Part of framing an issue is reflecting and writing about ones own definitions of technology and pedagogical design. This is included early in the Design section posted on January 26, 2013.
I struggled several times trying to determine a topic for the framing issues paper. Initially with a proposal submitted to the instructor related the effect of technology on student engagement; this topic was too broad and was non-domain specific. After searching the UBC library with the following search terms: student engagement, technology, clicker technology, STEM education and end engagement I gradually narrowed the search. This was the second struggle as narrowing the search took longer than I had expected.
Eventually after skimming some articles I noticed something was being said that I suspected and in addition, it was quantified about first year STEM courses at college and university. These courses are quite often killer courses meant to weed out students in the first year. Non-STEM first year courses are not as brutal. The second component which tied into my interest area of technology and student engagement surfaced as a solution to softening the killer courses. I selected the simple clicker as a technology used by some Instructors and Professors to encourage engagement. Several papers indicated this had a positive effect on student engagement in first and second year students.
So with this arose my framing issues paper which is an annotated bibliography of four papers titled “STEM in post-secondary education can be engaging or boring; it is the instructor’s choice”. The conclusion to the paper is as follows.
Clickers are a classroom technology that when integrated with an engagement pedagogy, can be used to effectively break up the intensive lecture and provide feedback and engagement for the students. If used with a modified instruction method, then students can discuss difficult concepts and then respond back to the instructor through clickers to validate that they are developing deep conceptual understandings of simple or complex STEM problems. This paper has allowed me to validate my thoughts on clicker usage in the classroom in general. In my postings on clickers I suggested that their usage encouraged engagement by both the students and the instructors, gave the instructor a reading on how well he is doing at getting the message across, let students know how well they are doing individually and amongst their peers and provided a safe anonymous environment for students to try answering questions asked in class.
The research provided evidence to a perspective that I had suspected; killer gatekeeper first year STEM courses do not need to be set up this way. It is the instructor’s choice to keep them boring and inactive for the students. With new technologies such as clickers, instructors can make them engaging and interesting for the students and can create an environment for them to stay in STEM majors longer. This will allow them to make better informed decisions about STEM careers based on their interest level after first or second courses rather than bailing out early because of a bad and boring experience with an unengaged instructor, perhaps in their first semester.
I am quite interested in knowing why research has shown an increase in student engagement and interest in subject matter using more engaging pedagogies does not translate into statistically higher grades for students. Perhaps the assessment tools are not appropriate to capture the benefits of deeper approaches to learning that engagement nurtures. If the assessment tools are designed to test the lower level memorization thinking skills expected from traditional lecture formats then they may not capture the deeper learning associated with higher order, integrative and reflective learning and thus not show the true benefits of the engaging classroom.
The paper is posted in the Framing section – February 2, 2103.