Online Pre-Labs: Literature (1)

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Here’s a nice paper on the use of online pre-lab activites to encourage “cognitive focus” in the lab – in other words to help students consider the underlying theory while doing the practical rather than just following the instructions. I’ve tried to summarise it using the graphic below. In doing so I have had to oversimplifiy some aspects, so if you are interested in it, I recommend you follow up the paper!

The reason I like this paper is that it considers several aspects of pre-labs in a single study:

  • cognitive load theory and the development of schemata;
  • the use of simulations in reducing intrinsic cognitive load
  • the above have been considered before in many studies, but this paper adds in student attitudes to learning to the mix and
  • considers a measure of how prelab work allows students to spend more mental effort on the theory underlying the experiment.
  • It also refers to the key literature in these topics, so if you are lazy like me, this is a handy reference!

Students’ Cognitive Focus During a Chemistry Laboratory Exercise: Effect of a Computer-Simulated Prelab, TM Winberg, CAR Berg, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2007, 44, 1108.

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Chemistry Education Research and Practice

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I still remember the pleasant surprise of discovering that there was a journal dedicated to the teaching of chemistry in higher education. Sometime in late 2005, I Googled something about assessment in chemistry, and out came a result: “Assessment in Chemistry and the Role of Examinations“, a great paper questioning the value of our assessment system.  The same issue had an article “Experimenting with Undergraduate Practicals“, which was hugely influential in my own consideration of the role lab education. My love affair with University Chemistry Education—which would later become Chemistry Education Research and Practice after a merger in 2005—began.

Early Themes

A Wordle of the titles of the papers published in U. Chem. Ed. from 1997 – 2004 is shown below. These show that the issues we are still tackling today—critical thinking, effective assessment, embedding transferable skills—have been around the block a few times in the chemistry education community!

Wordle of University Chemistry Education Titles Volumes 1 - 8.

The contents of the very first issue is telling in that regard. Among its articles are Alex Johnstone’s classic ‘…And some fell on good ground’, about prior knowledge and cognitive load in learning chemistry, the basis of my own research over the last three years. Tina Overton’s Creating Critical Chemists had themes of group work and discussion, which are interesting prelude to her hugely influential work on problem based learning in chemistry. The then editor of U. Chem. Ed., John Garratt, wrote a paper entitled Virtual investigations: ways to accelerate experience which discussed the use of pre-lab online exercises as a preparation to in-lab work which included a set of aims of practical work that informed the debate around laboratory education. More than twenty-five years later, these issues are still at the core of our discussions on chemistry education.

The new journal must have quickly gained an audience outside the UK. Apart from letters, Volume 3(1) in 1999 saw three non-UK-based submissions: Brian Murphy (IE), then of IT Sligo, on assessment of IT skills in chemistry (my 2012 CERP paper is on this topic!); Onno de Jong (NL) on how to go about researching chemical education (de Jong has done a lot of work on contextualising chemistry); and George Bodner (US) on an action research study of assessment. International submissions continued at a healthy pace.

Towards CERP

Soon after the establishment of University Chemistry Education in 1997 was the development of Chemical Education Research and Practice in Europe (CERAPIE), edited by Georgios Tsarpalis, in 2000. Like U. Chem. Ed., CERAPIE quickly attracted an international audience, and dropped “in Europe” from its title in 2003. In 2005, U. Chem. Ed. and CERP merged to form a new journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, co-edited by Stephen Breuer who was editor at U. Chem. Ed. since 2001 and Georgios Tsarpalis. From 2007, the journal was included in the ISI Citation Index, a hugely important step in the development of the journal.

According to ISI, 181 papers have been published in CERP since 2007. Among these, 61 (1/3) have been from US, 20 from England, 14 from Australia, 13 from Germany, 9 from Ireland and 7 from Scotland. The top 10 most cited articles are (note that these are biased by age!)

  1. Donald Treagust’s (AUS) excellent work on two-tier diagnostic assessment
  2. Norman Reid’s (SCO) seminal paper on the role of laboratory work in chemistry
  3. Lewis and Lewis’ (US) work on predicting at-risk students in General chemistry
  4. One of the early papers on clickers in chemistry by Loretta Jones (I have written about that here)
  5. One in Hofstein’s important series discussing laboratory education
  6. Absolutely ground breaking work done here at DIT :) on project based learning in the lab
  7. Cooper and Sandi-Urena’s work on metacognition in chemistry (check out last issue of 2011 for an update to this work)
  8. Mark Buntine and Justin Read’s work on undergraduate practical development ACELL
  9. Stolk and de Jongs’ paper on context based education in teacher training
  10. Domin’s work on conceptual development in a PBL laboratory setting

The Future

Issue 4, 2011 saw the retirement of both Stephen Breuer and Georgios Tsarpalis as editors of CERP. I think the chemistry education community has much to be grateful to them for, as they have provided a platform for practitioners and researchers in chemical education to share and debate ideas for more than a decade. For new and continuing lecturers, it is a great resource for stimulating a consideration of how we teach chemistry.

Interestingly, this last issue under their stewardship had themes which were very similar to those mentioned in the first issue of U. Chem. Ed.—technology in education, including laboratory education; conceptualising chemical concepts; and developing critical thinking through enquiry. The new editor, Keith Taber, has a big task ahead of him continuing on the work of this great journal. His own association goes back to 2000, when he wrote an article on teaching chemistry with a consideration of prior knowledge.

I am planning a follow-up article to consider some of the themes highlighted in CERP in more detail. If you’d like to be involved, or have any particular favourites, let me know!

Virtual investigations: ways to accelerate experience

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Twitter and Professional Development

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I was, in the time-scale of the internet, a little late to the Twitter party. If the early adopters were Cambrian, I am probably somewhere around Jurassic. Like many, I thought it was about what you ate for breakfast (weetabix and a nice cup of tea, thanks) and tweckling people from your multi-dimension dual monitor super PC workstation.

Since joining, and engaging with Twitter, I have grown to love it. Twitter can be anything you want it to be. If you want to know when Brangelina have a cup of tea (herbal I assume), discuss politics of Europe, or get the latest news on your own particular, even peculiar, interest, it’s all there for you. Personally, I have found it very useful in my own professional development in the three areas I am passionate about: chemistry (education), (education) technology, and history.

To this end, I follow several people who have interests in one or all of these themes.They post things of interest, something they have read, or written, that they liked, and perhaps an opinion on it. It’s likely that since I am following them because of a shared interest, I will find it interesting too. I can reply and have a chat about it, or pass it on to the people who follow you. This differs greatly from an RSS feed (which of course everybody must use by now, don’t you?!) where all content is posted, for example from a journal, and I have to find the stuff I am interested in. In other words the personal and community nature is removed. In this way, Twitter is a great learning tool, because I come across examples, arguments, and useful tools that will enhance my own professional life—professional in this case because of the nature of people I follow.

Twitter differs from email, in that you don’t have to read anything or everything in your Twitter stream. I like to try, and to that end I keep the number of people I follow low, sometimes excluding those who are very interesting but tweet a lot. Usually these people blog too, so I catch up with their interests there. Unfortunately, some people tweet the same thing several times, which should be banned! I generally stop following them. I’ve listed below some people I would recommend—this isn’t exhaustive, the aim is to give a flavour.

History

Before the humanities people run off on me and move to the next blog on 12th century archives, I’ll mention them first. There is a surprisingly very active community of historians on Twitter, for any time period you are interested in.

  • National Library of Ireland: There’s a whole thesis that someone will write about the NLI’s use of social media, which is a model that many should emulate. It is tempting for institutions to just disseminate in a one way, but the good people at NLI understand the dynamics of conversation, providing a useful service and building a community. I could go on for days, let’s just say I ♥ NLI.
  • The Magpie Historian: A classic example of when someone else’s interests overlap your own (except theirs is an encyclopaedia of knowledge), every tweet is of interest – architechtural and social history, my favourites have a 19th century bent, and a nice blog to go with it.
  • Learn about Archives: fantastic and generous source of information and discussion on all sorts of Irish archives.
  • Great to see that Marsh’s Library are a recent addition. Beautiful images regularly shared.

Educational Technology

Ed Tech people were obviously among the early adopters to Twitter, and it was at an EdTech conference that I first came across it. Lots of people who share and discuss useful ideas relating to educational technology in teaching. Concentrating on third level, some of those I find useful are (this is not exhaustive!):

  • The DIT group: @muireannOK (blogs, wikis, e-portfolios, academic writing, clickers, etc), @m_crehan (supporting learners, 1st year experience, academic writing) and @kcor1964(HE policy, ed tech in education, reads the New York Times so you don’t have to)
  • The Galway group: @sharonlflynn (clickers, plagiarism policy and practice) @catherinecronin (engagement of learners through tech, digital literacies) and @marloft (The Magpie Historian (see above) of the Ed Tech World)
  • International: @traceymadden (oers, accessibility, pragmatic stuff you can use) @marksmithers (practical matters, policy, says what you want to but are afraid to), @antoesp (Ed Tech theory, digital scholarship, information source), @clairebrooks (technology in education across a range of applications)

Chemistry

One of the really great things about Twitter for me is connecting with chemistry people around the world. Chemists were a little late to the party, but there numbers have swollen recently. I like following chemists for several reasons, obviously for my primary interest in discussing how we can teach chemistry, but also following people who are doing chemistry research and talk about it or share information on the application of chemistry. These often provide great case studies for use in teaching (most recent example is this excellent video from @professor_dave on the chemistry of transplantation). It has also been great to follow chemistry teachers in schools, as this gives me a lot of insight in dealing with new students at third level. Finally, people who are involved in science communication and sharing the science love – again I have got lots of useful information. I’ve grouped them below as I see them (obviously by their very nature they fit in more than one box, but where would we be without categories? Chaos, that’s where).

So go on – try Twitter!

I am @michaelkls. the most horrific and useless username possible. But there you go.

*Apologies to people I haven’t named directly. I love every 208 209 of you.

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Implementation of Research Based Teaching Strategies

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The traditional, almost-folkloric, based approach to teaching science is a stark contrast to the evidence-based research approach scientists consider in their everyday research. The quote by Joel Michael* highlights the contrast:

As scientists, we would never think of writing a grant proposal without a thorough knowledge of the relevant literature, nor would we go into the laboratory to actually do an experiment without knowing about the most current methodologies being employed in the field. Yet, all too often, when we go into the classroom to teach, we assume that nothing more than our expert knowledge of the discipline and our accumulated experiences as students and teachers are required to be a competent teacher. But this makes no more sense in the classroom than it would in the laboratory!

In discussing the implementation of innovative teaching techniques, this post is drawing on the work of Charles Henderson who spoke at a conference earlier this year on his analysis of the impact of physics education research on the physics community in US. I think there are lessons for chemists from this work. (The underlying assumption here is that moving from traditional methods of teaching based on information transmission to student-centred or active teaching improves student learning. This position is I think consolidated by a significant body of research.)

Change Mechanisms

The decision to use what Anderson called Research Based Instructional Strategies (RBIS) by a lecturer follows five stages, described by Rogers: (1) knowledge or awareness about the innovation; (2) persuasion about its effectiveness;  (3) deciding to use the innovation; (4) implementing the innovation; and (5) confirmation to continue its use.

Awareness of RBIS obviously underlies this process. A 2008 survey by Henderson and Dancy of 722 physics faculty showed that 87% were familiar with at least 1 of 24 identified RBIS applicable to introductory physics, and 48% reporting that they use at least one in their teaching. Time was reported as the most common reason why faculty did not implement more RBIS in their teaching.

A subsequent study by Henderson examined the individual stages of the implementation process in more detail and found that:

  • 12% of faculty had no awareness
  • 16% had knowledge but did not implement (Stage 1-2, above)
  • 23% discontinued after trying (Stage 3-4)
  • 26% continued use at a low level (Stage, 5, 1 – 2 RBIS)
  • 23% continued a a high level (Stage, 5, >3 RBIS)

Innovation Bottleneck

Henderson uses his data to demonstrate that on the whole, the physics education community does a good job of dissemination of RBIS to the community of educators. Just 12% of faculty had no awareness, and 1/6 of those who did, made no attempt to implement any. Therefore it can be argued that the fall-off in innovation is at a later stage in the change process. Hence efforts to encourage innovation should aim to address the one third of those with awareness who discontinue after a trial and those with a low level of continuance to build on their success. These groups may be a more suitable focus for consideration, in terms of percentage, as well as the fact that they were willing to give an innovation a go, when compared to those who had knowledge but did not try any innovation.

Teasing this out appears to be difficult. The decision to continue seems to come down to personal characteristics, such as desire to find out more, and gender (female twice as likely to continue than male, but the paper does dispel some traditional conceptions about who is innovative and who isn’t!).

However, in terms of practical measures that can be made the following are listed:

  • Practice literature can present an overly rosy picture of implementation. Therefore, when someone trys it and hits an unexpected hurdle (student resistance and complaints, concerns over breadth of content, outcomes not as expected), there is a sense that it isn’t working, and the innovation is discontinued. Therefore it is important that practice literature gives a full and honest account of implementation.
  • Implementation can be modified to the person’s own circumstances, and in modification, the effectiveness of the innovation is lost. Therefore, pitfalls and important issues in the dissemination stage (workshops, talks, etc) should be highlighted.
  • There is evidence that if an innovation is supported by the designer during the implementation phase, the innovation is more successfully implemented.

Now, who wants to do this analysis for UK/Ireland chemistry?!

References

Charles Henderson, Melissa H. Dancy, Magdalena Niewiadomska-Bugaj (2010) Variables that Correlate with Faculty Use of Research-Based Instructional Strategies, 169-172. In Proceedings of the 2010 Physics Education Research Conference.

Charles Henderson & Dancy, M. (2009) The Impact of Physics Education Research on the Teaching of Introductory Quantitative Physics in the United States, Physical Review Special Topics: Physics Education Research, 5 (2), 020107.

*Thanks to my colleague Claire Mc Donnell for giving me this quote: Joel Michael, Advances in Physiology Education, (2006) 30, 159-167.

Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of innovations (4th ed.). New York: Free Press.

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The rise and rise of clickers in chemistry

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As recently as 2008, a review of clickers in Chemistry Education Research and Practice had difficulty finding reports of their use in chemistry lecture rooms. In the intervening years, the increase in usage has been nothing short of meteoric. It’s interesting to survey the recent literature to consider how clickers are used in chemistry.

Simple response

The first category is those who use clickers in a simple check of the class’ understanding of a topic – do they know x? King (JCE, 2011, doi: 10.1021/ed1004799) describes the use of clickers to allow a class to identify the ‘muddiest point’, with the most common cause of difficulty being the subject of a review in the following lecture.

Initiate class/peer discussion

The second type of usage is to use clickers to gauge opinion from the class, often on a misconception, and use the initial class responses as a basis for discussion, with possible reassessment. Wagner (JCE, 2009, 86(11), 1300) describes the use of clickers in this manner, for example in asking students: which of the following substances has the ID(50) value? [aspirin; DDT; nicotine; caffeine; ethanol]; and initiating a subsequent class discussion based on the student responses. Mazur’s Peer Instruction is based on this approach.

Considering sequences

Ruder and Straumanis have a very nice paper (JCE, 2009, 86(12), 1392) on using digit response function in some clicker handsets so that students may input a sequence. Two examples illustrate the concept. in the first, students have to select which two precursors from two lists of reagents (in this example Michael donors and acceptors) they would choose in order to prepare a desired product. In their second example, students are asked to select the reagents they would add, in the correct sequence, to produce a desired product. These questions offer two advantages; they allow for a much larger set of possible answers and so minimise a lucky guess and they require students not only to know an answer, but to consider that answer in the context of a total problem. Clickers which do not allow numerical answers can still consider this approach – several more incorrect answers can be easily generated, and if clever, common wrong answers can be included. In fact, the authors say that they only show the responses to the top few most common incorrect answers.

This approach is also used by these authors to test students on curly arrow mechanisms – carbon atoms in a diagram are numbered, and students can describe their understanding of the mechanism by entering multiple-digit responses to represent a mechanism. It’s clever, but some of the very extensive models described seem a bit elaborate to expect students to be able to “code” their curly arrow mechanism into numbers. However, it shows how far the technology could be pushed. A similar approach using numbered carbons on complex organic structures as a basis for numerical entry is described by Flynn in her work on teaching retrosynthesic analysis (JCE, 2011, doi: 0.1021/ed200143k).

What and why?

My own use of clickers follows Treagust’s work (e.g. CERP, 2007, 8 (3), 293-307), where he asks students two-stage multiple choice questions. The first is a simple response, and the second is asking students to select why they chose that response. This work by Treagust is very clever, as it allows students who may know or guess the correct answer to really challenge themselves on their understanding of why they know what they know. The wrong answers in Treagust’s work are developed from literature reports of misconceptions. He has been very generous in sharing examples of these in the past.

In the lab

My colleagues Barry Ryan and Julie Dunne completed some work using clickers to assess pre-and post-lab activities. You can find out more about that here.

Do you use clickers? If so, I’d be interested to hear how in order to compile a “Chemist’s User’s Guide”.

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UnimPrezi

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Prezi arrived on the scene about two (maybe three?) years ago. Since its introduction, conference attendees’ snoozing during a succession of PowerPoints has been interupted by a sense of sea-sickness induced by well-meaning presenters and their carefully crafted Prezis. All Prezis I have seen are like a PowerPoint presentation riding along a rollercoaster. They are linear in format, usually contain bullet-points (a major faux-pas in the eyes of Prezi-purists) and have a start, middle and end. They offer no additional advantage to PowerPoint. I don’t really like admitting this to the learning community, but I don’t really like Prezi.

Exhibit A:

Take the Prezi below. This was my one live presentation I gave at a chemistry education conference, I think in 2009. What attracted me to Prezi was the fact that you could show the audience the overall presentation in one go, and as you go along highlight the sections of the talk you go through as you progress. (This Prezi, for extra nerdiness, was shaped as a reaction profile diagram, which no-one in the audience noticed. For shame, physical chemists, for shame). It had pictures and videos embedded. It took me an age to do and I was very proud of it

I wonder however, in the effort to help peple get a grasp on the overall presentation, whether I lost them in the detail of the talk with a constantly swishing screen. Even now I can see faces in the audience following the presentation as it rolled around, probably trying to wonder where to focus next, as I wished helplessly for the presentation to stop being so gut-churningly jolly. There is something elegant and simple about a well designed PowerPoint slide.

Exhibit B:

Well I don’t like to pick on other people, but if you’ve made a Prezi, can you take a step back and ask yourself, what added value does it have over PowerPoint? There is an add-in for PowerPoint that allows slides to be grouped together. PowerPoint animation is becoming really quite impressive. PowerPoint doesn’t leave you fretting about whether the computer you’re giving the presentation on will have Flash Player. PowerPoint doesn’t make your audience seasick.

Exhibit C

We all recognise there is something terrible about most PowerPoint presentations. But people interested in technology have a terrible habit of ambulance chasing the latest gig (see Exhibit A) rather than taking something that’s quite good and working on it to improve it. For PowerPoint, I think disabling the bullet point, having a maximum word count per slide and creating purposeful handouts for after presentation digestion are three ways to improve.

Exhibit D

Someone very cleverly suggested to me today that Prezi could be a very useful mind-mapping software. I think that has potential. But it’s not a presentation!

I want to be wrong about Prezi. I really do. It looks and feels cool. But I just don’t see it as a good alternative for presentations. Am I wrong?!!

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Variety in Chemistry Education 2011

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Variety in Chemistry Education (ViCE) UK is one of those conferences. Unmissable, pragmatic, friendly, and always informative. I’ve gone every year since I started teaching, and love catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. Its value lies in the fact that it is based on presentations by chemistry lecturers on things they have tried in their own teaching—so it is a treasure trove of new ideas of things to try. This year we found out using clickers in David Read’s talk that 48% of attendees were first-timers, a good measure of a well-established and thought of conference. Like last year’s Variety (which I wrote about here), I came away with a real boost in motivation for the start of the new academic year.

Keynotes

The opening keynote is traditionally given by the RSC Higher Education Teaching Award winner which for 2010 was David Read. I’ve heard him speak before about school to university transition, outreach, contextualising learning, lecture capture, and more. His background as a school teacher now working in the university system gives him a good view on transition issues. He spoke, amongst other things, about going full circle in developing a really nice suite of resources on worked examples—first at A-level and then at undergraduate level—which aim to demystify the assessment process. The latter were made using Camtasia Studio, which accompanied video lectures of key aspects of chemistry causing difficulties. An example of these is on YouTube. There’s also a nice example of a department tour that I’d like to try myself for pre-induction information. Those interested in the forthcoming review of Leaving Cert Chemistry might be interested in David’s analysis of A-Level chemistry. As if that’s not enough, he also pointed us to an bank of copyright free images for use in lecture-capture in chemistry (physical chemistry at the moment). This is a busy man.

Simon Belt, from Plymouth, was awarded a UK National Teaching Fellowship and his entertaining lecture Karaoke Chemistry used the talk titles of several previous Variety talks since 1993 to show how trends in chemistry education were changing, slowly. This provided the background to addressing a wholescale programme redesign for chemistry programmes in Plymouth. The approach was novel—considering what outcomes were desirable, picking just five of the most important of these (usually quite generic – e.g. research skills, project management, lab skills, etc), completing an outcomes audit, gauging the level of the outcomes addressed (usually quite low or not at all, which as the speaker noted was unsurprising as the original design did not include those) and then identifying how outcomes could be introduced into the curriculum. The process took a year and is still ongoing. It was brilliant to see a live example of a meaningful programme redesign and how it could occur in practice, incorporating mechanisms to get all staff on board. Simon is one of the best speakers in the business, and he used pictures of singers to underline several of his points (hence the title of the talk).

Ingo Eilks from Bremen gave a talk on the history of the lecture. I was a bit disappointed not to see more about his work in rethinking how lectures can be given, although this work, at an early stage, should be interesting to follow.

Presentations

Lots of presentations (15 mins) and bytes (5 mins), so it is hard to pick out ones to mention. In terms of themes, lecture capture is one of interest. It seems to be evolving, moving on from full lectures to shorter screencasts on topics that are causing difficulties. Simon Lancaster gave a talk on a collaboration with David Read (yes, him again) on chemistry vignettes which they are developing on a variety of topics; something similar is being developed at Leicester by Dylan Williams. Another theme was lecture or lab preparation, with our own talk on pre-lecture activities, and Gita Sedghi presented a talk on Liverpool’s VITAL pre-lab tutoring system. Visualisation is a component of this, and Liverpool’s excellent (and technically amazing) ChemTube3D project was well represented by Neil Berry and virtual experiments described by Charles Harrison, a student of David Read’s (yes, him, again). Jmol also featured in a brilliant talk by Nigel Young which had vibrations of molecules in tune with classic hits (open access but I can’t find the link).  Eleanor Crabb from the OU gave a great talk on supporting students using chat rooms and forums.

Following last year’s publication of Hanson and Overton’s Skills Audit, a lot of talks looked at professional skills, and all of them embedded the teaching of these skills into the chemistry curriculum. From writing chemistry books in an intensive week at Teeside to a communications module in Birmingham and a development of a suite of modules across a programme in Reading, there were lots of ideas for how to develop our delivery of these key skills. Kyle Galloway completed an impressive audit of student opinion of what they considered to be important key skills at various stages. There was a nice byte from James Gaynor on using wikis (with a useful reference: Educ. Assessment, 2006, 11(1), 1-31) which I would have liked to have been a full talk as he had some nice stuff to talk about on self- and peer-assessment, something which scares me greatly and I’d like to know more about it! My podcasting workshop reduced some people to song, better than tears I suppose. Lorraine McCormack nearly had us all in tears with an excellent talk on the gap between what Piaget says should be the cognitive development of our students and what her results actually find (for Irish students).

Ends of Eras

The Variety was the last one to be organised by the amazingly excellent UK Higher Education Academy Physical Sciences Centre which has closed following a reorganisation of structure at the HEA. We could only look on in envy at our UK colleagues with the support the Centre provided, and they were always generous in making their resources and workshops available beyond borders. It’s conferences like Variety that were the hallmark of the Centre, pragmatic and immediately useful, but backed up by a core of good research and scholarship. They will be missed. Variety will continue though under the auspices of the RSC Tertiary Education Group, which is good news.

Stephen Breur, editor of the excellent Chemistry Education Reseach and Practice journal wil also be missed, as he hands his editorship over to Keith Taber this week. CERP, and its predecessor University Chemistry Education are a place where reports on the scholarship and practice of teaching in chemistry had a good home. Stephen, along with his co-editor brought the journal into the ISI citations and saw it get an excellent impact factor—a real testament to the editors dedication to the promotion of the journal among all interested in chemistry education.

Twitter (#VCE11) featured prominently and a nice storyful (day 1, day 2) was compiled by @kjhaxton. Pathetically, I couldn’t tweet on Day 1 as I forgot my wifi code and on Day 2 I was just too, er, tired.

Looking forward to ViCE 2012 already! Got my kilt ready…

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On the general wonderfulness of the Learning, Teaching, and Technology Centre at DIT

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I’ve done a few courses at DIT’s Learning Teaching and Technology Centre (LTTC) and am just finishing my latest, the brilliant MSc (Applied E-Learning). It’s proof, yet again, of the diversity of talent, the pragmatic inspiration, and the extent of expertise of the staff at the LTTC.

Not that more proof is needed. The Centre have just hosted their second DRHEA E-Learning Summer School this week, themselves following on from in-house summer schools that have run for several years. I loitered around for the last two days at the summer school this year, and harassed a few attendees wh0 were from institutions in the Dublin region. They were, as I was last year at the end of the week, tired from a hard week of immersion into finding out about e-learning, but enthused with a range of ideas they could take back to their practice. This is the hallmark of the Centre. I’ve read (on the Interweb) that teaching centres can be at a distance from what goes on on the ground – a common complaint in the UK, it seems. In all the courses I have done, every one of them has been delivered so that it interweaves with the participants’ practice, allows for discussion with peers of common ground and has given me something to take back to my teaching. That’s no mean feat, but it’s something they do well. Their loyal and ever-growing fan-base in DIT is a testament to the collegial nature, in the very best sense, that the Centre fosters. It struck me this week that it must be very satisfying that a small group of dedicated people can ultimately have a direct impact on a large number of students’ college experience.

In September, for the first time in six years, I won’t be doing a course at the Centre. I’ll be peering through the windows on Mount St., wandering the corridors looking for a flip chart, lurking online waiting for a discussion post. I might just grow a moustache and start all over again.I’m still not quite sure about my epistemology.

In the meantime, thanks to all of my Mount St friends!!

 

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New Directions

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It’s hard to believe we are at the end of another academic year. It doesn’t seem long ago since I was welcoming new first years in and giving my final year induction talk to the incoming anxious, but eager fourth years. But here we are already in mid-June, which also means the end of my Teaching Fellowship on pre-lecture resources.

I am becoming more and more certain about the role of discussion in class, which the pre-lectures facilitated.

Looking back on the year, I’m incredibly proud of the work on pre-lecture resources. While the techy bits indulge my nerd-side, their impact on my teaching style will be long lasting. The initial excitement of monitoring their impact quantitatively on student grades was encouraging, but a more influential output is that my concept of what a lecture can be is evolving. I am becoming more and more certain about the role of discussion in class, which the pre-lectures facilitated. Things as elaborate as problem-based learning and as simple as “think-pair-share” all have discussion at their core. I’ve tried with my Learny-Teachy hat on in the past to get students engaged and interacting with me as a lecturer; but almost by accident, the pre-lecture resources got them interacting with each other. Since observing this and the positive impact in the classroom, it’s something that is going to be embedded in my teaching method in the future.

The project is formally finished, although it will of course be tweaked and adjusted for use next year. We, in the Chemistry Education Research Team, are moving on to an exciting new project this month. We’re going back to our roots. Our first collaborative project was on context-based laboratory mini-projects, (you can read the paper here) and we are returning to that theme now to develop a suite of context based laboratory and lecture resources and e-resources, supported by the Royal Society of Chemistry. It’s a big, quite ambitious project, and we are starting into a busy summer working on it. But like all of these things, lessons formal and informal will trickle into our on experiences as educators, and ultimately into student learning experiences. I’m looking forward to getting stuck in.

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E-learning (dis)traction

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I think the start of my teaching career coincided with the rise of the VLE. Early on, I remember being told about these new learning environments and the array of tools that would help student learning. Encouraged, in the nicest possible way, to upload material and use the institution’s expensive new toy, many lecturers complied and uploaded course materials, support papers, practice questions and so on. In this ideal world, the students couldn’t have had more learning resources at their fingertips. Learning was going to happen.

In reality, this has not been the case. The DRHEA e-learning audit (2009) reveals some disappointing figures across the Dublin region. Students regularly log into their VLE, but mostly access it to access course materials (lecture notes). This makes VLEs a very expensive version of Dropbox or other online repository.

This is also reflected in the UK. In my own subject (chemistry) and in physics, the Higher Education Academy Physical Sciences Centre review of student learning experience showed that e-learning came bottom of the pile when students were asked to say which teaching method was most effective and most enjoyable.

A Distraction

For most lecturers, e-learning is not part of their day to day practice, perhaps because of lack of confidence, probably because of lack of awareness. Mention e-learning, and the discussion quickly moves to whether to use PowerPoint and whether those notes should go online.There may also be subtle fears of replacement – that if learning can happen online, perhaps it can happen without lecturers at all! (Of course, anyone who has taught online knows the truth here!). And as the DRHEA survey shows, if academics engage with the VLE, it tends to be in the form of mimicking what they do in lectures, rather than supporting what is done in lectures.

Institutions, bless them, are concerned with e-learning from a perspective of usage and branding – how does their toy compare with next door. There have also been subtle and not so subtle undertones about how e-learning can provide cost-savings in the future, which is a naive viewpoint. Institutions need to be protected from themselves. If, as a community, we don’t consider valuable uses for incorporating into our practice, institutions will want to fill the vacuum, just as was done previously with pushing content online. Lecture capture, a spectacular waste of tax-payers money, is looming large and is already catching on in the UK. It looks good, makes for good PR and students “love” it. The fact that there is little or no evidence to show that it helps with learning is disregarded. As a community of educators, we should be concerned about this “innovation” being pushed on us [I recommend reading this for a fuller discussion of lecture capture]

Students, well bless them too. Students are clever, articulate, funny and they are our future. But they are also sometimes a bit stupid. Students will always want more – more notes online, more resources, more quizzes, self-study questions, more more and more! In the relaxed days several months before exams, they mean well and plan to engage with all of this material. But all the evidence points to the fact that students rarely engage with the material until it is too late, just before exams. At this stage, they find the nature of the content, often not even re-purposed for an online environment (substitution of what they have rather than supplemental to help them understand what they have), useless for their learning.

Finally, we have my very good friends, the learning development officers, who try various strategies, sometimes against all the odds, to assist lecturers in incorporating e-learning into their teaching. Locally, their help has been of great value to me, but reading about e-learning on blogs and on The Twitter Machine, there is a sense that the ideas and conversations within the learning development community does not reflect what is happening on the ground. There is perhaps a false sense of advancement, buffered from the great unwashed of PowerPoint debaters by early adopters and innovations in the literature. This can lead to a disconnect in language – acronyms, gadgets and tech jargon which results in the lack of confidence among lecturers who may wish to change. The term “learning technologist” does not help, as it immediately imposes a (false) divide between learning and e-learning.

Gaining traction?

So, what to do? The high participation rates in VLEs indicate that this is a place where learning opportunities can be provided. Students are hungry to engage, if material is there. One of my favourite authors in the literature on e-learning for practitioners is Gilly Salmon (Gill-e-Salmon?). A core component of her approach is for practitioners to ask themselves: “What is the pedagogic rationale for implementing any proposed change?“. I think  this is a very powerful position – it speaks in language all perspectives can understand, or at least appreciate (institutions I am looking at you). Lecturers, identifying problems or issues in some teaching practices can consider how to integrate a change, perhaps harnessing technology, into their teaching. Because there is a need; an underlying rationale even; the implementation has a value and a role to play in the module delivery. Lecturers may refer to it, and better still integrate it into their class work. Students are now presented with specific, often bespoke learning materials with specific purpose of supporting their learning at a particular stage of their learning in the module. Instead of just representing lecture information all over again, there is a reason at particular stages in the module, to interact with these reasons – they have a value. Learning development officers can offer their considerable expertise in supporting lecturers in developing the resources, so that they are fit for a purpose. And institutions are happy because students are happy and access statistics look good. In our own work here at DIT, we have enjoyed some success at the micro-level employing this approach – moving away from mass content upload (“shovelware”) towards specific learning resources tailored for and incorporated into specific modules. It takes time and is harder work, but the value of what is produced is greater for all.

Now, I feel better after that.

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Leaving Cert Chemistry – Example of Context

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In a previous post, I had a ramble about how the LC chemistry curriculum needs reform. This post aims to put a bit more meat on the bones. There is a lot of material available for teaching chemistry in context, but a recent paper* on the topic is worth considering, as it discusses the implementation of a context-based module in a school setting, particularly focussing on teachers’ experiences.

Overview

The paper describes the curricular reform undertaken in Israel, where “since  early 1950s, Israeli chemistry teachers focused on students’ memorization of scientific facts and algorithms that could support them while solving textbook exercises and problems”. Ten modules with a context-based approach were developed designed for the final two years of school chemistry. The module under investigation in this research study was the “Taste of Chemistry” module, dealing with food, nutrition, health and social aspects, along with higher order thinking skills, and was delivered for 30 hours over two months. An underlying philosophy of this approach is that “achieving scientific literacy for all students, not only those who will eventually embark on a career in the sciences, has become a central goal for education“. In describing the approach, the authors state that:

The module focuses on teaching concepts, processes, and different thinking skills along with context-based chemistry topics, such as lipids, carbohydrates and proteins. The students are exposed to the chemical aspect of food and nutrition, and each topic is designed to promote the three main thinking skills embedded in the module:

(1) information analysis and bidirectional transfer between tables and graphs;

(2) molecular representations which include understanding and transfer between various molecular models;

(3) understanding concepts and processes at four chemistry understanding levels [macroscopic, microscopic, symbolic, process].

Example of content

An example of lipids is presented below. If you are not a chemist, its important to realise that the chemistry goals here are similar to what would be desirable from a traditional curriculum – but the rationale for this method is that (a) it presents the information in a contextualised manner (with the benefits of that approach) and (b) additional higher order thinking skills and relevance to informed citizenship can be incorporated at no added cost – the approach throws this in for free.

The goals are that students will “understand the relations between molecular structure of fatty acids (symbolic) and the substance properties (microscopic)” and “understand the importance of fatty acids and lipids to our diet and increasing our awareness to the existence of fats in common foods”. The first goal is a chemical one, the second is a nutritional/health/social one.

The thinking skills associated with these goals are that students will be able to analyze “graphs and tables with information on fatty acids and triglycerides”, transfer between multiple representations of molecular models and transfer between chemistry understanding levels. A case study on chocolate is provided as a means of putting this in practice.

Finally, the activities associated with the lipids topic are investigation of the double bond in fatty acids using plastic and computer models, and investigating free fatty acids in olive oil by inquiry based experiment. This is coupled with a web-guided activity on cholesterol.

Findings of implementation

Eight teachers were engaged in the research study. The advantages of the approach, according to them, was that it gave them the opportunity for professional development (learning new topics, improving knowledge) and that it increased interest and motivation (enjoyed talking with students about how chemistry relates to everyday life). The difficulties were that teachers felt insecure about their background knowledge (summer program was beneficial), unaware about how to facilitate classroom discussions (although the comments indicated that this related to content awareness and was otherwise enjoyable) and that the students were used to symbolic and mathematical representations and found the larger amount of text in the context-based approach was difficult. They also commented on the teaching of thinking skills (analyzing information, molecular representations and chemistry understanding levels).

Implications and Recommendations

This method required continuous support in terms of professional development of teachers, to inform the content and pedagogical aspects of implementing this method. The figure below is used to illustrate the stages of professional development. Another difficulty outlined was that since it was the first run, there wasn’t a template of exam to consider, which made it difficult to prepare. However, even though this was the case, the score achived in this module (91%) was much higher than those in traditional other modules (molecular bonding and structure – 77%, carbon compounds – 79%).

Teachers also provided their own tips for taking this approach, including awareness of the multi-disciplinary nature of the approach, broadening knowledge base from a variety of sources to help with discussions, be ready to assist with skills students “should” know from other elements of their teaching – e.g. graphing – in integrative elements, use small group activities to allow students discuss concepts and use models as much as possible.

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*S Avargil, O Herscovitz and YJ Dori, Teaching Thinking Skills in Context-Based Learning: Teachers’ Challenges and Assessment Knowledge, J. Sci. Educ. Technol., 2011, DOI: 10.1007/s10956-011-9302-7

 

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Worked Examples in Chemistry – Literature

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This post aims to summarise some literature on the use of worked examples in the teaching of problem solving in chemistry. Crippen, drawing from the work of Sweller and others has summarised worked examples as follows (taken from Crippen, 2010, below):

Worked examples are sample problems which have already been solved and provide the learner with a model representation about how to think though complex items (Mwangi & Sweller, 1998). They are intentionally similar in content and structure to the quiz items under consideration for the current study. Worked examples are not scripted, but provide the learner with a knowledge base to understand concepts by demonstrating the necessary steps taken to arrive at a defined solution. They are an especially effective technique for increasing the problem solving skills of novice learners (Kalyuga, Chandler, Tuovinen, & Sweller, 2001), but can also assist in the same way with a more comprehensive audience of learners (Ward & Sweller, 1990). Worked examples also provide an efficient use of limited cognitive resources needed for schema acquisition preferable to mean-ends analysis problem solving methods (Sweller, 1988). Since worked examples are opened only when prompted by the user (learner), we consider this action a self-regulatory behavior.

A Valid and Reliable Instrument for Cognitive Complexity Rating Assignment of Chemistry Exam Items, K Knaus, K Murphy, A Bleckling, T Holme, Journal of Chemical Education, 2011, 88, 554-560. DOI

  • While not about worked examples per se, this paper ties in to the area in two important respects – in considering cognitive load of questions in general and in considering the cognitive components of a question, and attributing a load or rating to these.
  • An example of how a problem could be rated is provided and considers the the concepts and skills and their relative difficulty, and the level of interactivity between the concepts and skills. The rating is found by using a rubric to score the values obtained from this analysis.
  • Correlation was found between the rating of questions and student performance (r = .498), rating of questions and student mental effort ratings (r = .492),

Applying cognitive theory to chemistry instruction: the case for worked examples, KJ Crippen and DW Brooks, Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 2009, 10, 35 – 41. DOI

  • Perspective of literature around key concepts in feedback, worked examples, scaffolding, etc based on cognitive load theory applied to chemistry.
  • Purports that “Instruction that places a heavy emphasis on learning from open-ended problems, those often touted as motivational, is inefficient and ineffective because of its cognitive resource requirements. Instruction that requires students to learn from and interact with structured worked examples of closed-ended problems is consistent with contemporary models of human learning and produces efficient and effective results.“
  • Distinguishes between engaging in an activity and deliberative practice in learning how to do an activity. In the former, there is no (cognitive) room for criticism, evaluation of feed-back, etc. In the latter, “the situation is constructed specifically so that one can allocate energy for practice and dealing with feedback, especially disconfirming feedback.“
  • Defines worked examples as those which contain: “a) a problem formulation, b) solution steps and c) the final solution“.

Impact of web-based worked examples and self-explanation on performance, problem-solving, and self-efficacy, KJ Crippen and BL Earl, Computers and Education, 2007, 49, 809. DOI

  • This paper describes the use of providing worked examples and self-explanation prompts to improve problem solving capacity in chemistry. Worked examples are used in the context of cognitive load theory, as they can reduce the cognitive load in solving new problems, as learners can focus on problem solving. The paper distinguishes between worked examples instruction for inexperienced learners and problem solving practice for experienced students. The work is based on a prior study which demonstrated that students use extensively worked examples and self-explanation prompts and find them helpful.
  • A quiz is available to students on a weekly basis matching their lecture content. Correct and incorrect results and a grade are provided at the end of each week. The experimental group were provided with questions and three worked examples (designed in accordance with literature guidelines); the experimental group were provided with either worked examples or self-explanation prompts.
  • The results were limited by the fact that there was a small sample size, but showed that there was little difference in exam score between students who were provided with worked examples and those in the control group. The authors suggest that worked examples may be of use in questions that are well structured. The addition of a self-explanation prompt did result in an improvement in score relative to the control group, and the authors argue that this additional component to providing worked examples provide students with context for interpreting examples and activating learning strategies.
  • Project Website: http://crippen.nevada.edu/chemistry/WE_Study/

The effects of feedback protocol on self-regulated learning in a web-based worked example learning environment, Computers and Education, 2010, 55, 1470. DOI

  • Subsequent paper to that described above (2007)
  • Aims to examine worked example feedback protocols that will best enhance achievement and motivation
  • Describes literature into the different types of learners: (1) aim is to successfully learn how to complete a task; (2) aim is to avoid misunderstanding or making an error; (3) aim is to outperform others; (4) aim is to avoid embarrassment compared to others. The results are discussed in the context of these learner types.
  • As above. learners were presented with questions and the option of selecting a worked example/self-explanation prompt.
  • Feedback protocols varied between different groups of the sample of students (184): students received their quiz score and the class average (norm-referenced) or students received their quiz score compared to their cumulative attempts (self-referenced).
  • Results were inconclusive, and authors propose that a mixture of norm- and self-referenced feedback (e.g. by allowing them to toggle between the two).
  • A subsequent paper on this topic is: Scaffolding motivation through the use of worked examples, Journal of Interactive Learning Research in press.

More on the way…

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