Describe your approach to facilitating student learning in smart classrooms.

One of the things I notice in my time teaching in ENS 280 is that students in large lecture courses—I teach two 500 student intro to psych classes—can become relatively passive in their learning pretty quickly. And so what I’ve tried to do is leverage the tools in the classroom as a way to engage them more during class to help them be more active in their learning. I guess the overall goal is to move them away from a situation where they are simply transcribing notes off a PowerPoint slide and more thinking about what we’re talking about, maybe going over some examples with them, that sort of thing, to help them engage more with the content.

Describe your approach to facilitating student learning in smart classrooms (continued).

I use a couple of different tools, I think, more than others to get them to become more active in their learning. Probably the main thing I have done is to make use of the student response systems; so they basically have these “clickers” that are built into the [ENS 280] classroom that are connected to their seats with a little Velcro strap; those are the tools that I’ve used to incorporate in what I call concept check questions. So the concept check questions are basically little review items, very similar to multiple-choice items that will be on the test about a topic that I just finished teaching.

For example, if I just finished a section on different types of memory, I might then go through and give them a multiple choice item with four choices, I ask them to pick up their clickers and basically they are given immediate feedback about whether they understand what I’ve been talking about. I’m given immediate feedback about whether they’re getting it as a whole, and so immediately (I’ve given them a minute or so to respond to the question), I get a nice little histogram of the breakdown of the responses, what percentage of them got it right, what percentage of them got it wrong. And then I can have some sense if it’s okay to continue—80-95% of them get it right—or if 30-40% of them get it right, I kind of go back a couple of slides and review whatever the concept was to make sure that they’re on board. That’s the main thing that I’ve done.

What data, observations, or feedback from students have you received regarding your approach?

I would say the best part of that for me has been getting feedback from them formally and informally about that tool. And the feedback has been uniformly positive on the concept check questions. I actually had students spontaneously writing on their course evaluations in the fall that you should do more of those: “more concept check questions, they’re very helpful.” Again, it gives them feedback, they like it, it also gives them a sense of the kinds of multiple choice items I might ask and so, when they’re taking the first and second test in the course and they’re not sure what to expect, they’ve maybe have seen probably a half dozen or more items that will mimic what will show up on the test. That’s the main tool I use. 

Describe your approach to facilitating student learning in smart classrooms (continued).

PowerPoint is really in a lot of ways, in addition to Blackboard, the backbone of the course. So, PowerPoint is sort of the in-class backbone and what I do with it is incorporate some text to get across some of the content that I’m teaching, but I’ve also tried to include more multimedia elements. I’ve tried to paste in figures and diagrams from the textbook and build that bridge for the students between the textbook and what’s going on in lecture, so that if there’s a particular useful figure from the textbook, I’ll tell them what page it appears on, walk through that diagram.

As much as anything, in class what I use is the Sympodium tool, which is basically a stylus that allows me to write on the screen in the front of the classroom, kind of like a John Madden telestrator type of tool. And, for a lot of areas of the course, that ends up being very helpful.

For example, when I teach biology and go over the different parts of the brain, I’m able to kind of draw an arrow in and point specifically to where the hippocampus might be. Whereas if I didn’t have that tool, I would be pointing maybe with a laser pointer to one of the two screens up front, and it wouldn’t really work as well, and students could get lost.

In fact, students that I’ve talked to about that tool say that it’s helpful, and almost makes it feel like the professor is taking notes for you, and is kind of directing your attention exactly to where he or she wants the attention to go. So, that works really, really well.

In addition to diagrams and figures, I’ve also used the Sympodium writing tool to write examples on slides that might be just text-based. I might write in some kind of mnemonic device for helping them to remember different things. There are a number of times in the course where some concept and definition of the concept will both begin with the same letter, and so I’ll say “Oh, here’s an axon, and an axon carries information away from the cell body.” So I’ll circle the “a” in “axon” and circle the “a” in “away” and say, “You probably should never forget this now” given that I’ve given you this little tool to remember.

Did you encounter any problems implementing your approach? If so, how did you resolve them?

Those kinds of things I’ve done with the Sympodium tool, it works really well, it makes it interesting. I do screw up every once in a while with it, and forget to click back from the pen to the cursor, and the writing disappears, or doesn’t appear, and there are occasionally problems like that, but that’s more operator error than anything, and those end up being pretty comical at times, too.

How does the feedback you've received match up with your observations and/or expectations for the impact and success of your approach?

Those assessments I think really help me move away from just a global impression, if you will, of what’s going on in the classroom and give me numbers. I’m a scientist by training, and so having numbers, having concrete data to back up what those impressions might be is really, really helpful to me, because I have a sense of what’s working and what’s not working. So for example, I had a sense that the concept check questions were pretty helpful and students were responding positively, [and] then I got some numbers to back that up. I also had a sense, for example, with the discussion boards for the large sections, that those weren’t working as well because of how large the sections are, and how unwieldy that can become.

In fact, when I got the Student Assessment of Learning Gains data on the discussion boards, those numbers were down in the two or three range, rather than up above the four range on those kinds of items. It definitely helped me gather some additional information in a more formal way, doing those kinds of assessments.

Informally again, students have given positive feedback about the concept check questions, not so much about the discussion boards, and so, I think that’s one of the things that happens is you try out different tools, you find what works, what doesn’t work, and I’m very interested in finding out in formal ways what works, rather than some sense of what’s going on in a classroom, and again, numbers-driven, data-driven conclusions are what I’m looking to get. I’m able to do that with some of the tools I’m using.

What factors contributed to your choosing that approach?

A big thing during the summer was identifying student passivity as a major undesirable condition, as a major problem in these large lectures, and then trying to find ways to leverage the technology in the classroom to overcome that, to address that issue, and the concept check questions are a perfect example of how I try to do that. It sounds relatively simple, but it ends up being pretty powerful, and sometimes those little things can make a pretty big difference, I think.