Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog – Page 23

Laboratories: enhancing performance and retention – Mary Power

“Active learning”, “authentic learning”, and “experiential learning” are common buzzwords in education, but are also what we try to provide our students as we aim to enable them with the required skills and knowledge for their successful entry into the “real world”. In many scientific disciplines laboratories have been an integral part of teaching and learning that attempt to provide those experiences. The combining of laboratory activities with more theoretical forms of instructions, such as lecture and discussion, has been attributed to an improvement in both attitude toward the subject matter and scientific reasoning skills (White and Frederiksen, 1998).

However, laboratory courses are extremely expensive to operate with respect to infrastructure, material, human, space and time resources and so have often become limited in the curriculum. At universities across Canada and the US, including at the University of Waterloo, many lab courses have become “un-linked” from corresponding undergraduate courses. There are of course very good reasons for doing this as large lecture courses can service a broad population and a subset of majors can occupy the expensive lab courses. From a financial perspective this all makes perfect sense. However, in some instances, including many of the courses in the Faculty of Science here at the University of Waterloo, students requiring both can enroll in the lab and lecture in different semesters. Viscerally, I have always had difficulty with this practice as I see value in the integration of the theoretical with the practical for optimal learning and as a teacher when I teach a course of both lecture and lab I can integrate the two better and interact with the students more – only practical in smaller courses of course.
A recently published large study looking at nearly 10,000 first year General Chemistry students over 5 years at the University of Michigan (Matz et al, 2012) found that concurrent enrollment in the lecture and the corresponding laboratory course positively affected lecture grades when compared to those who took the laboratory in a later term or not at all. This effect was even more pronounced for the group of weakest students, as determined by entering math and chemistry scores on the SAT test, whose grades increased by an average of a third of a letter grade (ie., B- to B). The authors also looked at withdrawal rates from the lecture and again found that the concurrent enrollment was positively linked to retention, with the odds of a concurrent student being retained being 2.2 times higher than those who took the lab separately of not at all. This was so for both the stronger and the weaker students.
The design of laboratory course in this study may have played a role a guided inquiry course where student presumably do authentic experiment and the pre-lab is not designed to “give away” the results. Much of the lab work in this course is also done in teams, which is intended to promote a collaborative, community environment. The authors hypothesize that this community factor also played an important role in their findings.
I hope more studies such as this will be done. I wonder what the data here would show us?

Matz, R., Rothman, E., Krajcik, J., & Banaszak Holl, M. (2012). Concurrent Enrollment in Lecture and Laboratory Enhances Student Performance and Retention. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 49(5): 659-682.

White, B., & Fredericken, J. (1998). Inquiry, modeling and metacognition: Making science accessible to all students. Cognition and Instruction. 16 (1): 3-118.

Accidental, Informal and Formal Learning in Intercultural Education – Svitlana Taraban-Gordon

As International Education Week on our campus (and many other campuses around the world) draws to a close, I am thinking about my past and current connections to the field of intercultural and international education. In particular, I am thinking about unexpected sites of intercultural learning in our daily life and work. (Coincidentally, this week CTE is hosting four visiting professors from China who joined our PostDoc teaching series to learn more about teaching and learning in the Canadian context). At the start of the PostDoc series, I asked the participants (28 this time) how many of them got their doctorates outside of Canada. More than half of their hands went up. So here we are, a group of almost 30, coming from various cultural backgrounds and bringing our diverse educational (hi)stories gathered in a room in EV1 to spend a week talking about teaching and learning.

The next evening I attended an event organized by a local non-profit that works with immigrant and visible minority women new to KW. There I met a Laurier student born and raised in Canada who shared with me her experience of volunteering in Panama last summer. It was challenging, she said, but I also heard a talk by a Chinese Canadian high school student who is in the midst of submitting her university applications. She talked about the change in her reasons for going to university after participating in the Immigrant Women and Voice Youth program. In her inspiring speech, she told us that she is no longer interested in going to university because of familial expectations or peer pressure. Instead, she wants to go in order to hone her leadership and communication skills so that she can overcome her fears and self-doubts and do the work she aspires to do in her community.

These are just some examples of the unplanned intercultural moments/encounters that find their way into my daily life and work. In our daily interactions on campus we experience many moments like this. Both in and outside of the classroom. Both within and outside our departments. In the context of formal and informal curricula.

The history of international education fascinates me. Looking at the current numbers of students who pursue postsecondary education abroad (more than 4.1 million in 2010, according to OECD data), I ponder the question of *when* student sojourners started to venture abroad to pursue higher learning. Thanks to a quiz on the history of international education, I discover that Emo of Friesland was the world’s first recorded international student. Apparently, he traveled from Holland to Oxford in 1190.

I think my CTE colleague Mark, who grew up on a grain farm in Saskatchewan and has been a diligent student of Arabic over the last few years, would find this little factoid fascinating (Mark also shares my passion for Ethiopian food, but that’s an aside). And perhaps Mark has a story about it that will send me to the dictionary to discover new words in English that I haven’t encountered before. As a non-native English speaker who arrived to North America in her twenties – past the period of achieving native-like competence, according to the proponents of the contested Critical Period Hypothesis for second language acquisition – I can’t think of a better place to work than with English and communication majors and a former English professor. My second (well, actually third) language vocabulary is so much richer for that.

I am also reminded of the fact that my other CTE colleague, Julie, did a teaching presentation to the French department in, well… French. I think it’s really cool that we have a bilingual educational developer at our teaching centre. And while we at CTE have not yet explored our individual and collective frameworks for doing international and intercultural work and have not yet articulated a framework that defines and guides our activities in these areas, we often find ourselves *doing* various kinds of international and intercultural work – accidental, unplanned and planned. I think the same is true for teaching and learning that happens on our and other campuses. Most of the ‘international’ happens accidentally, unexpectedly, informally.

Intercultural exchanges and interactions have the potential to be immensely educational, even transformational. However, a growing body of scholarship on intercultural education reveals that we often fail to take advantage of available opportunities for intercultural and international learning. Many intercultural/international possibilities are left unexplored, unexamined or simply left up to a chance. Some activities labeled ‘international/intercultural’ lack clear intent. They are not guided by purposeful and intentional framework based on institution-specific goals, academically-driven agenda and mutually beneficial partnerships. Some examples? The notion that bringing more international students on campus will naturally lead to more intercultural learning for home and international students (research and experience have shown otherwise). Or that students participating in study abroad programs will acquire intercultural and international competencies when left to their own devices (this excellent book available through the university library provides research-based evidence to the contrary).

So my question, then, is how can we take advantage of accidental and informal types of intercultural and international learning in our work as teachers and/or teaching developers? How do we connect them into a more intentional and systematic framework grounded in our personal and professional frameworks for internationalism? How can we use them to guide our educational work and shape the formal curriculum/programming? How can we make connections between the planned and unplanned, informal and formal, accidental and intentional in intercultural education? As I write this, I am reminded of Paul Gorski’s words that when it comes to intercultural education, good intentions are simply not enough.

Gorski, P.(2008). Good intentions are not enough: A decolonizing intercultural education. Intercultural Education, 19 (6), 515-525.

Universal Design, Accessible Lectures, and Other Fun Buzz-Words — Michelle Ashburner, AccessAbility Services

I love the chalk-and-talk lecture in math. I have had the pleasure of teaching thousands of first-years, and with lots of questions, discussions, pauses, and well-formatted notes, the chalkboard lecture can go a long way. It forces students to attend lectures if they want notes directly from the instructor, allows for the presentation of dynamic visual and symbolic material, and most importantly allows for quick correction of mistakes.

Ever since I have been working with the AccessAbility Services office, I have met many students who have disabilities that interfere with their learning in the classroom environment. These students, most of whom have an above-average to superior IQ, have found wonderful ways of compensating. They have inspired me to work on making my lectures more user-friendly to persons with disabilities (Accessible Lectures), as well make my course more readily absorbed by students in general (Universal Design).

The most challenging thing to do here was with regards to testing. The main idea of creating an accessible assessment is to provide choice. In the humanities, for example, students might choose between a 40% exam, a 40% essay, or 20% split between the two. Perhaps in a history class a student could perform an exam orally while another could write a paper exam. Everyone has a preferred learning style and strength of expression, and for students with learning disabilities, being able to use this strength is of even more importance.

Well, what choice can one give with math exams? Traditionally the math midterm is a collection of questions on paper, and the possibility of an oral exam, or an essay in lieu of a problem-style written exam is out of the question. There aren’t enough resources to issue oral exams to 400 students, nor can we ensure that students understand mathematical reasoning and calculations if they are to write an essay composed entirely of text.

The exam that I gave this term was made with large font in LaTeX (which looks like 14-16pt when printed), lots of white space, and clear instructions for each question. After two common questions, the exam splits into a Part 1 and a Part 2, and students are instructed to complete one part or the other. Part 1 is mostly composed of word problems, while Part 2 is mostly composed of algorithmic problems. Part 1 does contain algorithmic, calculation-based material, and Part 2 does require students to create problem spaces and to translate wording into math; they are just presented differently.

Of 400 exams, about 230 students chose to do mostly word problems, while the rest chose the algorithmic thinker option. Keep in mind that deconstructing a word problem and going through the steps of solving takes time, so that there were more questions in Part 2 (yet the points per part were the same).

Students with a case of math anxiety (there are SO many in my classes!) can consider the algorithmic part as opposed to freezing when coming in contact with only word problems under a time constraint. They will continue to hone their word problem solving skills within the tutorial environment, where they may choose to work on a group assignment or on their own. Come the final exam, they will be more prepared for the word problems that await them.

In my experience, those who are verbally strong and are more comfortable learning the “soft” sciences tend to be more linear and algorithmic mathematics students, while those that are more comfortable going through an unpredictable journey with a math puzzle and have a more developed mathematical intuition tend to be less restricted to linear thinking. They could be characterized as “global,” or “intuitive” learners. Honestly, learning styles change and studies continue to bring light to the learning styles and strengths that tend to go together. All I have to go on is what I’ve learned from my students thus far.

It has helped me immensely to see the perspectives of my students at AccessAbility Services. When I present a word problem, I always read the text after having them read it on their own; I give breaks to process information; I try to have the learning as active as possible by prompting discussion, asking questions, and holding votes (we have very poor voter turnout in my classes. I am worried about the future of democracy). I have digitized note outlines posted on LEARN in 14 point font, which are optional to use, but require attendance to have a complete set. My tutorial assignment instruction sheets encourage any student with difficulty producing written solutions to contact me by email, phone, or in person to discuss alternatives. I allow technology in the classroom (a whole other discussion on its own!), and I try not to assume ability to see in colour.

I have enjoyed the challenge of making an accessible math course so far, and I am looking forward to updating you all when term is over. Your thoughts will make this venture more of a success. Contact me any time.

Effective Feedback – Gowsi (CTE Co-op Student)

Entering my third year at the University of Waterloo, one thing that never crossed my mind was the idea of higher learning and teaching. I never thought to myself about how any of my classes could be improved. Was it because I did not care or was it because I was not asked?

Since working at CTE I constantly find myself analyzing my past professors and their teaching methods to see if they were actually effective. As a Sociology major I find that most my classes should have been more engaging. There are many ways professors could have engaged students to want to learn, using methods such as effective discussions or switching up the delivery of the content. But the problem was that many of my teachers never asked me how I felt about the class. As a result, I rarely found myself focused on lectures. This is why feedback is necessary in courses. Feedback in a classroom setting is beneficial to both parties involved. The students giving the feedback are able to critically examine the teaching method. The receiver of the feedback, the teacher, can get a better understanding of the effectiveness of their teaching method. The feedback allows them to cater towards students need and create a better learning atmosphere.

Feedback must have a balance of perfect timing and effective questions to be valuable to students and teachers. I have written many feedback forms for my courses at the end of the term. But what is the point of that, the students filling out the feedback forms don’t get to see any of the results. Don’t get me wrong, feedback at the end of the semester for a class is beneficial, but not for the writers. As a student I want to see the changes made from my feedback first hand to benefit me. Implementing a system of feedback throughout the term would increase student engagement and participation.

For the first time in my university existence I was asked to give feedback within the first few weeks of class this term. My professor had asked us questions based on the simple feedback mechanism called SKS. The professor simply asked the student what he should Stop, Keep, and Start doing. The next class he would display the outcome of the feedback in a graph, a simple and easy way to read the results. This method allowed students to expose their issues with the class early and allowed the professor to assess such issues early enough that the class could mover forward without any issues. He then changed his method of delivery to benefit the majority of the class. This schedule of feedback throughout the semester should be implemented in all courses the university provides. Students in the classroom feel more welcomed because it shows that the teacher is interested in the success of their students. I guess the takeaway of this blog is that everyone is aware of the benefits of feedback, but what is key, is to begin the process sooner then later.

How to Reignite Intrinsic Motivation — Sophie Twardus (CTE Co-op Student)

There are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is something you do because you enjoy it for its own sake. Extrinsic motivation is something you do for outside factors like grades or money. One of the intriguing things about motivation is that if a person is intrinsically motivated to do something, giving them an extrinsic motivation diminishes that original motivation.

This is especially relevant in education considering that humans are naturally interested in learning. You only need to talk to four-year-old children to see how excited they are to go to school, how proud they are that they can count to ten. However, talk to them ten years later and all that enthusiasm will have dissipated. The problem is that in school you don’t learn for the sake of learning – you do it for external reasons like grades and getting accepted into university.

This approach leads to a decline of people’s intrinsic motivation to one solely driven by external rewards. The question is how do we address this problem. I know personally that math is my passion. Despite that there have times where I have been so bogged down by assignments and midterms that I have forgotten that math can be fun.

Last term I had an absolutely brutal week: I had gotten sick twice, I had gotten a midterm back and the results were less than optimal, and I had broken my laptop screen. I was in dire need of a break, I was exhausted, with zero motivation. I walked into the MathSoc office where my friends were playing the card game called SET. The game has a lot of interesting mathematical properties. You can see a sample game here.

While playing the game, I mused out loud how many unique sets exist in the game. “That’s an interesting problem,” exclaimed my friend. Naturally, being mathematicians. we put the game on hold in order to solve it. It took us no time at all to find out that the answer was 1080. We then tried finding out if it’s possible to model the number of sets for the general case of n values and m attributes.

It took me four days to solve this problem. Working on it reminded me why I was studying math. I love the mental challenge of a good problem, the battle of wits as I try to deconstruct the situation. I especially love the flash of insight that comes at the end when the solution is suddenly obvious.

University can be a stressful environment. It is all too easy to get caught up in the frenzy of midterms, assignments, and exams and forget why we originally chose to pursue post-secondary education. If you feel burnt out I recommend taking a break from your responsibilities and do something not because you have to but because you want to. Remind yourself that learning is fun.

As for the solution to the problem, I leave it as an exercise to reader. I would not want to spoil the fun.

Presenting and Recording Notes Using a Tablet – Carsen Banister

Tablet technology has been available to consumers since the 1990s, but was not originally heavily adopted. New generation tablets, most of which are designed without dedicated keyboards, are becoming more common.

I am currently taking a Graduate course with an instructor that uses a tablet to present his lecture content. The environment created is very similar to the typical blackboard or whiteboard classroom, but instead the instructor’s laptop screen is projected for the students to follow. I am recording notes for this class in the same way, using my tablet to reproduce what is being created on the projector. For both of these applications, tablets provide some advantages over traditional methods, but also introduce some drawbacks.

As a note-giver
From a lecture or presentation perspective, a tablet simplifies many of the activities required, such as eliminating the need to erase the board, allowing the marking up of images, and offering many drawing tools, such as coloured inks of varying thicknesses. With the addition of a desktop recording software, the lecture can be recorded and saved to the class website. Students are able to review these screen-castings and catch up on content they missed. This can be particularly helpful for graduate students, where travel to conferences can interfere with a class schedule.

Many of these advantages also have direct disadvantages, such as reducing the movement of the instructor in the classroom. Since the tablet is typically used at a podium, the instructor will remain rooted here during the lesson. It is much harder to interact and gesture with a projection screen than a blackboard. This reduced movement can impact the interactivity of the class, confining it to a style of note-copying rather than getting input and involvement from the students. Although no erasing is required, the screen is much smaller than a collection of blackboards, so less content can be shown at one time. This can hinder students’ ability to visualize the progression of course material and make connections.

As instructors, we should be aware of these advantages and disadvantages because our choice of presentation method affects all members of the class. Switching perspective now to the role of student, a tablet and note-taking software can also be used to record notes, regardless of the method of presentation.

As a note-taker
I have used this method for a couple equation-intensive engineering courses and, as expected, also found some advantages to be balanced by drawbacks. A strong benefit I have found is the high speed of typing compared to writing. In courses with a lot of text note-taking, a lot of time can be saved. An added benefit is being able to look up while recording these notes, something that is not easy when writing on paper. This allows for more focus during the lesson and less time bogged down blindly copying notes.

I don’t find drawing on a tablet faster than on paper, but the added tools do provide benefit. Being able to draw shapes or axes with a couple clicks saves time and improves quality. Drawings can also be modified after they are created, rather than having to pull out an eraser and start over. For mathematical equations, there is a choice to write it out in full or use a built-in equation editor to type the equation. The latter option provides a nice appearance that is less likely to be misread in the future, but it requires some getting used to and can be slower than the former method.

Recording all the content digitally means that it can be easily searched using keywords, even handwriting in many software packages. This can save time if you need to find something quickly and don’t want to look through all your notes. But being able to leaf through your notes is exactly what you lose when going digital. No longer can you quickly flip through them to look for a key image or figure.

A major concern with taking notes electronically is the reliance on electronics and electricity. What if your computer crashes during a lecture? What if you don’t have an electricity source for the 3 hours of class coming up? A backup is always required in case your tablet is unavailable. A pencil and paper don’t have these technical limitations and are much more reliable.

Although it may not be reasonable to expect tablets to replace pencil and paper or chalk and blackboard, they have established a place in the classroom. In both cases, there is a significant learning curve when beginning to deliver or take notes using a tablet. If you want to start using this technology in the classroom, take the time to become comfortable with it before taking the leap!

Refining my Twitter “voice” for CTE tweets — Trevor Holmes

I think I was probably born in the wrong era. Sometimes, I feel like a late Victorian. Other times, I feel like a Millennial. I want to talk about the latter feeling in today’s blog post. In a dizzyingly “meta” moment, I’ll probably tweet the link to it as soon as I post.

You see, I’m someone who has been more comfortable texting than phoning someone ever since texting became a thing. This seems to characterize most of the Millennials I know, and few of the Boomers. Perhaps as Generation X, I just tend to sit on the cusp one way or another. Unlike Millennials, I also played around in very rich text-based virtual worlds before there was a visual web… you know, when the internet seemed all fresh and new and had no pictures besides ASCII art. Of course all these generational generalisations are probably false. I suspect I’m just a sci fi geek in educational developer clothing, and therefore an “early adopter” in my tech and teaching life.

So when Twitter came along in 2006, I did the usual exploration* that I do when new things pop up. That is to say, I pretended I was evaluating its possibilities for teaching and learning. In truth, I DO do this with new software, new platforms, new technologies. But it’s also, of course, about my own predilection for fun toys I only imagined as a kid (this may be why I held onto my flip phone far longer than anyone I know — it reminded me of an original Star Trek communicator!).

paper speech bubbles laid on a green background, concept of open discussion and debate — Speech Bubbles

In short, nothing seems more natural to me than musing in 140-character thoughtlets, or sharing interesting links to topics various with hundreds of other people, or recirculating helpful hints by others. This is probably why I jumped at the opportunity to tweet on behalf of CTE when it came round. Our Faculty Liaisons had a Twitter account, run mostly by Zara Rafferty, who has since moved on to teach in Recreation and Leisure Studies. When Zara left, it became clear that we could leverage Twitter for CTE more widely, and so we created @uwcte, and started to gather followers. For the most part, I’ve been handling the daily (except for weekends) tweets, and to be honest, it’s a very different approach to tweet institutionally than to tweet individually.

I’ll start with what I am trying to do, and what we are trying to avoid.

What I tweet on behalf of CTE:

links to upcoming events across the range of our practice and audience (TAs, faculty — full-time and adjunct, teaching staff, postdoctoral fellows)
mentions of events underway or just finished (sometimes with links to relevant resources)
links to resources around the web for teaching practices /theory, including our Tip Sheets and blog posts
University of Waterloo or Faculty-specific good news (retweet)
material of interest to the mid-career professors who follow us locally
tips and sample techniques that suit the time of term we’re in (e.g. mid-course feedback tips at midterm, how to end a course and review for exams near the end of term)
publicizing CTE news (hires, retirements, accomplishments)
critical engagement with educational controversies where they seem relevant to uWaterloo communities
musings on current events, without taking a strong position

Some things I try to avoid:

particular endorsements of a one-sided position
inflammatory or controversial statements about higher education, particular people, or universities
bad press for our own University or any neighbouring ones
jokes — they are usually at someone’s expense

Again, this is all very different from my individual Twitter account, which I’ve had for some time and use to post items about more political aspects of higher education, items about my personal interest in food and food culture, and items related to my former discipline, among other things. As @vardalek, I’m very much my uncensored self; I rarely hesitate to post what I’m thinking or feeling, although I am very aware of the dangers of permanent archives and the problem of the fatal error in judgment. I guess I have nothing to hide that is unsavoury, in my view anyway. I have always taken seriously the idea that we ought to build personal histories and narratives using the internet archives of ourselves (some call it branding). Searches through old listservs devoted to higher education topics or to queer theory would likely result in some classic Trevor rants.

Such an apparently wanton approach (actually it’s of course more rhetorically intentional than one might assume) is exactly wrong, though, for an institutional account. As a CTE tweeter, or as @ks101wlu (my course over at WLU), I have a different relationship to official culture. I’m not the same kind of autonomous individual. Certainly, lines blur when we make a constant stream of crossings-over that transcends single or simple identity. Some of the people I follow and those @uwcte follows are the same. @uwcte even follows @vardalek (retweeting one’s own tweets turns out to feel rather self-indulgent, but I’m certainly not doing it for some future day when retweets count like citations do now!).

I draw the line at thinking like a corporate Chief Information Officer (CIO), though. I’ve noticed articles or blog posts lately about social media “compliance” and “return on investment” (ROI). While I can imagine ways in which our tweets can be shown to enhance our work, I’m not in this for the obvious ROI. We are a helping group, teaching developers, and we just, it seems to me, want those with whom we work to have a sense of confidence as they plan, deliver, and assess learning. That is why I tweet for CTE, and why I hope you will follow @uwcte if you join Twitter or are already using it.

*note: I’m more cautious than I let on here. I didn’t begin tweeting seriously until mid-2009. Apparently I have been a user longer than 93.9% of all users though. See Twopcharts’ tool for your own data.

Image Attribution: Creative Commons Stockmedia.cc/Stockarch.com http://stockarch.com/images/abstract/concept/speech-bubbles-3348