clickers – ETEC 533 E-folio

Weeks Four and Five: Framing Issues Paper

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.

Early lessons from this course.

The first 10 days of the course moved very quickly from introductions to our early experiences with digital technology, conceptional challenges, unpacking assumptions and finally examining video cases to help flesh out our perspectives of what and how educational technology can be used in math and science classrooms, and any classroom. I posted my thoughts on each of these topics to the course discussion board and I further benefited by reading my colleagues postings, their comments to my postings and my comments to their postings. More details on my postings for these subjects are presented in the “Framing” page of this blog.

Introductions:

In the introductions, I discovered that I may be the lone post-secondary administrator voice in the course (hopefully not a lone voice in the wilderness!) as the majority of my colleagues are K-12 teachers. This is familiar territory for me in the MET program, and I will present a totally different perspective to my colleagues throughout the course. I trust they will listen and understand this view as I always look at a students’ journey from K through 12 to post-secondary to graduation and employment.

Auto e-ography:

My early experiences with digital technology go back to the early 1970’s when I was given an electronic calculator; a real game changer compared to my older brother who made it through high school with a slide rule. I experimented with many different technologies over the years as they appeared and they have all been integrated into our everyday lives to the point that we don’t think of them as technology, but as tools and widgets. This was a great exercise to spend some time thinking about these early experiences and to present them as an auto e-ography

Conceptional Challenges:

Conceptional challenges are something that I had never thought of previously as being important. But as I went through the course resources, read the postings from my colleagues and started to reflect on my own situation, I realized that yes there are a lot of challenges out there that people have related to math and science that are important to identify and to talk about. For me as a Geographer, I soon realized the conceptional challenges around maps and how they are used to portray the round earth were important to identify.

Unpacking Assumptions:

In the unpacking assumptions exercise, I was able to quickly identify a few examples based on my post-secondary experience to illustrate what I think are good uses of technology in the math and science classroom. My initial thoughts are to not get caught up in the WOW factor and use it just because we can and feel that we need to use technology just because we are teaching in a math, science or technology course or program. I like to recommend to instructors to consider using technology in situations where they struggle to get difficult concepts across to students. Also from a practical post-secondary perspective, to consider using technologies that are applicable and relevant that the jobs graduates will be moving into.

Video Case Analysis:

Clickers and calculators are a couple of basic technologies that I looked at in two of the cases. Both teachers/instructors were very confident in their use of these technologies and to the benefits to the students. Both of these technologies helped tremendously with the engagement of the students and the teacher/instructor in the classroom. I felt these tools helped challenge conceptions that math is not relevant and lecture format is boring and not engaging.

Onto week three and at home interviews.