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Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/localed/default.html.
These are my notes on research done locally, with which I've been associated in
some way, on educational issues. There are several headings, though some
pieces of work belong under more than one heading.
(A conference abstract giving an overview is here.)
We've acquired handsets to allow every student in a lecture theatre to
register (privately) their answer to a displayed question; and then for the
aggregated responses to be publicly shown. The overall aim is to make
lectures more interactive, and so promote activity, and so promote learning.
This has been trialled by a wide variety of departments, evaluation data
collected, and is dealt with on other pages.
Lockhart,P. (2004) "An investigation into the causes of student dropout
behaviour" (Dept. of Psychology, University of Glasgow).
This study of student dropout at Glasgow University has the special feature of
being based on recruiting actual dropouts and comparing them to matched
persisters. It is hard to find published studies that use anything other than
persisting students.
This study tested four separate explanations for student dropout: Tinto's
concept of integration, personality, self-efficacy, and homesickness.
Overall the results suggest that academic integration is more important than
social integration, especially if readiness to get to know staff members is
counted as academic rather than social; but that ability to organise oneself
to study may be another important factor separating persisters from
dropouts.
Neil Duncan (2006)
"Predicting Perceived Likelihood of Course Change, Return to University
Following Withdrawal, and Degree Completion in Glasgow University Students"
(Dept. of Psychology, University of Glasgow).
Participants studying psychology, law, English literature and biology from all
years of study completed an on-line questionnaire. This measured the
predictive variables of current and past residence, year of study, alcohol
use/attitude, confidence in course choice, student self-esteem, academic and
social integration in university, social integration outside university,
social support, academic self-confidence, goal and institutional commitment,
and the outcome variables of how much they have thought about changing course,
their perceived likelihood of degree completion, and the likelihood of
returning to university/college if leaving their present course. It was found
that thinking about changing subject was significantly predicted by low
academic integration, belief that course choice was not well informed,
distance from Glasgow before starting university, and low social integration
outside university. Perceived likelihood of degree completion was
significantly predicted by year of study, goal commitment, low extraversion,
belief that course choice was well informed, low conscientiousness, student
self-esteem and a lack of understanding of the work-grade link. Finally,
perceived likelihood of returning to university/college if leaving present
course was significantly predicted by year of study, distance from Glasgow
before starting university, openness, low understanding of the work-grade
link, goal commitment, low extraversion, and social integration within
university. It appears that academic and goal related concerns influence
students in making drop out decisions more than do social concerns. The
findings are discussed in relation to the life-span theory of control
(Heckhausen & Tomasik, 2002) and other recent theories on drop out, and
suggestions for future research are proposed.
PDF file.
Jocey Quinn, Liz Thomas, Kim Slack, Lorraine Casey, Wayne Thexton
& John Noble (2005) From life crisis to lifelong learning: Rethinking working-class "drop-out"
from higher education
(Joseph Rowntree Foundation)
Download page (free PDf available)
Reading party evidence: value it, and value it more than they expect; make
friends. Also, int. scores compare well with other depts.
Based on a sample of 40 out of 120 who filled in a questionnaire both before
and after the level 3 Reading Party,
while their prior attitudes about whether they expected it to be enjoyable and
useful were not negative, their post RP attitudes were significantly more
positive. Afterwards they have a lot more friends on the course (as distinct
from either close friends or acquaintances) than before; and significantly
more than a comparison sample in level 3 EngLit.
In general there a number of issues psych. students complain about if asked
(see below) but in fact they compare well against other departments on the
measures systematically measures. For instance, they complain more about
finding it hard to make friends on the course and theat they lose them all on
entry to honours, yet in fact report having more friends.
Issues for complaint include:
Feel the staff want them to fail or are indifferent. Discouraging rather than
encouraging you to do better.
Hard to make friends in psy L1,2 AND lose them all when enter honours.
Never been in no.58 Hillhead street AND take that as symbolic.
Unpleasant atmosphere of competition between students, which lingers on in
honours.
Ball,S. (2004) "Alienation, integration and motivation in psychology
undergraduates" (Dept. of Psychology, University of Glasgow)
Gosnay,E. (2004) "xx" (Dept. of Psychology, University of Glasgow)
There have been a number of investigations and projects concerning the teaching
and learning on the Computing Science level 1 course. Most have been
supervised by
Quintin Cutts and a few by me.
Early work by Quintin is described in his chapter:
"Engaging a large first year class"
in Walker,M. (ed.) (2001) Reconstructing professionalism in
university teaching: teachers and learners in action ch.6 pp.105-128
(SRHE/Open university press: Buckingham). See also the
symposium
marking the book launch.
A followup Psychology final year project by Rebecca
Black is planned.
Part of this may be trying out
aptitude tests for computing students.
An enjoyable paper on why teaching introductory programming is so hard is
Tony Jenkins'
recent paper "On the difficulty of learning to program"
given to the ICS LTSN 2002 conference, and published
here,
and locally, and more printably, here
with my comments.
Lego/Logo for level 1 programming course.
This could be an experiment, comparing various alternative supplementary
instructional interventions.
LSS
There is
an email list for those concerned with the transition for the
subject of Computing Science. Basically, it consists of someone from almost
all the Scottish universities with CompSci degrees plus some representatives
from the Scottish schools sector. They held one half-day workshop here at
Glasgow on 7 June 2002, organised principally by Alison Mitchell, Phil Gray,
and David Bethune.
A unit at this university, the
Student Network
(ext. 2384) is particularly concerned with "widening access" i.e. with
improving the transition for students from backgrounds where
disproportionately fewer students have hitherto come to University. There are
various schemes associated with this, the longest running being the
Summer Schools. Lynn
Walker's PhD thesis was a study of these in the mid 1990s. (Lynn Walker
(1996) An evaluation of the pre-university summer school at the University
of Glasgow, 1986-1993, and its effects on student performance PhD thesis
[Faculty of Arts, Department of Education], University of Glasgow. [Level 12
Spec Coll Thesis 10493].)
See also a section on my Tinto page
for my further opinions.
"Induction" means the briefing new arrivals get.
By analogy with common good practice in the private sector, induction should
not be a 3 hour lecture once; but be seen as a process over (say) the first 90
days.
See here and
here
for material elsewhere on the fundamental approach of
telling (new and prospective) students what it is actually like, and not some
Tony Blair style "speak no evil" attempt to conceal the bad things and trick
them into coming.
See the next section ("Student generated PDP") for our local initiative on
doing this a different way; which is focussed on asking inductees what their
worries are, and then addressing them partly by letting them see that others
are thinking the same and partly by having older students comment on how they
dealt with each issue.
Nick Bowskill has a project where sessions are held (at the start of a year)
in which student concerns about the course or programme as a whole are
elicited, shared, discussed; and possible solutions too are discussed
suggested by student mentors who have completed the course.
This relates to the issue of transition, but can be seen as addressing the
aspects of PDP to do with self-management and the skills of being a student,
but doing so not by experts lecturing, but rather by eliciting student
concerns, and student experience.
Peer assisted learning (PAL) can be a help at the school-university
transition, or more generally a help at all levels for all students, including
the area of study skills. It means, basically, providing in addition to any
tutorial groups led by staff, groups for all students in a class that are
led by students from a year or two above (mentors of a kind) who act as
facilitators rather than tutors i.e. they promote the group members in
answering each others' questions rather than being a source of answers
themselves.
The Student Network
pioneered the introduction of PAL in Computing Science commencing October
2002. I and others were involved in evaluating this trial.
For more see
my notes and pointers, leading to other sites,
and published papers on the approach. It is now being run in Computing Science
again, and in Psychology: see the
Psychology PAL home page.
Seminars given by Randy Swing as part of SHEFC's 2003-4 Quality Enhancement
Engagements suggested some innovations in US first year teaching. Whether
these have lessons for the UK is discussed in my notes.
CDIO (conceive, design, implement, operate) is a new schema for organising
engineering education (possibly the next step up from PBL). A few notes and
pointers to papers are in these notes.
We've started a project on teaching colour theory as an example of
learning, not from exposition, but from interactive exploration (as in the
best museum exhibits).
See this page.
Graduate attributes are work-related employability attributes you are supposed
to pick up during your degree.
Flynn's ideas on critical thinking as a general mental ability are about how
to do critical thinking better across disciplines, or anyway on general
topics.
In between those are, or could be, a set of the key things any person needs to
learn (even though education programmes almost never address them). Flynn's
are only about critical thinking and arguing i.e. are patterns of thought;
these are about basic skills.
I've taken them from:
this blog by
Stephen Downes.
His list is:
How to predict consequences
How to read [effectively]
(how to see under the surface to what each piece is doing;
and to distinguish the 4 types: description, argument, explanation,
definition)
How to distinguish truth from fiction
How to empathize
How to be creative
How to communicate clearly
[i.e. how to write effectively; how to use the 4 types]
This is an important and strong form of student-generated teaching, invented
by Aronson in 1971. The idea is that the teacher does not teach the subject
matter content, but divides the class into teams, each of which researches
(cf. EBL) a topic, and teaches it to
the rest of the class.
To find more on the original Aronson design see:
Aronson's Jigsaw classroom.
Aronson,E. (1978) The jigsaw classroom (Beverly Hills: Sage).
Ann Brown has applied it successfully for Biology in US high schools, and
with a somewhat different theoretical emphasis. (References to some
influential papers by her are in
wikipedia.)
Baxter (2007) "A Case Study of Online Collaborative Work in a Large
First Year Psychology Class"
Case study
Jim Baxter's redesign of a first year psychology course used in part a
jigsaw design in a class of 550 mediated by a VLE.
I have used a version of Jigsaw, mediated by a VLE (moodle), in my
Positive Psychology course.
You can login as a guest to the course's moodle site and inspect the wiki
pages produced as startup learning materials by the class for the class.
(My talk on this.)
Recommended (by Jo Royle) paper full of hints and tips about running
successful learning groupwork in practice:
Davies,W.M. (2009) "Groupwork as a form of assessment: common problems and
recommended solutions" Higher Education vol.58 no.4 pp.563-584
Mitra's "hole in the wall" work seems obviously a close relative of Jigsaw
conceptually (though not historically) when you see the aspect of the small
groups talking to each other to share what each have worked out. It is
certainly, just like Jigsaw, about small group peer-collaboration in learning,
with no teacher content teaching. His view is one step more radical than Ann
Brown's: Brown said the teachers in the room were teaching pupils how to learn
(not the subject matter content); but Mitra allows no teaching of how to learn
either, apart from one or more starter questions; plus in (only) one method,
the "grandmother method", unconditional interest and praise. In fact
normally, he makes the teachers leave the room especially for the first
question (and observe only through windows if they are nervous). Conversely,
when in a demo in Turin he remained in the room, he spoke no Italian and the
kids spoke no English: in other words, this really isn't about information
content transmission.
Setting the questions (in turn, when a topic is exhausted eventually) is an
important Teacher skill here, he says. So teacher direction of the learning
goals / objectives is not only a real input, but a crucial one. BUT he
qualifies that by many cases where the questions have been wildly harder than
any normal person thinks such kids could possibly tackle; and furthermore,
he's grasped how people (including his children) set their own expectations,
which in different cases can be limiting or very high. Or both: as in
when a group of remote-area Indian primary school children who were directed
to discover what DNA replication was, reported back that they had understood
nothing (long faces, no smiles) ... except that birth defects resulted from
faulty replication.
His method is like Jigsaw, to divide the class (large group) into small groups
of 4-5, each with one computer screen between them. (Assigns them to groups
to start, but makes it clear that moving to another group, and persuading
friends to swap into your group are both fine.) But instead of the Jigsaw
method of organised cross-teaching between groups studying different
sub-topics, Mitra has only one topic for everyone, and plenty of informal
circulating round the room to pick up stuff other groups have got that your
group hasn't.
Mitra's theoretical statement about this is that "Education is a
self-organising system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon";
and that for children, curiosity can work well as the Attractor for the system.
N.B. 1: He says that assessment in older children suppresses the group
dynamic and hence the learning. So in his experience, assessment does not
drive learning but the exact opposite: it drives the suppression of learning.
N.B. 2: Some of his earliest results turned out to be an important synergy
between what they learned in school, and his hole in the wall. (The
example was: they got good teaching in school of English in syntax and
vocabulary, but the internet hugely improved their accents which in turn were
crucial to employment (in call centres).)
Patchwork text is a related technique: like Jigsaw, it uses peer discussion of
students' work and regular writing by each student; but unlike Jigsaw it
doesn't deal with topics where all students are supposed to grasp the same
idea, but on the contrary to deal with reflection and the emergence and
description of contrasting ideas.
Key refs. are:
Scoggins,J. & Winter,R. (1999) "The Patchwork Text: a coursework format
for education as critical understanding"
Teaching in HE vol.4 no.4 pp.485-499
A special issue of a journal:
Innovations in education and teaching international
(2003) vol.40 no.2
Maisch (2002) (in the special issue) describes using it to support
dissertation writing on a postgraduate course for non-native-English speakers.
It is the only technique I've seen that explicitly aims to support (scaffold)
induction and creativity: that is, to help a student come up with a theme or
idea around which to organise their work by collecting the "patches" of that
work and reviewing it for unplanned themes.
However Sharon Flynn has another, quite different,
approach to this; "Using Turnitin to support student writing".
Rebecca Kay has some good handouts for her students on this:
http://portfolio.gla.ac.uk/view/view.php?id=4304
However they are in Mahara, so you need a GU account to get in, and then get
her to take you as a "friend"
In the sense used here, this is not about a teacher transmitting an idea by
dialogue not monologue, as Plato seems to depict Socrates as doing;
but about using such dialogues as a personal philosophical research tool for
developing new ideas oneself. It is taught, as a technique. It is powerful
educationally (if the teacher keeps nearly quiet, and the emerging ideas are
the learners') as another technique for student generated content.
This is related in that (structured) peer interaction is at the heart of it.
The focus is intermediate between Jigsaw and Patchwork Text in that there is
no requirement to reach consensus, but nevertheless that peer discussion helps
everyone develop their own ideas at the same time.
Another is developing "experiential" exercises for students, where they
experience a technique (study skill) and whether it is useful for them.
(A series of maxi projects should be referred to here; and a paper or para on
what I mean; .... and the exam.prep workshop I put on .)
PeerWise is software to manage getting students in a class to design and make
available MCQs (multiple choice questions) for the whole class. See
PeerWise website
Getting students to read and comment on each others' work is beneficial,
especially if they have to comment and indeed assign a mark using the course's
explicit marking criteria. We have done versions of this for several years.
A project on a miniaturised exercise for practising critical thinking and
writing: [PDF] by
Alison Gemmell.
Document for teachers, representing this micro-CT exercise:
Word doc.
Approaches
There's now various bits of software to support this: especially useful on a
big scale (big classes). However there are (say) 3 ways of doing this:
Double blind anonymous review, mediated by software.
Fully personal (as I do it): reviewers know who wrote it, and deliver the
feedback personally (perhaps face to face). This may be best for establishing
a collegiate atmosphere, and a personal practice without staff scaffolding for
students getting feedback from peers as part of normal working. Myself, I get
them to deliver the first batch face to face, with me chairing the meeting.
Fully open, just post everything to a wiki: the work and the reviews.
John Hamer has done it in a class of about 35. This was a class with an
established community feeling; but also the wiki was of course open to
reading and policing by the lecturer.
The underlying technical problem is that the web was developed to leave screen
appearance in the hands of the local user: so when you resize a window, or
increase the font size to suit your eyes, then the text is dynamically
re-wrapped to suit. This was done from the start by treating web pages as 1
dimensional text strings, just as written language is. However maths notation
is fundamentally 2 dimensional: HTML just doesn't do it.
The surface problem for online maths resources is to get a workaround for
maths to work on all the browsers students may use. If they only use it in
timetabled labs with university-configured machines, then no problem. But
especially for self-help resources, they may use it on old cast-off machines
at home. Even worse: if they are just having a look to see if the resource
could be helpful, then having to spend time downloading a different browser
before they even get a glimpse is unlikely to work (we know for example, that
commercial websites that fail to get their customers to a page showing what
they want within 2.5 mouse clicks, will often not see that customer visit
again for many months).
Another important problem aspect is: if we would like our students to be using
online forums to discuss maths, how can they "write" maths notation into these
forums?
There seem to be 3 approaches to this:
Using a remote server, or possibly local software you downloaded, you get
a Latex expression rendered into a bitmap (GIF) image, which is sent back to
you and displayed as part of the web page.
This does not scale well if you resize your web page; or in fact even if your
web page is not set to the general font size it assumes. So it violates the
requirement to support people with imperfect vision; and will not be legible
if you are projecting the web page to a lecture theatre.
jsMath: relies on javascript in your browser.
It deals with page resizing, but does rely on java being turned on and working.
(For fanatics, it does it even better if you download their fonts, as they
prompt).
MathML: relies on a wannabe "standard" which however at the time of
writing only one version of one browser supports. If you use this extension
of HTML and the one browser (Firefox v.3.n.n) then it works great.
It lets you author very simple math exprs in your HTML (e.g.
y = {x^2} ),
and the Latex for that was "y = {x^2}",
the complete in-line HTML for that was
"(e.g. <span CLASS="math"> y = {x^2} </span>),"
and the additional once-per-document setup was only:
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">.math {visibility: hidden}</STYLE>
<SCRIPT SRC="../jsmath/easy/load.js"></SCRIPT>
This will display on essentially all browsers, but the author has to install
something in their web file space: i.e.
install jsMath on your server i.e. near your web page, in
your file space. This is tens of MBytes and large numbers of files; but
only takes a few minutes, and doesn't require admin. permissions to the server,
only write permission for your own web-served file space.
MathML approach to displaying maths
This currently relies on all your readers using the one enabled browser
(Firefox). This is the browser used in the GU Common Student Environment
(i.e. student computer clusters); and it could be downloaded free by any
student at home. Probably OK for maths students, but less viable than techies
believe for all students e.g. remedial maths work for Education or psychology
students. Few people would download something they weren't going to use for
their major course; and many students have old personal machines that aren't
necessarily high-spec enough for new browsers.
Given that, then the author can write maths directly into their
HTML without special downloads or include files. This is probably a good
solution for Maths lecturers creating materials for their students.
Moodle approach to displaying maths
You can write Latex expressions in Moodle pages (e.g. forums) and have them
display as maths: see here.
It displays correctly on almost any browser (because it produces a GIF image);
and authors (e.g. students contributing to Moodle blogs) can author maths
expressions without installing anything themselves, relying on the Moodle
installation. (But note however that Moodle blog editors don't in fact work
properly even for text on some current browsers.)
The students have to know simple Latex to write such expressions.
Normal web users like me don't; but it is now a standard skill requirement in
maths and related disciplines, and students there are more or less taught it and
required to use it anyway.
This comprises substantial online (moodle) materials for helping students
improve their writing skills. There are extensive exercises for this.
The person doing the project is
Katie Grant.
http://khios.dcs.gla.ac.uk/writing
You can access the moodle, and the "courses" (areas for self-help exercises)
for computing science and for English Literature.
When asked, press the button "Login as guest".
Look over (or print) all the expository advice for one course in one place:
here
Example proforma
for teacher->student notification of areas where self-help remediation is
required. The idea is that while marking a piece of work, the tutor both
writes "13" in the margin of the student script and ticks "13" on the proforma
when they see a problem indicating that self-help work on topic 13 would be
useful.
Malcolm Gladwell:
"Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to
persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you,
to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone's head."
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