Designing Activities to Teach Higher-Order Skills: How Feedback and Constraint Affect Learning of Experimental Design.

ABSTRACT: Active learning approaches to biology teaching, including simulation-based activities, are known to enhance student learning, especially of higher-order skills; nonetheless, there are still many open questions about what features of an activity promote optimal learning. Here we designed three versions of a simulation-based tutorial called Understanding Experimental Design that asks students to design experiments and collect data to test their hypotheses. The three versions vary the experimental design task along the axes of feedback and constraint, where constraint measures how much choice students have in performing a task. Using a variety of assessments, we ask whether each of those features affects student learning of experimental design. We find that feedback has a direct positive effe

SUBMITTER: Meir E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10956604 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature