Somewhat belatedly I have been catching up on a couple of reports about the future of Science teaching in Europe. Both were prompted by widespread concern that school science in its present form is not meeting the needs of society for the 21st Century. The decline in students’ attitudes towards science – apparently universal across Europe – is a particular worry.

Science Education Now: A renewed pedagogy for the future of Europe was published in 2007 and Science Education in Europe: Critical reflections in 2008

Published in 2007, Science Education Now: A renewed pedagogy for the future of Europe was written at the behest of the European Commission with the specific objective “to examine a cross-section of on-going initiatives and to draw from them elements of know-how and good practive that could bring about a radical change in young people’s interest in science” (p2).

The second paper, Science Education in Europe: Critical reflections follows on from two seminars held in 2006 at the Nuffield Foundation in London. The final report was published in January 2008.

It is not my intention to analyse the documents in detail; both are written in a clear and accessible style, and at only approximately 30 pages each they are eminently worthy of your direct consideration. Here instead I will reflect on a couple of the major issues that struck me as I read the reports.

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What is the purpose of science education?

A fundamental problem relating to science education is apparent from the outset; namely the objective of the whole process. There has long been a tension between ’school science as foundational knowledge for future scientists’ and ’school science as a mean of equipping the general citizen for engagement with science as they will encounter it in everyday life’.

In most countries science is now compulsory and as such, it is argued, the emphasis must be on the second of the two aims – i.e. promoting scientific literacy for all. Osborne and Dillon, authors of the Nuffield report, see this as warranted on both moral and economic grounds – it is poor management of resources to flog the majority for a programme geared for the minority who will take science to a higher level.

This was the motivation of the major GCSE curriculum changes that took place in the UK from October 2006, with much more emphasis placed on the understanding the process of science  - “How Science Works” – than on fact regurgitation. Advocates of the changes point out that the new curriculum benefits both the general student and the future scientist, though the latter will need additional instruction to establish the core knowledge necessary for higher study.

Critics have suggested that the baby has been jettisoned with the bathwater, that the new approach is “more suitable to the pub than the classroom“. I suspect that many of my science colleagues would intuitively feel nearer this latter position. Of course no-one is yet able to measure the effect on future scientists; the first students that took the new GCSE specifications will not start undergraduate courses until September 2010 at the earliest. I have genuine expectations that we will encounter a new breed of more science-savvy students from the autumn.

Of course one of the perennial dilemmas in education in general,but particularly science education, is whether we will be afforded time to see the current developments through before some new government initiative will force additional changes to be made. Like incoming Students’ Union sabbatical officers, new political leaders have an overwhelming desire to do something differently and thereby leave their legacy, but it does make it difficult to tell which innovations were genuinely beneficial when nothing is left to run its course.

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Induction v Deduction, Inquiry v Instruction

There are some nice metaphors in the reports; I particularly like the analogy given by Osborne and Dillon that much traditional science teaching is like “being on a train with blacked-out windows – you know you are going somewhere but only the train driver knows where” (p8). Both documents hold that this type of deductive, “top-down” transmission delivers fragments of knowledge whose relevance does not become clear until you have got to your destination; if you fall by the wayside before reaching that point then it will never make any sense. Apparently random snippets of information hold no appeal for all except quiz addicts, and thus the majority, especially girls, switch off.

Instead, inquiry-based science education (IBSE) is advocated, a model in which a structured problem, ideally with a hands-on or practical dimension, comes first and then students are encouraged to develop their critical thinking and reflection skills whilst formulating an understanding of what is going on.

This latter approach has much going for it, but there are significant difficulties in adopting pedagogy of this kind. One problem is the fact it is fundamentally different to traditional approaches – you cannot get to it by minor tweaks of current practice. Secondly, ‘correct’ scientific interpretations do not always flow intuitively from observation. Thirdly, if IBSE is to avoid descent into “the blind leading the blind” it requires the science teacher to feel confident in their own underlying knowledge of the subject and in their classroom management skills, such that they will allow free-flowing discussion to occur before pulling together the salient points at the end.

This is a major sticking point. Combined with research that shows attitudes towards science are frequently cast in stone before the age of 14, a pivotal role is played by the primary school teacher. We know that relatively few primary school teachers have science backgrounds and many feel uncomfortable with even straightforward scientific experiments. There is thus a vital role to be played in equipping primary school teachers for this task. Good work is being done – both papers put a spotlight on the POLLEN programme, an initiative in 12 European countries trialling continuing professional development for primary school teachers in a way that will be scaleable across the wider community.

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Careers from Science > Careers in Science

The final point that struck a chord with me was the need to convey to students that studying science can lead on to more varied (and more interesting) careers than simply wearing a white coat and working in a lab. Osborne and Dillon talk about an emphasis on Careers from science not just Careers in science. This is one of the things I am trying to convey to undergraduate scientists through the Careers After Biological Science seminar programme where we try to include a blend of ‘obvious’ and less obvious careers that can follow advance study of science (see our sister site biosciencecareers for more details). A rung or two further down the educational ladder I take it that this is also the goal of the scienceandmaths.net programme currently being advertised in cinema trailers before the feature film.

Development of appropriate curricula, appropriate pedagogy, appropriate assessement tasks and appropriately-trained teachers are going to be crucial in producing scientifically-literate societies and socially-literate scientists in the 21st Century.

Amongst the major science research journals, Science magazine has consistently been the most prominent in flying the flag for science education. I was very interested, therefore, in an Editorial by Carl Wieman in the September 4th 2009 issue of the magazine. In his piece Galvanising Science Departments, Wieman describes some fairly radical innovations in Science Education currently underway at the University of Colorado and the University of Bristish Columbia. The aim is to adopt evidence-based teaching methodologies with emphasis on the development of scientific thinking and problem-solving skills rather than fact regurgitation.

I have no direct experience of teaching in the USA, either as provider or recipient. I know, for example, that much greater emphasis is placed on the recommended course text in the USA than in the UK, but beyond that I cannot speak with any authority. It does sound like some of the reported innovations are things that have taken place here for some while, such as the addition of specific (skill-centred) learning goals to modules. A cornerstone of the strategy has been appointment of science education specialists, individuals who not only have expertise in their subject discipline, but are also au fait with educational and cognitive psychology studies, a variety of effective teaching strategies and – I note with some mirth – possess diplomatic skills!  The programme is ongoing, the University of Colorado is in the 4th year of an initial six year project and so the full impact of the developments will not be known for some while.

What really struck me, however, was the extent of the commitment at an institutional level, including provision of serious money to fund these changes. Far too many pro-active educators, motivated by genuine desire to improve the learning experience for their students actual receive flak not gratitude. In many cases this is, I believe, because their approach to pedagogy is different to the cultural norm and, as such, moved students (and staff) outside their comfort zone.

So much of education, even at University level, is about recall of a prescribed body of information. This is relatively easy – for both the teacher and the student; it is the mindset that underlies that chirping questions “will this be in the test?” Development of thinking skills demands more from everyone. If innovations that require higher skills are associated with just one module, or even just one academic, then that individual may unfairly receive criticism in feedback from the class.

I believe this is why Wieman is absolutely right when he says “an entire department must be the unit of change”. Depending upon institutional structure, it may even require a larger body – School, Faculty, College – to move together with shared commitment to the new goals. So far at Colorado, 60% of academic staff in three Science departments have embraced the new teaching approaches, impacting 80% of their students’ credit hours. Faculty are reported to enthusiastically discussing teaching as a scholarly activity – that’s surely got to be a good thing. But – it needs time and it needs money.

Wieman C (2009) Galvanising Science Departments Science 325:1181

The Higher Education Academy Centre for Bioscience Pedagogic Research in the Biosciences day conference brought together about thirty academics, for the most part Bioscience specialists, who have been involved to educational research. The day turned out to be highly informative and thought provoking. Some on the hoof reflections were collated via Twitter – click this link.

Appropriate citation of source documents is a key element in all academic writing. As anyone involved in the teaching of undergraduates will know, however, suitable ways of organising reference lists, and conventions for highlighting within the new text the points at which the sources have been used, are not always intuitive.

Colleagues and students may therefore be interested in an online tutorial about referencing that has recently been launched at the University of Leicester.

The student reference guide is the latest online tutorial produced at Leicester

It is very clear that different subjects have their own discipline-specific rules governing citation and referencing. Developed as a project of GENIE, the Genetics CETL, the referencing style is contextualised for students in the Biological Sciences.

The tutorial has evolved from a need identified by both staff and students. The team was convened by Raymond Dalgleish and the bulk of the graft in producing the tutorial was undertaken by Nicola Suter-Giorgini. One of the tensions has been to distinguish necessary aspects of a reference scheme from individual preferences about ‘the best way’ for citation to be undertaken. We are sure that the current version has scope for improvement, and suggestions would be gratefully received.

The new tutorial is a useful addition to a growing collection of online tutorials to aid students in different aspects of writing. An earlier tutorial, Don’t cheat yourself, was originally developed by Stuart Johnson for students in the biosciences. A range of versions with different subject-specific examples are now available.

"Don't cheat yourself" has proven to be a popular tutorial dealing with the issue of plagiarism

“Marking, remarking and meaningful learning: an assessment and feedback seminar” was held at the University of Leicester on April 4th 2008.  The event was organised by the Assessment and Feedback Working party of the University’s Student Experience Enhancement Committee and was attended by about 60 members of the academic community. The following are personal reflections and things that I took from the day.

Smartie-pants
The first presentation was given by Jon Scott, Director of Studies in Biological Sciences at the University. Jon’s cryptic title “How the baby got the Smartie” actually drew analogies between his research work on development of motor coordination skills and effective use of feedback. The ability of a baby to pick up a smartie from a flat surface is apparently a developmental landmark (presumably there are healthy options now available for choco-phobic parents). Research on brain activity whilst learning this task has shown that neurons are fired by failure to achieve the task, i.e. whilst the infant is self-feedbacking (is that a word?) . It knows what it is expecting (bright, interesting-looking object in mouth) and feedback modifies performance until it gets it. Once the task has been mastered, apparently, the relevant neurons go silent.

 Jon then applied this observation to the way students use (or ought to use) assessment and feedback. He stressed that feedback is an active process for assessor and learner and that feedback can show both what is ok, and what is needed for next time – hence we need to encourage reflective behaviour in students – they need to review their work in the light of feedback received to work out how to do better next time.

Why did I get 37%?
Next up was Brenda Smith from the Higher Education Academy. Brenda’s theme was Assessment for Learning: why did I get 37%? AfL is a topic we’ve considered previously at the Journal of the Left-handed Biochemist. The title of Brenda’s session reflects a comment made by a student in a research project; their tutor was reported to have refused point-blank to enter into discussion on the matter.

Brenda began by reflecting on the growing evidence from QAA subject reviews, the National Student Survey, etc that all is not well in the world of Assessment and Feedback. The problems noted are familiar to anyone who has taken an active interest in this process: too much summative feedback, not enough formative; feedback coming too late to be useful; inconsistency in assessment practice both within and between institutions. Referring to data from the 2006 and 2007 National Student Surveys, Brenda highlighted that the lowest scores (51% for both questions, in both years) were in response to the statements “feedback on my work has been prompt” and “feedback on my work has helped me clarify things I did not understand”.  These are serious issues if feedback is to give relevant guidance for improvement in a timely fashion.

Tackling a number of ‘myths’ about assessment and feedback, Brenda questioned whether high failure rates on some courses could be defended as “maintaining high standards” as some institutions might try to do so. The thorny issue of feedback on exam performance also came up – the more students pay for their courses, the more they feel they are owed it. I certainly have some sympathy with the need to offer students training and advice on taking exams, including the opportunity to receive both peer and tutor feedback – indeed we have run an exercise with precisely this aim over a number of years (see ‘You have 45 minutes, starting from now’: Helping Students Develop their Exam Essay Skills). I do, however, worry that this genuine need, and entitlement, would descend into the type of routine calls for remarking that are now rife with A level courses.

Turning to the need for consistency (but stressing that consistency was not the same as conformity), Brenda then showed some discrepancies between the different balance of coursework to examination ratios in a number of departments at a University “not dissimilar to Leicester”. One Department highlighted seemed to assess students in their second year entirely on the basis of exams. Given the lack of feedback students in general receive about exam performance, do these students therefore receive any feedback at all for the whole of that academic year? We were challenged both to know more accurately about assessment practice in other Schools and Depts within the institution, but also to actively seek out examples of best practice elsewhere (e.g. via joint awaydays).

Why do we assess? Brenda gave four reasons: certification (i.e. to show someone was fit to practice), quality assurance, learning and sustainability. She argued that we have perhaps overfocussed on the first two and not enough on the others. Regarding sustainability, for example, do we do enough to equip our students to be sustainable learners themselves, and also to be future givers of valuable feedback to others. Do we encourage students to read each other’s material and offer one positive and one negative comment; to develop a habit of critical assessment?

To make the best use of this opportunity, students will need some training to know what they are looking for. Begin simply, e.g. give them three pieces of work – one good, one average and one weak – can they tell which is which, and why? What feedback would they offer the authors of each piece of work? Moving on from that, what would they feel like if they received the feedback they had just written?

Finally, Brenda pointed us to the Student Enhanced Learning through Effective Feedback (SENLEF) pages on the Higher Education Academy website. She drew our attention particularly to the card-sorting activities and to the seven principles of good feedback practice.

How was it for you?
Next up was Aaron Porter, currently a Sabbatical Officer in the Students’ Union at Leicester, and recently elected  to the national leadership of the National Union of Students. Aaron began by showing a series of voxpop interviews featuring about ten students answering a set of questions: What is feedback? What is good feedback? What do you do with the feedback given to you? Does your personal tutor help you with feedback? How has feedback you received helped you to learn? What would be useful feedback to you? The views expressed were interesting, but without offering and particular fresh insights. I was starting to get really cross when all of the students talked about how carefully they re-visit the work after they’ve received feedback and was much relieved when Aaron also expressed his skepticism about how representative this was.

In fact I was generally impressed by Aaron’s presentation and he raised a number of thought-provoking issues. He considered the timing of assessments, the balance of different types of assessment, the usefulness of feedback and the use of appropriate technologies for the 21st Century. His thoughts on timing were probably the most interesting. Communicate with colleagues more effectively to spread out the load – this allows students to actually spend more time on each piece of work, spreads the marking burden for STAFF and has relevance for the mental health of students. The first of these wasn’t new, the second I actually disagree with (I LIKE marking coming in at certain times as it leaves other time periods free of marking) but it was the third point that was the fresh insight. Of course, once aired it makes a lot of sense; multiple deadlines crammed into a short period of time, coupled with financial worries, the burden of parental expectation (especially if they are paying) can be highly detrimental to a student’s mental well-being. He also put in a general plea for earlier notification of exam timetables to facilitate better planning, which is something staff would wholeheartedly echo.

Commenting on the National Student Survey, and the apparently poor satisfaction scores, Aaron made the point that if there is an approx even split between coursework and exams then the fact that most students prefer one or the other means that no-one is ever going to be offering top marks for assessment satisfaction. Good point. He also stressed the need to make students aware that they are receiving feedback in a variety of formats, it is not only written comment and advice from their personal tutors.

Whilst recognising that there are logistical problems associated with feedback on exam scripts, he added his voice to concerns that the status quo is unsatisfactory from an educational perspective. Having said that, Aaron did also query the appropriateness of exam essays as an assessment format at all. Students, he suggested, are increasingly calling for ‘real world’ relevance of the tasks that are set for the. When will someone in employment ever be asked to write on a topic (as opposed to word process), in a linear start-to-finish manner, for a period of an hour, without reference to source materials or the internet? Is it time, he wondered, for students to be allowed to use computers in exams?

Personally, I’m not sure this is a runner – unless there was some kind of auto-archiving as they went along, I can just see lots of people crying into their keyboards after two and a half hours complaining that they’ve accidentally pressed delete and lost all of their work. I’m also not taken with Aaron’s final suggestion for online tracking of coursework so that students can know where in the marking/second-marking process their work has got to, in the same way that you might track the progress of an online delivery. It strikes me this will involve a huge administrative burden for very little net gain. It was funny to hear it so soon after Alan Sugar had mocked the 24-hour hotline for laundry monitoring on this week’s The Apprentice –  they seem like two peas in a pod.

More for less?
The last presentation was by Phil Race. This is the second time I’ve been to a session led by Phil and hearing him again reminded me how many practical tips and tricks I’d taken and applied in my teaching after our previous encounter. He is also very generous with his resources via his website, www.phil-race.com. This time around his topic was How can we get better feedback to more students in less time?

One of the points that came across most strongly from Phil was the need to separate feedback from the return of marks; in the table discussion before the talk he went as far as to say that “it’s unethical to give students a mark at the same time as feedback”. Feedback is most useful when it is given within 24 hours of a submission deadline, since the material will be fresh in the minds of all the students. Clearly we can’t be expected to have marked or even read all of the work in that timescale, but there is plenty of generic feedback we can give – the sorts of things that we end up writing time and again on student scripts (which allows the individual feedback we subsequently give to be all the more targetted).

The predictable problem with this approach was raised – how do you cope with late submissions? Phil was clear on this issue too – why should the 97% of student who submitted on time miss out on prompt and timely feedback just because of the 3% who haven’t made the deadline? The problem is sidestepped if an alternative but equivalent Assessment B (albeit deliberately on a slightly less appealing topic) is set at the same time of the original Assessment A. If a student misses the deadline for Assignment A then they do B; that way they get fair treatment if the deadline was missed for a genuine reason.

If you give feedback before you give the mark it also allows for an additional carrot to ensure students engage fully with the comments and advice that we’ve offered – if, on the basis of the feedback given, they come up with a mark within 5% of the mark you awarded they can have whichever is the higher mark. After reading your comments, more than 90% of students will be within that range of your score – you can then target discussions with those who have significantly mis-read the merit of their work and examine where the false perception has arisen.

The other main point I took away from Phil’s contribution – and it was from the round-table discussion rather than the talk – was the merit of offering students a proforma for recording the feedback they have received and the use to which they have put it. The form can be stored in their portfolio of PDP evidence, it can be a tool for aiding genuine interaction with their feedback to make it feedforward, and it may allow them to identify repeat themes coming up from several different markers. Of course some may not choose to use the proforma, and others may simply ‘play the game’ without really entering into the spirit of the exercise, but for those who do make the most of the opportunity it may be a valuable addition to their learning experience.

To summarise:
Overall, this was a useful day – nothing ground-breaking, but some helpful reminders and some new food for thought. As is so often the case, the big frustration is one of ‘preaching to the converted’ – I suspect that the assembled staff are probably amongst those who are already the most conscientious about the feedback they give. It was also interesting to participate in Alan Cann’s experiment in liveblogging using Twitter (with hashtagging) - a valuable way to share and capture insights in 140 character chunks.

From time to time I find myself ruminating on exactly how and where I acquired a variety of study skills. I have no recollection, for example, of any formalised training in finding and selecting source materials and yet even as an undergraduate I seemed to be reasonably adept at choosing relevant information.

Back in those days, of course, finding the material was a bigger task than it is today.  The contemporary student is spared the need to leaf through the Index Medicus and then scourer the shelves for the relevant tomes before staggering to the photocopier burdened by the combined weight of several impressively-bound volumes. A multitude of online search engines and databases, coupled with institutional access to a plethora of electronic journals provides the 21st Century undergraduate with more information than they could ever hope to process in time to meet the assignment deadline (to say nothing of the less formal internet sources at their fingertips). 

The challenge today is much less focussed on the location of documents and much more heavily skewed towards the evaluation and selection of appropriate material; discriminating good sources from bad and the evaluating the relevance of the material to the specific task at hand.  Having recently marked a set of essays where several submissions were characterised by failure to achieve these goals, I am reminded that the challenge of panning through tonnes of data in order to extract pertinent nuggets of gold is considerable, and the skills necessary to achieve this are unlikely to be acquired by osmosis.

It was against this backdrop that I was interested to read a paper The annotated bibliography and citation behaviour: enhancing student scholarship in an undergraduate biology course, written by Molly Flashpohler and colleagues, and published in the Winter 2007 edition of CBE – Life Sciences Education. The paper describes an active intervention to develop the ”Information Literacy” skills of students taking an immunology and parasitology module at a small college in Minnesota, USA. 

In keeping with many institutions, our programme includes sessions on making the most of Web of Science, PubMed and other such search tools.  In addition to this, I’ve done some work myself on plagiarism-prevention.  What I don’t believe we’ve offered previously is any intervention of the type described by the Flaspohlers, in which students are encouraged to undertake a meta-critique of the reference materials they have assembled for a forthcoming assignment.

In the Minnesota model, the students are required to produce an annotated bibliography.  This is more than a citation list; each resource they are intending to use must be critiqued in a brief (approx 150 word) paragraph.  The students are advised that this annotation should demonstrate, as far as possible: the authority or background of the original author(s); their intended audience; the writing style of the author(s); how this article relates to their project; any bias or point of view apparent in the original work; and to highlight any tables, figures, etc which the student feels will be particularly relevant for their task.  Further to this, the annotations are supposed to cross-reference to one another as the student compares and contrasts the specific work with others that they have chosen to cite.

It strikes me that a task of this kind is “do-able” – it could be added as a training step on the way to submission of essays or dissertations that are already part of our courses.  The authors describe the improvements they have seen in the seven-year evolution of this intervention – including a shift towards better quality and more authoritative sources, and a concommitant fall in instances of plagiarism. Admittedly they have been working with a relatively small cohort (average 17 per annum), but I suspect that the knock-on merits of adding an exercise of this type would justify the effort of introducing something similar to my group, where n is nearer 100.

To re-quote John Porter, author of an earlier work in the same journal (albeit under its former name): “An awareness of the current literature is as important to scientific research as the careful design of adequate controls“.  This being the case, Information Literacy is too significant to be left to osmosis.

In preparation for a recent meeting of our School of Biological Sciences Pedagogic Research group, I’ve been reading a number of articles in the Assessment for Learning genre. My attention was particularly drawn to accounts of ELLI – the Evaluating Lifelong Learning Inventory – project.  ELLI has been developed by Ruth Deakin Crick and colleagues at the University of Bristol and is an instrument for the diagnosis and development of an individual’s learning power.  As Deakin Crick and colleagues point out in their 2004 paper (Assessment in Education 11:247-272), existing assessments tend to be focused on measuring either intelligence or educational achievement, whereas the measurement of a person’s learning power, that is their capacity for lifelong learning, may actually be the most valuable quality to assess.  “There is“, she notes in her 2007 paper (The Curriculum Journal 18:135-153), “an urgent need for our education system to foster flexible, creative, self-aware and dynamic learners who have the capacity to apply and adapt what is learned to their own lives, embedded in their local and global communities, and who can extend their learning and understanding into spheres of thought and action which demand intelligent behaviour in the real world” (p.137).

Having extensively piloted versions of the assessment instrument in a variety of Schools, the ELLI team have presently settled on a 72-item questionnaire that is used to probe students’ self-perception of their relative strengths and weaknesses in the seven core dimensions of learning power. These are: changing and learning; critical curiosity; meaning-making; dependence and fragility; creativity; relationships/interdependence; and strategic awareness.  Positive and negative manifestations of these dimensions are summarised as part of the slideshow below, along with an overview of the findings of ELLI so far.

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I must admit the ability to have a handle on the learning potential of our students is an attractive proposition; it might also be illuminating to take the test myself and see what it showed about my own strengths and weaknesses in this regard! There would definitely be value, even if it was just as a one-off diagnostic.  Clearly, however, the most merit comes from being able to combine the diagnostic with a programme of activities that develop and enhance the learning power of the students, in a targeted and individualised way, combined with a reappraisal of their learning power at a later stage. 

This is a big ask and one which, with the best will in the world, is going to be tricky to fulfil in the Higher Education sector.  All sorts of problems stand in the way – the large cohort sizes; the fact that an individual student is receiving input and instruction from a broad range of colleagues rather than one staff member for a significant time; the impact of the secondary sector, where persistent summative assessment has led students to be entirely goal-driven and only engage if there are marks up for grabs. 

The balance between skill development and acquisition of factual knowledge is a recurring tension in HE, but I’d love to be able to utilise an instrument such as ELLI in order to shift the balance more towards learner enhancement and less on information regurgitation.

The fact that you are reading this blog entry at all means that you are already engaging with Web 2.0, which has been defined on Wikipedia as “a perceived second-generation of Web-based services such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users”.  In the third talk at the University of Leicester Learning and Teaching in the Sciences conference on 23rd May 2007, Alan Cann raised the potential impact of Web 2.0 technologies in science teaching.

Dr Cann began with the definition of Web 2.0 given in the previous paragraph, and illustrated how broadly we have come to accept interactive aspects of the web with reference to Amazon.  Ostensibly an online shop, Amazon offers us the opportunity to review the goods on sale, even allowing us to give critical reports.  Similarly, we are invited to rate the performance of sellers for whom Amazon has acted as middleman. 

Alan highlighted the fact that, when asked to write an essay, the default strategy of today’s student is to turn to Google and Wikipedia.  We may not like it, but this does not change the reality and, setting the pattern that was to run throughout his presentation, Dr Cann challenged us to think about ways that we can work with and develop the students’ study habits rather than fighting against them.  So, for example, we should teach students how to use Google more effectively to obtain the best quality information, rather than simply chastising them for using such a shoddy tool and brow-beating them into using the ‘proper’ searches.  This does not mean that we abandon training sessions on PubMed, Web of Science and the like, far from it.  We start with Google and move on to the more professional tools as an extension of good practice.

Against that backdrop, what is the place of wikis, blogs, podcasts and the like in the teaching of science? Alan suggested that, used appropriately, these Web 2.0 technologies can be particularly helpful in engaging the ‘long-tail’ of less able and less motivated students who do not respond well to the traditional approaches.  Clearly we need to adapt our writing style to be appropriate to the medium – the academic journal genre is not appropriate for blog entries which must be more bitesized and engaging.

What about podcasts and ‘viral’ video?  Dr Cann shared some insights from his personal experience and research projects conducted over the previous couple of years.  Alan has been developing blogs, podcasts and online video for the public understanding of science (specifically microbiology), for using in teaching statistics to first year undergraduates at the University of Leicester, and to share his virtual frogroom with fellow tropical frog enthusiasts. In doing so he has gathered both statistical data and qualitative comments from users concerning the relative merits of different approaches.  His observations included:
(1) A general dislike for the ‘push’ model of subscription via RSS feed, people prefer to ‘pull’ material to their computer as and when it looks of interest to them.
(2) Students are happy to listen to ‘work’-related podcasts on their computer, but reserve use of their mp3 player for ‘entertainment’.
(3) More students watch online videos via YouTube, and the like, than listen to podcasts.

Dr Cann finished by reiterating the point that this is not a call to ‘dumbing down’ and that the intention was to offer Web 2.0 resources to students in addition to traditional approaches.  The materials produced must remain academically robust, but should be offered in a format that is comfortable and familiar for 21st Century undergraduates.

Professor Melanie Cooper from Clemson University, South Carolina came to Leicester’s Learning and Teaching in the Sciences conference as part of a UK tour sponsored by the Physical Sciences Centre of the Higher Education Academy.  In her talk, Using technology to investigate and improve student problem-solving strategies, Prof Cooper began by drawing an important distinction between problems and exercises.  Often when people set ‘problems’ what they are in fact asking students to do are ‘exercises’, activities designed to train the participants to be able to tackle similar future tasks in a formulaic way.  Problem-solving is about developing a range of skills that will equip students to “address novel situations and arrive at a suitable course of action” (Dudley Herron).  It is not, therefore, about knowing how to crank an equation to get the right answer.

In understanding how students approach problem-solving, there would clearly be huge value in directly observing them throughout the duration of a task.  Such ethnographic research methods, however, have a number of difficulties.  Firstly, the time required for the observations themselves, and all the moreso the subsequent evaluation, is a vast commitment.  Secondly, observations tend to be based, for reasons of practicality, on relatively small numbers of individuals. 

In her education research, Prof Cooper has been able to access a very much larger cohort (several thousand students at Clemson take general chemistry each year) and has got around the need for direct observation of the students at work by exploiting the IMMEX software, developed principally by Ron Stevens at UCLA.  Not to be confused with any similar-sounding floor-to-ceiling cinematic experiences, IMMEX stands for Interactive Multi-Media EXercises. An example of IMMEX use (in the context of genetics education) can be seen in the open access journal Cell Biology Education (see Stevens, Johnson and Soller, 2005).

IMMEX seems to involve some pretty fearsome computing, but I hope the following catches the essence of it.  Students carry out an on-line activity working from a single start-point towards a specific correct answer.  Along the way they can select from a number of briefing sheets, experimental results and other lab data relating to the problem in order to help them to the solution.  Not all of the available information is equally valuable or necessary to complete the task.  The software records the route taken by each student from start to finish (a so called ’search path map’), and uses artifical neural network (ANN) clustering to identify and categorise common strategies.  The technology has to be ‘trained’ by exposure to a large number of examples, and then generates a ‘topological map’, for example a 6×6 grid of ‘nodes’ where similar approaches are clustered together.  Rather than contemplating 36 different approaches, these nodes can then be rationalised into a smaller set of ’states’ representing similar models, in terms of strategies used and/or outcomes achieved.  So, for example, a ‘novice’ strategy might be ineffective (i.e. the student is unable to solve the problem) and/or inefficient (i.e. they visit most or all of the pages before completing the task), whilst an ‘expert’ would take a more efficient and effective route encompassing only the necessary information sources.

The use of ANN allows for helpful categorisation of students’ performance in a particular task.  This can be used to provide them with formative advice on how they might improve their approach.  At this stage a second approach is used to predict and to evaluate the changes in strategies that students make when offered the opportunity to undertake one or more similar tasks.  With sufficient data Hidden Markov Modelling (HMM) can make statistical predictions about the likelihood that students using strategy X will use the same approach again the next time, or whether they will swap to a different tack, and if so whether it will be strategy Y or strategy Z.  The challenge then is whether interventions that we make can move the students on towards a better strategy.

Work by Prof Cooper and others has shown that individual students, be they ‘novice’, ‘competent’ or ‘expert’ at the outset, can improve their competence by repeating activities – but only up to a point.  After five performances, or fewer, none of the participants working on their own exhibited any further improvement in either their ability or strategies employed.  How, therefore, can educators help students to make further refinements in their problem-solving abilities?

Melanie’s evidence shows that an answer lies in group work.  Working with others, particularly those of with different approaches (see below) involves metacognition, i.e. it forces the students into explicit reflection about what they are doing. Tackling a problem collaboratively exposes students to new ways of thinking and/or offers them clarity about why certain approaches are less useful.  What’s more, there is evidence that the improvements made by involvement in group work are retained if the students are subsequently required to work on their own again.

What group arrangements work best? Groupings should be organised by the tutor, not left to the students to choose.  The  maximum group size should be four, and the majority of benefit can be achieved by students working in pairs.  At Clemson, they use the GALT (Group Assessment of Logical Thinking) test as an initial means to identify the type of thinking employed by students – concrete (C), transitional (T) or formal (F), according to the Piagetian model.  Following the GALT assessment, students in Prof Cooper’s research were assigned to pairs according to all possible combinations; FF, FT, FC, TT, TC and CC.  It was clear from the research that there were distinct combinations that afforded greater improvement (to at least one of the pair).  For example, ‘transitional’ students paired with ‘concrete’ improved the most.  Overall female students improve more than males via experience of groupwork, but there was no significant difference based on whether pairings were single sex or mixed gender. Male students, incidentally, improved more as a result of using concept maps than as a result of participation in groups – but that’s probably a story for a different report.

Other talks at the Learning and Teaching in the Sciences conference, by Norman Reid and by Alan Cann,  are discussed elsewhere on this site.

Each academic year since 2005, the Higher Education Academy in the UK has run an essay competition for current students to express their views on an aspect of teaching and learning.  In 2007, the theme was “What advice would you give to students starting your course?“  The top entries submitted by Bioscience students have recently been made available on the HEA Centre for Bioscience website.  The winning author Aneeqa Meedin, from the University of Sheffield, produced a thought-provoking ten commandments for biomedical science students.