AUCHE 485 - Selected Topics in Biochemistry. I think, and Annie confirmed, that the three-week intensive immersion blocks of teaching are great for learning applied skills or developing a project. So a lab where students are doing a lab project once a week or where they are presenting seminars on their research project in a Selected Topics course could work very well. But the more typical surveys of biology, molecular cell biology, biochemistry, or histology do not lend themselves very well to the three-week block format.

is the criticism of the lecture a result of poor oratorical skills?

A recent article posted on The Atlantic website revisits the issue of lecturing vs active learning. Maryellen Weimer, Lolita Paff, Carl Lovitt and I discussed this at the Sunday plenary of the 2016 Teaching Professor Conference this past June in Washington, DC. Similar to Christine Gross-Loh, we suggested that good teaching requires a mix of active learning and lecturing dependent upon the needs of the student. A good teacher doesn't simply leave their students to forage for themselves. On the other hand, a good teacher also guides students to construct their own knowledge structure. As I wrote in my editorial for the 2016 volume of CELT, teaching is similar to tuning the dial of an analog radio between the two continuums of lecturing (teaching by telling) vs active learning (learning by doing) and this is dependent upon the intellectual level of the students. Actually, rather than being dependent upon the intellectual level of students, it might be better to say it is dependent on how developed students are as independent learners. The primary task of higher education is to train students how to learn. The best result of a bachelor's degree is the ability of students to research the answers to their own questions. As I have said elsewhere, the ultimate independent learner is a researcher - when the knowledge is unavailable to answer a question a good researcher will collect the data and produce the knowledge required to answer the question.

But I digress....

What Christine Gross-Loh suggests is that the problem with lectures stems from a lack of training of higher education professors in the skill of public speaking. This is a skill that was once taught and developed in colleges and universities but declined during the 20th century. If graduate students were taught to publically speak in an engaging manner (and this does not mean continuous exposition but rather speaking, discussing, thinking, active learning, and telling) then perhaps the lecture (broadly defined) would not be so maligned. Perhaps the wealth of data that indicates that lecturing (continuous exposition) is hazardous to students' grades is a result of the decline of training the professoriate in properly lecturing/teaching. Christine Gross-Loh would not be the first to suggest that this may be a result of increased emphasis on research at the expense of teaching.

Resources

Arum R, Roksa J. (2011). Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bart M. 2016.Lecture vs. Active Learning: Reframing the Conversation [internet]. Faculty Focus, June 24.
Freeman S, Eddy SL, McDonough M, Smith MK, Okoroafor N, Jordt H, Wenderoth MP. 2014. Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(23), 8410–5.
Grow GO. 1991. Teaching learners to be self-directed. Adult Education Quarterly, 41(3), 125–149.
Gross-Loh C. 2016. Should Colleges Really Eliminate the College Lecture? [internet] The Atlantic, July 14.
Haave NC. 2016. Practical tuning - achievable harmony. Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching, 9: iii-x.
Pocklington T, Tupper A. 2002. No Place To Learn: Why Universities Aren’t Working. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.

teaching compressed courses

I read this paper for the Augustana Spring Workshop in preparation for our transition to teaching 3 and 11 week blocks from the 12+ weeks we currently teach in a term. Many of the best practices that the study suggest are practices that I am already trying to implement in my current courses. It seems, that best practices are to flip the classroom and holding students accountable for their pre-class preparation, and using the in-class portion for applications of the material. To do this, I have had to seriously consider what to keep in a course and what to throw out in order to keep the cognitive load for students reasonable. What I have most trouble doing when I flip a course is to vary the activities in class so that active learning does not become tedious. This is difficult. I find it relatively easy to find and design applications of learned content and to make those into team-based activities, but that invariably ends up being some sort of MCQ type problem. However, I have experimented with versions of the digital art walk with posters and communal slideshows - those work well. Also, sometimes turning the problem-solving activity into a game or competitions with M&Ms as the prize is sufficient to entice students to become engaged. But still, sometimes students are just tired and are in need of some guidance. This is where it takes experience to be able to judge what is needed at the time.

One of the things that I disagreed with in this article was the recommendation to supply students with notes. I really believe that short-circuits students learning. It is the process of developing notes that is valuable not the notes themselves. I suspect that what this best practice is really trying to promote is instructors to find and assign reasonable reading assignments and if none are found to produce their own textbook for students (rather than notes). This makes some sense but of course, how many of us are going to find the time to write our own tailored textbook for compressed courses? An alternative is to provide students with detailed reading guides that indicates which parts of the reading are critically important to attend to. I have gone to either extreme with reading guides that are overly detailed vs those that are too sparse. There is a happy medium between these two extremes.

Finally, I was surprised that by their suggestion that instructors plan the entire course rather than planning only one or two days in advance. Do many faculty plan that last minute? I have been planning my course daily instructional schedule since I started teaching in 1990! I can only assume that my mentor, Morley Riske, must have been an exemplary instructor to have been this far ahead in best practices. Actually, I don't have to assume..... I know he was an exemplary instructor. I cannot imagine teaching a course without the goalposts at the end of the term to guide where I am going with the course.

In sum, it seems that the best practices for teaching compressed courses basically distill down to flipping the classroom and using in-class meetings to apply course material in an active engaged manner. To do this requires careful planning and forethought using backwards design which includes carefully choosing preparatory reading (or other) assignments and holding students accountable for their pre-class preparation with quizzes or assignments completed at the start of a course chunk. In addition, students need frequent formative feedback to guide their learning and to also guide instructors to determine what students need help with. I also like the idea of dividing current course content into must know, need to know, and nice to know. Again, this is the approach that I have taken when redesigning courses as flipped classrooms. To reduce cognitive load for students' pre-class preparation and in order to make room for in-class application of learning, peripheral content must be ejected from the course.

Best practices for teaching compressed courses overlaps significantly with my experience in retooling courses for team-based learning.

Resources

Kops WJ. 2014. Teaching compressed-format courses: Teacher-based best practices. Canadian Journal of University Continuing Education, 40(1): 1-18.

Weimer M. 2015. Why Students Should Be Taking Notes. Faculty Focus (Feb 20). 

transitioning students to independent learners at ACURIT

So, I have spent the last couple of days immersed in Augustana's Conference on Undergraduate Research and Innovative Teaching hosted at the Augustana Campus of the University of Alberta. It is an interesting conference for a number of reasons but above all, it gathers both students and faculty to discuss teaching practices and the place and impact of undergraduate research. A couple of themes arose for me for during the conference. One was the desire to move students from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset: Students often come to university thinking that they are gifted in a few disciplines and topics and that it is impossible to develop other areas of their intellect. Students with a fixed mindset are typically those that have a performance orientation whereas those with a growth mindset have a mastery orientation. Students who have a mastery orientation tend to have better academic success. I have heard so many students complain or think that they cannot do math. Or other students indicate that they cannot write. And the students think that is a fixed property of themselves. It is so odd because if you are coming to university, you are coming to learn how to do something you cannot yet do. So, it implies that you should have a growth mindset - that you can grow abilities that you do not yet have or that are under-developed. It reminds me somewhat of the Perry Scheme of Intellectual Development in which students come to university with a dualistic understanding of the world in which they are fairly certain of their knowledge but then transition over their four years through stages of multiplism (everyone is entitled to their own opinion and  grades simply reflects the opinion of professors) through to relativism and  commitment in relativism in which students understand that some opinions are better informed than others and that context matters when it comes to matters of judgment.  The Perry Scheme is interesting in that students' certainty in knowledge first decreases markedly in the multiplism stage and then slowly increases as they move through relativism and commitment.

Our primary role as undergraduate researchers is to develop students into independent learners over the course of their four years of an undergraduate degree. I often tell students that, really, their professors are simply professional independent learners. This is what a researcher is - someone who understands how to go about generating the knowledge required to answer their own questions - the ultimate independent learner.

A couple of students presented their independent research experience doing field research in the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica at the Piro Research Station this past term. Two of my colleagues take a class of 12 students every other year down to the station to conduct research on the flora and fauna there after the students spend weeks preparing their research question and the methods they need to gather the required data to answer their question. It was interesting to hear the students at the conference describe their transition from expecting their instructors to tell them what to do, to give them their question and methods to independent learners who knew how to go about gathering what they needed for themselves. One student indicated the difficulty they had in transitioning to trying things out without knowing for sure that they had the correct approach or answer. The other surprised themselves at how she became comfortable doing the best she could with what they had prepared and adapting their question and methods as needed.

So, the question I came away with from their presentation was how do we support and nurture our students' transition to become independent learners as these two had done? When I attempt something similar, though at a lower level in my first and second-year biology courses using team-based learning, students are initially very disoriented at needing to use my reading guides (lists of learning objectives and keywords for the assigned reading). Many don't yet know how to read for learning nor how to actively engage with their reading. I have to teach them how to read and make notes for themselves and explain that it is not the notes themselves that are important but rather the process of constructing the notes that produces learning. Also, students are initially uncomfortable with being held accountable for their assigned reading with readiness assurance tests (RATs) that they write before I, as the instructor, do any teaching. Even though these RATs are worth a very small amount of their final grade (often a fraction of a percent) they stress out at not knowing for sure whether or not they know it completely. Students do not seem to have an understanding that learning something takes time and active effort. And those formative assessments are useful in informing them what they do and do not know. The team discussions of the freshly learned material are formative learning experiences which also informs them what they do and do not know and thus what they still need to work on in order to grow their skills and abilities in the subject matter.

I wish I knew how to alleviate the stress levels of my students when they are in that uncomfortable space where they are not yet sure of their knowledge because they are still learning it. Part of the problem, I think, is that so many of my students in biology are keen on getting into a professional programme (e.g. medicine or dentistry) and due to the competitive nature of those programmes, there is no forgiveness for not getting it immediately right and scoring a perfect grade. No matter what we do at Augustana with our liberal arts and sciences curriculum designed to give students the opportunity to explore and develop students'  knowledge and intellect, it seems that the expectation and requirements of professional programmes dampens students' curiousity and ability to explore their own interests and develop their own intellect. Which is odd, because I think professional programmes really do seek to admit those students that are intellectually flexible and have breadth and depth of knowledge.

I don't know what the answer is. All I know is that to continue teaching with integrity I need to continue encouraging students to adopt a growth mindset and give themselves the freedom to explore their heart's desire.

Resources

Coutinho, S. A. (2007). The relationship between goals, metacognition, and academic success. Educate~, 7(1), 39 – 47.
Kloss, R. J. (1994). A nudge is best: Helping students through the Perry Scheme of intellectual development. College Teaching, 42(4), 151–158.
Schraw, G. (1998). Promoting general metacognitive awareness. Instructional Science, 26(1-2), 113–125.
Weimer, M. (2009). Mastery and performance orientations. Faculty Focus (Oct 22).