Author Archives: Linda Duong

Jasper Series Exploration

The Jasper series is a collection of narrative adventures. It looks like each video introduces students to a scenario: relevant background information is presented and then students must solve a problem connected to the narrative. The problems require multiple steps to be solved and are generally open.

First Impressions

For some reason, I thought that Jasper was done as homework: Maybe because that’s how I’m watching the Jasper videos, I was a bit overwhelmed and wondered how students would be solving the complex problems without help. As I write this, I realize that my experience with video instruction are through independent learning (e.g., Khan Academy, Crash Course). I’ve rarely seen this form of instruction in a classroom.
- The only times I’ve heard of a video that encourages students to solve a problem are the TED-Ed math puzzles and through EDpuzzle and H5P. The TED-Ed math puzzles present an interesting scenario and then encourage the viewer to pause the video and then solve. The rest of the video will provide a solution. H5P allows users to create interactive videos. You can insert links or quizzes within a video. EDpuzzle takes things further. You can crop videos and insert questions. Until learners submit their responses to questions, they are locked at that specific point. As well, the teacher can review what students submitted and view how many times a student has reviewed a specific segment
That was a lot of words: Since I only saw clips from Jasper, I don’t know if there was anything before the narrative I watched. Regardless, I think there will be challenges for English Language Learners given how fast the video can move and all the new vocabulary that each clip contains.

Questions about Jasper’s implementation

Pedagogically, I think Jasper can work really well because it contextualizes math. The questions are complex so learners apply multiple skills and connect with multiple concepts. The assessments can be rich. Peer collaboration can be leveraged to ensure students work in their zone of proximal development. However, I wonder how Jasper is applied in classrooms given the challenges that can arise:

What happens before/after a Jasper video? I’d like to know how Jasper is initially framed to the class and how students’ perception of math are addressed.
What scaffolding is needed for the Jasper videos? In the video clips I saw, many concepts were required to solve the problem. Are these broken down with the students? How is readiness addressed in these classrooms?
- As I write this, I think I’ve answered my own question. I would approach this the way I would always approach a more student centred activity: with facilitation. Guiding questions and intervention as needed. Check in with the students to see how their plans are going and converse about the math and problem solving approach.

Jasper’s similarities to other activities

I think Jasper is interesting. It’s a nice way to introduce problem based learning in a math class. It reminds me of the math trail I’ve done in teacher’s college. The math trail I experienced involved a walk in Downtown Toronto. There was one question about estimating the radius of the fountain. This required estimation as the fountain had a lip and we didn’t walk into the fountain. These questions are definitely fun because of the context and it’s nice to apply the math as well.

When I think of my reductionist thinking, I often discredit the fun aspect of the context. Sometimes I see the context as a layer of complexity that is too difficult. However, this is not the case. The context can be helpful and it situates learning. I think along my math learning, I have forgotten the fun of math and see it as computation. Losing sight of the pedagogy content knowledge connections, math became a computational subject that’s only connection the “real world” was as a prerequisite course.

I like that Jasper reminds me of the fun in math and that math is everywhere. Math is about the logic, problem solving, and critical thinking. Math is about numeracy and applications in the everyday. Math can be fun and math involves rigour and discipline. These aspects of the content knowledge need to be communicated to students through varied and meaningful assessment.

Student resistance to active learning in engineering: How can pedagogy and educational technology be used to engage students in post-secondary engineering education?

Background and Context

I support a first-year engineering design course with about 1000 students. A design process is taught by engaging students in a common problem in the first semester. In teams, students translate the client’s problem into engineering terms to recommend solutions. In the second semester, students re-iterate the design process in new teams and with unique real clients.

Given the nature of learning design, I think the course’s scaffolding and experiential elements are clever and well supported through project and teamwork. Our lectures are taught by different members of our teaching team depending on the topic. Student teams sit at their assigned lecture tables. Each class is a mix of direct instruction, modelling, and facilitated activities. Outside of synthesis and discussion based activities, we use student response systems like Mentimeter and Kahoot!. However, my thoughts are inconsistent with the student feedback we receive. Perhaps because unhappy students are more vocal, I have heard many complaints about the course either being too boring, too obvious, or too difficult to participate in.

As a non-engineer, I am not always familiar with the course content. I sympathize with the students who feel that they cannot participate because they do not know the content. The complaints make me wonder if active learning is appropriate given low motivation, preparation, and engagement. However, I know that active learning can lead to better learning, but students require structure to orient and transition themselves to these non-traditional approaches. As a result, I want to know how to better organize and leverage our learning management system with pre-lecture tasks to support our students and address their feeling of learning.

Modified Annotated Bibliography

Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(39), 19251-19257. doi:10.1073/pnas.1821936116

I really enjoyed this article. It’s a great cross-over design that was able to compare passive and active instruction in an undergraduate Physics course. Notably, the learning objects and handouts were identical in both conditions, the intervention occurred in two consecutive classes and was taught by two instructors that previously had no interaction with the students. The experimental instructors and authors of the test of learning were blinded (instructors did not see test of learning; test of learning was created independently from the instructors, based on detailed learning objectives).

The findings that students learned more in active learning but perceive that they learned less was so interesting! The authors attribute this to poor metacognition of novices, overestimation of learning in passive instruction, and unfamiliarity with active learning. The suggestions of early assessment, clarifying the meaning of learning/cognitive load, and responding to student feedback are important. Active learning is challenging because it is an ongoing commitment between the instructors and students. It requires engagement and motivation.

Saterbak, A., T. Volz, and M. Wettergreen. 2016. “Implementing and Assessing A Flipped Classroom Model for First-Year Engineering Design.” Advances in Engineering Education 5 (3): 3.

This course is strikingly similar to the one I support. Although there was no statistically significant difference in learning found between the experimental and control, I still think the flipped classroom was interesting. As the authors point out, design is already a heavily inquiry/project based topic. At the same time, it was difficult to control for confounding given the pre/post tests were not in controlled conditions (i.e., they were take home assignments) and I wonder if the comparison to the second semester iteration introduced confounding due to transition to engineering and post-secondary education. Regardless, I think a future iteration of this experiment with varied assessments (e.g., problem statement, design, team dynamics) in addition to the project management through the Gantt chart analysis could be done. As an observer to the engineering course, I’ve noticed that my course also emphasizes these concepts and wonder how the active instruction may or may not impact the learning gains/losses in these elements of design.

The authors took on a large commitment to create resources (videos, quizzes, exercises) for their course. I wonder how they decided to go with this direction. As well, it would be interesting to survey if students are using these resources, how/when they are using them, and their perceptions.

Kaewunruen, S. (2019). Enhancing railway engineering student engagement using interactive technology embedded with infotainment. Education Sciences, 9(2), 136. doi: 10.3390/educsci9020136

Similar to Deslauriers et al (2019), it was found that students learned more in active instruction, but students preferred more traditional methods and did not like technology as much. Students preferred face-to-face interaction and networking. I really like how the author included a digital-native orientation survey. I didn’t expect this and think it’s an interesting way to gauge familiarity/comfort/readiness with technology. In a future iteration of a similar study, I wonder if the researchers could look at the user experience of the learning management system and how users actually use it/what they expect. Eye path and time spent on specific assigned tasks could be measured.

Conclusion

The emergent themes from these articles are that for successful active learning requires:

addressing the benefits and perceived challenges of active learning,
using frequent and early assessment to help students regulate their behaviour,
scaffolding active lecture exercises with pre-lecture activities,
orienting and transitioning students to technology,
framing technology within the pedagogical goals.

In my own context, this might take the form of:

pre-lecture tasks to scaffold learning for in-lecture activities: the challenge with such a large course is assessing student learning frequently and providing immediate feedback. Pre-lecture tasks in the LMS could help address this. Currently, we have unstructured readings, but I find that textbooks are often written for experts, rather than novices. Embedding formative assessment within a reading task would provide immediate feedback to learners while increasing their engagement.The pre-lecture tasks could target specific items depending on the point in term. For instance, the first pre-lecture task could be a syllabus reading and quiz, and reading and quiz on active learning/learning. In other cases, the pre-lecture task could include a reading (text, video, etc.) and a follow up quiz, activity, or reflection. As Saterbak et al (2016) suggest, these pre-lecture tasks work at the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy and scaffold learning for the more complex in-lecture exercises.
orientation and transition to technology: this is always a tricky process. I wonder if it would be useful for learners to complete a technology readiness assessment. The assessment would give a general score for readiness and direct students to resources to improve/access. A course LMS welcome video would also be helpful in orienting students to the LMS and how it works. At a larger scale, a common course homepage would be helpful for students.

Underlying assumptions

Something I notice as I look back at this post is the underlying transition from behaviourist and cognitivist to constructivist methods. All the pre-lecture tasks have high levels of behaviourist and cognitivist biases. This is definitely more teacher centred. I don’t know if this is necessarily a good or bad thing, but it does assume that there needs to more of an expert guiding the learners and then fade as mastery develops.

Meritorious Post – Module A

Week 1 Discussion: Auto e-ography

Context:

This was a threaded conversation in response to my original post. I had shared a quote from one of my associate teachers and hinted that sometimes technology doesn’t have a place in all our lessons; we need to consider the benefits of the educational value and the costs from implementation. This created a larger conversation around frameworks for selecting technology like SAMR and SECTIONS. In this reply to Ram, we were discussing the SAMR model and using technology for multiple representations of learning.

Post:

Hi ____,

I think I would classify that more at an Augmentation level because now the inclusion of technology has a pedagogical purpose.

For greater context, my associate teacher’s example for where technology was a substitution he didn’t want to use was connected to algebra tiles. He didn’t think using algebra tiles was useful because his usual methods would be just as or more effective and algebra tiles would introduce more challenges (because of the zero pair) for his specific demographics of students. As well, using algebra tiles doesn’t link students to developing digital skills.

For the movie making and alternate forms of assessment that use technology, I’ve always been hesitant with this because of the potential for grade pollution and the challenges of trying to get students to learn the digital skills. To be fair, I’m not a practicing classroom teacher anymore and when I was, I didn’t have the opportunities to implement some of the ideas I had, so I don’t know if these ideas will be practical. However, these are my concerns and suggestions:

Grade pollution: Are we marking the product or the content? I can see challenges with unearthing student learning if it’s masked by a different medium and especially if it’s one that they are unfamiliar with. Regardless, this is always a challenge with any form of assessment.
Learning digital skills: Super important for sure, but challenging depending on the teacher’s own skills set. What happens if the teacher isn’t familiar with movie pre-production, production, and post-production? Is the teacher interested in these phases, or does the interest lie solely in using software? I don’t know how feasible this might be in your school, but connecting to a media arts or communications technology teacher would be really useful here. It would be really cool to team teach this. If not, I think the usual path I’ve seen teachers take is to tell the students to figure it out on their own.
Addressing students’ feeling of learning: I didn’t realize how important this would be until I further reflected upon Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory.. Essentially, if students don’t realize they are learning or feeling that they are unable to take control of their learning, they will not self-regulate and miss out on the learning opportunities. From the teacher perspective, I would like to implement tiered assessments:
- Encourage students to try demonstrating their learning through different media through expectations and assignment weight values: Throughout the term, students will have X number of assignments. Some assignments will have higher weights, while others will have lower weights. For a higher weighted assessment, students have free choice over the medium (e.g,, essay, presentation, movie). For a lower weighted assessment in this group, students are NOT allowed to choose a medium they have previously used (especially one that they are more comfortable with; this is negotiable with the students). Hopefully the lower weighting takes the pressure off and encourages exploration.

From writing this, I can see that I have a very teacher-oriented approach. This is a result of my current personal learning theory and experiences with students. Having students take free reign over learning new media is definitely great, but it would depend on your specific group. I believe that structure and experts are important and it would be helpful for students.

Outside of this specific assessment medium conversation, digital skills and technology resources are so important! I think the selection of these tools and resources will stem from a deep understanding of the discipline and its pathways.

Reflection:

I think this was my meritorious post because of the conversation it was connected to. This post was very important in helping unearthing a variety of underlying assumptions about teaching, learning, and technology:

Personal learning theories
Frameworks for selecting, designing, and applying technology
Concerns about assessment, grade pollution

Personal learning theories: As I reflect upon this post, I see more and more of my teacher-oriented approach to teaching and learning. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s important to identify this underlying assumption. It’s clear from my future discussions and posts that I often think of technology as what a teacher uses, what a teacher does, and how students are impacted. In these cases the teacher is an active agent, but the students are acted upon.

In unearthing these underlying assumptions, I know that this comes from my experiences as a supply teacher and university teaching assistant. The lack of control and time have caused me to prioritize and efficiently use direct instruction. This has led me to a more behaviourist and cognitivist bias in my teaching. My preference is to transition from behaviourist to cognitivist to constructivist approaches. This scaffold fits well with Bloom’s taxonomy as long as it involves modelling, shaping, and fading.

It’s important for me to be aware of my personal learning theory because it influences how I select, design, and apply technology.

Frameworks: Choosing technology within a framework is important as it grounds us in pedagogy. I am still trying to wrap my head around my ETEC 524 instructor’s comment on dismissing the Substitution from the SAMR model, but it’s challenging. I do prefer the detail of the SECTIONS model, but will use the SAMR model as a quick test.

Assessments: My current bias is to engage students through assessment. Since marks and feedback are valued and are used to shape behaviour, I am often thinking about how the structure of assessments are used to encourage learning. Assessment and evaluation is a tricky topic because it’s hard to tell what a student knows. Of course, we can get a window into this through multiple, frequent, varied, valid, and transparent assessments, but this is easier said than done.

Regardless, it’s important to engage students in assessments that help them develop digital skills and technical skills as aligned with the discipline.

Definition of Technology

Feenburg’s definition of technology made the most sense to me:

Feenburg (1999, 2003) suggests that technology is the medium of daily life in modern societies. His impression is that technology is humanly controlled and value-laden just like a social institution.

Humanly controlled – I currently see technology as an extension of the self. Technology can make completing specific tasks easier and offer other representations. It can act as a cognitive tool so that the user/human can focus on a higher order skill. Overall, technology is a tool that is exercised through human autonomy. However, the extension of the self will have different representations depending upon the medium.

Value-laden – Given our current technological scene, there are a variety of technological media that range from books, chalkboards, computers, probes, and specific software. With “old school” media, like books, it was a little odd to think of this as technology because its advancement was so long ago. However, the printing press is a huge technological advancement. In the classroom, the selection of a specific technology may speak to values connected to accessibility, socioeconomic status, discipline preferences, and philosophical preferences.

Technology does not equate to advancement. The creation and use of technology often contains artifacts of what society at the time values.

Week 3: Interview Reflection Post

From the interview discussion thread, the overall themes that I’ve seen arise are:

There isn’t enough time or training for using technology in the classroom
- Funding and rapid changes with technology make it difficult for schools to keep up
Technology can be a distraction
- There are challenges with the everyday vs. academic use of technology
Teacher attitudes towards technology impact its integration in the classroom
- If a teacher is resistant to technology and doesn’t see its utility, then it will be poorly integrated if at all
- Peers who have posted about integrated PD and mentorship have mentioned that they are poorly used. This is due to competing priorities with the need for prep. Given a busy teacher schedule, technology and new pedagogy are often lower priority than the immediate classroom survival.
Technology enables multiple representations of learning and discipline specific use
- From using technology in assignments to get students to develop digital skills and engage in a platform to practice digital citizenship, technology leads to opportunity
- When materials are scarce or specific experiences are not possible, VR, video, and other digital archives/worlds are important

Change in understanding of issues

What I’ve been seeing from the discussions so far is that technology isn’t always the topic. Connected topics, like training, pedagogy, and access to technology, are often what comes up instead.

I wonder if these conversations are partially reflections of teacher attitudes:

it’s too hard to do this alone
there are too many competing priorities, we need to focus on surviving

There is a desire to improve teaching and learning with technology, but the lack of training, time, and funding seem to limit the implementation.

It’s also important to consider the context in which most of my colleagues are discussing. Many are working in the public sector in elementary and secondary schools. In these contexts, there may be less choice in what a teacher can do (e.g., the curriculum is set, technology is selected at the board level) and there are many responsibilities put onto one person. In my context, we are very lucky to have a teaching team and staff to work on supporting our course. With this brings different reporting structures and the transition to get support, but there are many steps in place. The funding available for technology is also different. I find that at a large post-secondary institution there are more avenues to get access to technology that may not be as available for others.

I’m curious as to how the role of outreach between institutions and schools can be better leveraged. This could be a nice connection to inform everyone’s practice, but I recognize that this is difficult and depends on location and funding.

Interview Excerpts and Analysis

Excerpt

Analysis

How do you think your students perceive the use of technology in a science classroom?

I feel like when I used Padlet specifically, there is a lot more engagement. I found that these days you just ask students “what do you think about this?” or “what do you think the answer is?”, there’s always only two three students who actually participate and voice out their answers and say what they think. But if it’s something that allows them to be anonymous, and not show that they made a mistake or don’t know about something, then they will participate more. It gets rid of the whole burden of being embarrassed about not knowing something.

Technology’s helpful in getting students to participate and amalgamate data. A student response system like padlet can be used to highlight specific responses (e.g., misconceptions, model responses, interesting ideas) to support discussion.

Questions like “what do you think about this?” and “what do you think the answer is?” seem like they dominate in a teacher-oriented class. As well, they appear like weaker activities that are done during whole-class instruction.

With technology and different forms of assessment, students have alternate methods to express their understanding. There’s also comfort in low stakes formative assessment.

What challenges have you faced when using technology in the classroom?

I find that students get a faster idea of how to use technology because they have more experience with using multiple different types of technology. It comes with their age group or generation, but they get distracted easily. They try to multitask a lot which doesn’t work all the time.

Technology can present distractions. Our students have greater access to technology and this can make them more familiar with basic technical skills. However, technology and phones are often designed for entertainment and to keep users engaged. Multitasking, devices, and the given tasks all compete for student attention.

How do you deal with these challenges?

With younger groups, I try to make sure they know when they’re allowed to use their devices and when they shouldn’t be. I try to also let them know about, like, oh it’s better if you write certain things down physically than to type everything out because you’re engaging more with the content.

Co-regulating the use of devices by setting up norms and expectations can help students recognize responsible/appropriate and irresponsible/inappropriate use of technology.

Connecting distractions and technology use to how people learn is important. Highlighting cognitivist principles can emphasize how learning works, how attention works, and how our behaviours influence these.

How have your students used technology in the classroom?

If one student doesn’t write notes very well and there’s one student that does take notes very well, they’ll do the Google Docs thing, where they’ll share/combine everyone’s notes into one Google Doc and just share it with the class. So there’s a collaborative element that I’ve been seeing more of.

Students can use technology in novel and unexpected ways. This collaborative note-taking is an interesting way of filling in gaps and resource pooling.

Connecting with our students about their technological preferences, uses, and experiences can give us insight into how they tend to learn.

Re: use of technology in the classroom

I just find that there are so many [chemicals] that are banned now. You just can’t do it in the classroom anymore so a lot of the time you have to resort to showing it from the internet. I’m trying to do certain experiments, and then I find out the chemicals are banned and then I’m like, well what’s my alternative?

When real experiences become limited, one way to keep them is through a digital archive. Although this is a bit artificial and we still want our students to develop the requisite skills connected to a hands-on experience, our assessment tasks need to change.

Week 3: Case Study Reflection

Something I’ve been noticing from our course discussions so far, that has been really highlighted in the Case Study thread, is that we aren’t talking about technology. Of course, there is discussion around technology and tools that people are using, but a lot of the discussion is really connected to pedagogy and training.

So far the larger themes that have emerged from the conversations are:

Training
Skepticism surrounding use of technology
The changing role of the teacher

Training

There’s been a lot of commentary about how there isn’t enough training on how to use technology in the classroom. A challenge that many have been highlighting is that it takes a lot of time for the teacher to learn how to use the technology, how to use it for teaching, and then implement it into the classroom. From the sounds of it, many of our classmates have been experiencing teacher as DIY lone rangers.

From a public high school perspective, I can understand what the sentiments for better training. As a newer teacher, I know that my teacher’s college experience didn’t provide a ton of training on technology. We did have a really useful workshop on technology with different breakout sessions. I don’t know if there’s a way for teacher’s colleges to present everything teachers would ever need to know. At the same time, something that a professional teacher needs to demonstrate is professional knowledge and the willingness and commitment to ongoing professional development. In the mind of a pre-service teacher, directly applicable skills and the how-to are so important. Pre-service teachers need this context and sometimes the more theoretical aspects of teacher’s college can be lost. There really needs to be a balance between these competing priorities.

Linking back to technology, there are so many moving pieces. Even if a teacher candidate is “trained” with a specific device, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a public school has access to this technology or the same model of the device.

Learning how to be a teacher doesn’t end at teacher’s college. Future formal and informal learning opportunities are required to hone our practice. A really interesting suggestion from a classmate was that teachers could be required to take specific courses to be re-certified after a specific time period. I don’t know if I agree with this because this could be very expensive and I don’t know how this could be implemented. In some ways, it looks like an added layer of responsibility being added to what teachers must do.

I’m all for learning about technology and pedagogy and their implementation in the classroom, but I wonder about the push back and how this could impact informal learning. I wouldn’t want these mandatory paid courses to negatively impact the perception of training and continuing development. Instead, I think a strong culture of community of practice would be very helpful. This helps to maintain the academic freedom for teachers, while encouraging teachers to learn and develop more. The community of practice could also be integrated within the existing culture and transition into professional teaching. Perhaps newer teachers are paired with mentor teachers. The pairing could be done based on interests and include a school community of practice.

Skepticism around technology

There’s been commentary around the reliance of technology and technology as a substitute.

For example, the case where graphing calculators are shown to students and used before students learn how to graph was seen as problematic. In this case, there were concerns about students not actually knowing what they were doing and are just using the calculators to get the answer. Here I wonder if the learning objectives have really been achieved if students don’t know what they are doing. I think the calculators can be useful in supporting students in their zone of proximal development (e.g., solving harder problems, and focussing upon the logic). However, a counter argument could be that students always have access to technology.

In terms of technology being a substitute, it can be difficult to see what its role is when we look at a lesson from a reductionist perspective. Yes, technology can make things faster, it can simplify tasks, and in some cases, it does look like it’s merely there. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean we should discount its utility and role in the classroom. From a pragmatic perspective, technology is here to stay and students should learn how to work with and around it.

Something that I’m noticing is that although the activities we do may be more technology enhanced, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the products that students produce are changing. Perhaps this also needs a re-think.

The changing role of the teacher

I wouldn’t say that technology makes everyone an expert, because there are discipline specific skills and knowledge that may not be picked up by a novice. Instead, technology can help anyone access an expert. With this, the teacher role can shift to more of a facilitator. If an activity leverages collaboration and peer-to-peer instruction, the teacher could check in on the groups.

In the most ideal case, I don’t think a classroom is full of only teacher-instruction or peer-instruction, instead I think learning will cycle between the two.

End of Week 2: Unpacking Assumptions

This discussion seemed a bit weaker than the Conceptual Challenges thread. The challenge with online forums is that I never know if people aren’t commenting because they agree with the post, if they have nothing to say, or they cannot relate to the post.

From re-reading everyone’s posts, I noticed the following trends:

Technology’s primary perceived uses are tied to teacher-content and student-content interactions: Although there were posts that mentioned how technology could be used to get students to work together, this was not as well explored. Technology, in the form of AR/VR and animations was suggested as a way to present content and allow students to explore phenomena. Although there is the potential for inquiry, there is an underlying tone of individuals as independent observers. The perception here could be that science is something that is observed primarily by the individual, but potentially in conjunction with others.
The inclusion or integration of technology is weighed to be pragmatic: The selection and application of technology depends on the cost (monetary and time), ease of use, and student needs. If the benefits do not outweigh the cost, technology is not used.
Technology plays an important role in multiple representations of content: This can be very useful in highlighting alternate conceptions.
Technology can motivate students: This was an interesting point. It was suggested that technology could be used sparingly or in specific contexts to engage students. I don’t know how I feel about this, but I know it would depend on the individual’s classroom and students. However, I think the use of technology in multiple representations and ability to connect to inquiry and doing, can facilitate active learning.
Teachers may feel resistance to using technology: Since technology can be used to support inquiry and independent learning, the role of the teacher changes. This may cause discomfort for both teachers and students. Teachers may not be used to not knowing the content/applications as well. Students may not like the added responsibility of independent learning and perceive having to take the initiative with less support from the teacher as not learning. These feelings of teaching and learning will need to be addressed.

Overall, I’m wondering if our assumptions about the use of technology in math and science classrooms comes from the disciplines themselves. Of course we are not dealing with just content misconceptions, but misconceptions about teaching and learning.

Week 3: Case Studies

Case 6: Teacher G

Teacher G is an engineering professor who uses clickers in the classroom. I sympathize with the challenge of gauging what students know and getting them to participate. The challenge of a large classroom is the inability to connect with students on a one on one basis. In post-secondary institutions, it often seems like we’re in a race against time to jam content into our students, but it just leaves us all exhausted.

In Teacher G’s case, he used clickers to get students to participate and then uses the response distribution to decide if a concept needed to be taken up or not. He appears to have leveraged peer-to-peer instruction during the clicker sessions.

Somethings that I wonder about in watching Teacher G’s lesson are:

How are the clicker questions made? From one of the vignettes, I realized that he might be creating the questions himself based on student misconceptions he has seen in the past.
How does he get students to buy in/participate? Teacher G mentioned that in student evaluations, there were students who really liked the clickers. He didn’t mention any data about students not liking them. To me, his class looked small, about 75-250 students. In the course I support, we have about 500 per lecture section and using the classroom response system (Mentimeter or Kahoot! depending on the activity), we might get anywhere from 80-350 unique participants; we can’t tell if students are actually paired up for activities. Do students have pre-lecture tasks? How does he approach readiness and feelings of learning?
How are clicker activities structured within a lecture? The section with the student testimonial seemed to suggest that professors were using PowerPoint presentations and overheads, while Teacher G used clickers, possibly in addition to these methods. However, it’s unknown if the clicker activities are done before, after, during direct instruction or another form of instruction.
How are clicker activities structured within the syllabus? Are these for marks?
What support is available to instructors who are using clickers? From the way the students were dressed, this was probably in the 90’s-00’s and it seemed like clickers were something Teacher G was lone rangering.
What types of support are available to students who are struggling with the content? It looked like only Teacher G and the students were in the room. Does Teacher G circulate during clicker time to speak to students? What happens to students who are struggling; are they identified?

What doesn’t shock me about this case study is that Teacher G’s class is very similar to what post-secondary classes today. Our post-secondary classrooms are designed to be theatres to listen to someone present. Even if the architecture of the room is put aside, what we’re really seeing is that there isn’t a lot of teacher to student support. In the large engineering course I support, we have an additional 4-8 members of the teaching team present who will circulate during activities. Not everyone is reached, but the support is present.

Case Study 1: Teacher M

It was hard to hear what was being said in this videos, but it looks like Teacher M et al are using project based learning and inquiry. Peer-to-peer instruction is also leveraged. The projects and inquiry work well in contextualizing the content within STEM. There was also really good leveraging of open access resources for students to develop auxiliary skills. The teachers also discussed outreach between high school and post-secondary education to benchmark. I laughed when they said this because when I was teaching high school, our administration would show us these extreme examples as evidence that we shouldn’t be doing what we are doing (e.g., to show that we shouldn’t do multiple choice: a physics test from a different school where the options are paragraphs, the correct answer would be found if students notice that “desert” is spelled as “dessert”. This was clearly an invalid assessment; students misattributing stress from writing exams from being in the room they are writing in = we cannot have exams in the cafeteria because it is scary, instead we should write in our classrooms where there aren’t enough tables and chairs). When teachers in university-prep courses said we were preparing our students for university, we were told that we weren’t supposed to do that.

Something that surprised me from this clip is that technology wasn’t necessarily applying to computer programs or apps. It was applying to specialized tools the discipline uses (e.g., probes).

Similarities and Differences Between the Case Studies

What I’m noticing between the case studies is how the station and project activities that are typically done in elementary grades start to disappear as students go to secondary and post-secondary. Tests are typically what get emphasized more and projects start re-appear in the end of post-secondary when the relevant skills have either stagnated or never developed.

The projects and inquiry being done in Teacher M’s high school are important. I wonder how the students were supported in the transition into this type of learning. Having to take responsibility for one’s own learning is often a cognitively dissonant experience. As well, it’s tricky for the teacher to shed the traditional teacher persona. I think the questions that arise from the inquiry and constant engagement in the new tasks can help bring out developing misconceptions. The teacher will need to check in frequently.

Another topic that comes to mind is the high school experience of group work. I know that some students might think that peer-to-peer instruction is bad because it involves “the blind leading the blind”, but the teacher is still present and can facilitate/correct learning. However, some students may be concerned about freeloading group members. The other challenge of these group work activities in Ontario, is that they are hard to assess. We can’t really tell where a specific student put in the work, and try to get them to submit their own individual components and the end team product is a very small percentage. I don’t think an individual mastery policy is possible, but this is what the engineering course I support does:

Team Assignments, Attribution Table: Students submit an attribution table to show the allocation of work. After the TA awards a grade for the product, individual penalties are applied to students for undercontribution
Individual Mastery Policy: We have individual and team based assignments. If a student is unable to earn at least 60% in their individual assignments, then they do not get any of their team assignment marks. So if a student has an average of 55% in their individual assignments and an average of 90% in their team assignments, their final course grade is 55%.

Overall, I’m having difficulties seeing how these strategies can be applied. Perhaps the part that surprises me the most is that the case studies discuss how students are using technology. Upon reflection, I realize that this was missing from my Unpacking Assumptions post. I think I need more time to mull over this.

End of Week 2: Conceptual Challenges

This week we have two discussion threads, from the thread on conceptual challenges, I am re-thinking language, visuals, and assessments.

Academic vs. Colloquial Language

There were great discussions connected to shortcuts. Something that was pointed out was the use of “lazy language”. I don’t know if I agreed with this word choice, but essentially it could include cases where students and teachers use colloquial (everyday) language to explain academic concepts that require technical and discipline specific terms. Colloquial language can be problematic because its context is not always technical or can fit in contexts that are inconsistent with a discipline’s context.

Math and Science Examples of Academic and Colloquial Language

Academic Language	Colloquial Language
Reciprocate the fraction	Flip the fraction Invert the fraction
This is the favoured orientation for this molecule because it maximizes stability.	This is the favoured orientation for this molecule because it is happy like this.
This substance slows down the rate of reaction, it is an inhibitor.	This substance slows down the rate of reaction, it is an anti-catalyst.

The above examples of academic vs. colloquial language are some that I have used before. After speaking to other colleagues, they pointed out that some of our word choices impact topics that they teach later (e.g., reciprocate vs. invert: using “invert” later causes confusion with “inverse functions”).

Strategy to approach the use of colloquial language

Shortcuts and colloquial language are not inherently bad. Starting with colloquial language to engage students can be a useful entry point. However, teachers need to remember that the end goal is to get students to recognize and use academic language. Colloquial terms and incomplete academic language may be linked to other parts of a students’ schema, which can impact the development of alternate conceptions.

Like with English Language Learners, I don’t think it’s appropriate to stop the learner at every point they make an error. Instead, it would be more effective to:

Ask for clarification about what a student is trying to say
Model academic language by paraphrasing the colloquial language into academic language
Praising students when they use academic language
Use praise and scaffolding to shape behaviour
Make connections between colloquial and academic language and how they are different

Using colloquial language as an entry point and as an analogy can also be helpful:

Domain: for this function, where does it live? What x values can the function take?

Visuals and Examples

Another area that was discussed was the examples that are seen by students and how technology can facilitate multiple representations of content and exploration. There are no perfect visuals when trying to represent abstract concepts. In the Private Universe, it was pointed out that the alternate conception about seasons being formed due to the distance between the sun and the earth partially comes from the perspective drawing of earth’s orbit. In addition to this perspective drawing, it’s important to show the orbit from the top view, highlighting that the orbit is approximately circular, and by using animations. These multiple representations are important to highlight the flaws in some representations and to develop a better understanding of a concept.

Similarly, it’s important to carefully select examples. A variety of examples is important in contextualizing that the concept is not an exception. As well, the examples should highlight the skills necessary in understanding the concept.

Assessments

Assessments are where students make their learning visual. Even if students have access to great scaffolding and modelling for academic language and a wealth of strong examples and visuals, they may still form their own alternate conceptions. Students need to practice strengthening their schema, discarding incorrect conceptions, and creating connections between schema. This can be done through assessments.

There were some really excellent examples of assessment questions that would reveal if students have a deep understanding of the topic. These included determining the climate of an unfamiliar place based on ocean currents, longitude, and latitude, and explaining in what circumstance squirrels with yellow feathered feet would increase in population.