Do you ever read a piece of research and wish you could take that idea and run with it?
As part of their special collection on Education & Technology, Science published a report Why Peer Discussion Improves Student Performance on In-Class Concept Questions.
In a lecture theatre containing tens or hundreds of students, individuals are reluctant to speak up when the lecturer addresses questions to the audience. Interactivity can be introduced by providing each student with a clicker and posing a multiple-choice question. The audience responds via the appropriate buttons on the clicker and the combined results can be displayed and discussed. (This technology is used to Ask the Audience on Who wants to be a millionaire?).
In the report, Smith et al used this technology to test whether peer discussion could improve student performance on in-class questions, even when none of the students in the discussion group knew the answer. According to their findings, discussions were useful even when none of the students in the discussion group answered correctly individually.
Examinations are looming large in my mind at the moment. I have long maintained a wish for the opportunity to collaborate in an exam setting – I remember cursing that at A-level, my peers and I could not check each others’ maths papers for those trivial errors that often trip me up.
I would be more than willing to use my upcoming exams to extend Smith’s investigation. If we as a study group were allowed to discuss our answers, I hypothesize that we would be able to cobble together an answer to some of the problems, even if each of us alone were stumped.
Having said that, coursework this past term was the focus of several desparate fruitful discussions and between us we managed to formulate some reasonable responses to the problems we were set in class. We can hope that what we learnt in those late nights in the pub computer lab will have rubbed off when we turn over the paper.
Proposal: introduce two different types of degrees, one achieved with teamwork, the other without. Kind of like having a driving license for driving an automatic vs. a standard transmission..
(I wonder which one would be more
popularproductive?)I don’t think that many people achieve their degrees without teamwork, albeit not in an examination setting.
At the outset of the course it was proposed that as students we would learn more from each other than from our lecturers, and I think (as was suggested in the report) there is a lot of value in being able to talk through our ideas even when we individually felt overwhelmed by the material. Whether we have learnt enough, or the right things, remains to be determined…
bq. Whether we have learnt enough, or the right things, remains to be determined…
Isn’t that what the exam is for?
I can see the value of teamwork for learning, for the reasons you outline (plus, it makes it more fun), but the exam has to test the individual not the group. Testing a team would not tell you about how well the weakest members of the team had understood/learned the material.
There are ideas kicking around university pedagogy about marking groups, based on the group allocating the proportion of the marks to each member. I’ve no idea how well these things work.
Truism warning: I don’t think you can achieve much at all in life (not just in science) without teamwork, regardless of how good you may be. The answers a team can give are always better than those of even a very knowledgeable individual (there are silly assessments, mostly used in management training, that show this quite impressively).
But of course your individual knowledge and skills have to be up to scratch, too – to use my (joking) transmission example again: if you depend on the automatic entirely, you won’t ever be able to drive a stick.. (ok, the picture doesn’t quite do it, maybe I’ll think of a better one!).
Good luck with all of your exams, Erika!!
“In a lecture theatre containing tens or hundreds of students, individuals are reluctant to speak up when the lecturer addresses questions to the audience.”
I remember very clearly situations like this at university! No one would want to be the first to ask a question so we’d sit in silence for minutes at a time as the lecturer got more and more exasperated… tumbleweeds would roll across the classroom…
I really like the idea of ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ style polls and quizzes in lectures, I think they’d be good fun and a great way to encourage interaction.
When I was at university we used to get graded for our participation in tutorials and discussions, giving us the opportunity to earn credit for teamwork. This approach would probably go down better with your tutors than suggesting collaboration in examinations!