Using Magnets and Classroom Flipping to Promote Student Engagement and Learning about Protein Translation in a Large Microbiology Class.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: McLean JL
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4858368 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Using Magnets and Classroom Flipping to Promote Student Engagement and Learning about Protein Translation in a Large Microbiology Class.
McLean Jennifer L JL Suchman Erica L EL
Journal of microbiology & biology education 20160504 2
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Project description:IntroductionThe emergency medicine (EM) clerkship curriculum at Los Angeles County + University of Southern California Medical Center includes monthly lectures on pediatric fever and shortness of breath (SOB). This educational innovation evaluated if learning could be enhanced by "priming" the students with educational online videos prior to an in-class session. Factors that impacted completion rates were also evaluated (planned specialty and time given for video viewing).MethodsTwenty-minute videos were to be viewed prior to the didactic session. Students were assigned to either the fever or SOB group and received links to those respective videos. All participating students took a pre-test prior to viewing the online lectures. For analysis, test scores were placed into concordant groups (test results on fever questions in the group assigned the fever video and test results on SOB questions in the group assigned the SOB video) and discordant groups (crossover between video assigned and topic tested). Each subject contributed one set of concordant results and one set of discordant results. Descriptive statistics were performed with the Mann-Whitney U test. Lecture links were distributed to students two weeks prior to the in-class session for seven months and three days prior to the in-class session for eight months (in which both groups included both EM-bound and non-EM bound students).ResultsIn the fifteen-month study period, 64% of students rotating through the EM elective prepared for the in class session by watching the videos. During ten months where exclusively EM-bound students were rotating (n=144), 71.5% of students viewed the lectures. In four months where students were not EM-bound (n=54), 55.6% of students viewed the lectures (p=0.033). Participation was 60.2% when lecture links were given three days in advance and 68.7% when links were given two weeks in advance (p=0.197). In the analysis of concordant scores, the pre-test averaged 56.7% correct, the immediate post-test averaged 78.1% correct, and the delayed post-test was 67.2%. In the discordant groups, the pretest averaged 51.9%, the immediate posttest was 67.1% and the delayed by 68.8%. In the concordant groups, the immediate post-test scores improved by 21.4%, compared with 15.2% in the discordant groups (p = 0.655). In the delayed post-test the concordant scores improved by 10.5% and discordant scores by 16.9 percent (p=0.609). Sixty-two percent of students surveyed preferred the format of online videos with in-class case discussion to a traditional lecture format.ConclusionImmediate post-tests and delayed post-tests improved but priming was not demonstrated to be a statistically superior educational method in this study. Medical student completion of the preparatory materials for the EM rotation session increased when the students were EM-bound. Participation rates were not significantly different when given at two weeks versus three days.
| S-EPMC5785208 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Teaching is now experiencing a new centrality due to the fast socio-cultural transformations, the vertical growth of digital media and, therefore, the new ways children and young people learn. New paradigms and teaching methodologies are emerging to meet the new educational needs; among them, the "Episodes of Situated Learning" approach (EAS in Italian) was chosen for this study. This approach broadly refers to the "Flipped Class" model, in which the lesson structure reverses the traditional teaching/learning cycle with a positive outcome on engagement and learning. The present study aims to explore whether the EAS teaching methodology, according to literature about the Flipped Class model, has a positive outcome on student engagement, focusing on its emotional, cognitive and behavioral components. In particular, we hypothesize that the EAS teaching methodology changes teachers' behavior in classroom, increasing their movements and body expression during the lesson. Moreover, we expect higher levels of self-efficacy and positive emotions and lower levels of perceived anxiety in teachers, thus improving students' level of engagement. The research was conducted in a secondary school, in Milan, and includes a classroom of sixteen students and three teachers. We chose a quasi-experimental nested design, a mixed-method approach that combines the qualitative and quantitative collection and analysis of data, in order to reach, as far as possible, a holistic, effective and exhaustive representation of the studied phenomenon. Pre-post measures, including video-recording, systematic observation and questionnaires, of both students and teachers were collected during the 8 months of experimentation. This research project could foster positive outcomes for participants as well as the broader society, in which school dropout is increasing. Many authors positively associate low levels of students' engagement to high rates of school dropout; for this reason, working on improving teaching methodologies and students' engagement measurement, could be an effective way to enhance learning and opposing school dropout.
| S-EPMC6607896 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Teaching is now experiencing a new centrality due to the fast socio-cultural transformations, the vertical growth of digital media and, therefore, the new ways children and young people learn. New paradigms and teaching methodologies are emerging to meet the new educational needs; among them, the "Episodes of Situated Learning" approach (EAS in Italian) was chosen for this study. This approach broadly refers to the "Flipped Class" model, in which the lesson structure reverses the traditional teaching/learning cycle with a positive outcome on engagement and learning. The present study aims to explore whether the EAS teaching methodology, according to literature about the Flipped Class model, has a positive outcome on student engagement, focusing on its emotional, cognitive and behavioral components. In particular, we hypothesize that the EAS teaching methodology changes teachers' behavior in classroom, increasing their movements and body expression during the lesson. Moreover, we expect higher levels of self-efficacy and positive emotions and lower levels of perceived anxiety in teachers, thus improving students' level of engagement. The research was conducted in a secondary school, in Milan, and includes a classroom of sixteen students and three teachers. We chose a quasi-experimental nested design, a mixed-method approach that combines the qualitative and quantitative collection and analysis of data, in order to reach, as far as possible, a holistic, effective and exhaustive representation of the studied phenomenon. Pre-post measures, including video-recording, systematic observation and questionnaires, of both students and teachers were collected during the 8 months of experimentation. This research project could foster positive outcomes for participants as well as the broader society, in which school dropout is increasing. Many authors positively associate low levels of students' engagement to high rates of school dropout; for this reason, working on improving teaching methodologies and students' engagement measurement, could be an effective way to enhance learning and opposing school dropout.
| S-EPMC6607896 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Knowledge surveys are a type of confidence survey in which students rate their confidence in their ability to answer questions rather than answering the questions. These surveys have been discussed as a tool to evaluate student in-class or curriculum-wide learning. However, disagreement exists as to whether confidence is actually an accurate measure of knowledge. With the concomitant goals of assessing content-based learning objectives and addressing this disagreement, we present herein a pretest/posttest knowledge survey study that demonstrates a significant difference correctness on graded test questions at different levels of reported confidence in a multi-semester timeframe. Questions were organized into Bloom's taxonomy, allowing for the data collected to further provide statistical analyses on strengths and deficits in various levels of Bloom's reasoning with regard to mean correctness. Collectively, students showed increasing confidence and correctness in all levels of thought but struggled with synthesis-level questions. However, when students were only asked to rate confidence and not answer the accompanying test questions, they reported significantly higher confidence than the control group which was asked to do both. This indicates that when students do not attempt to answer questions, they have significantly greater confidence in their ability to answer those questions. Additionally, when students rate only confidence without answering the question, resolution across Bloom's levels of reasoning is lost. Based upon our findings, knowledge surveys can be an effective tool for assessment of both breadth and depth of knowledge, but may require students to answer questions in addition to rating confidence to provide the most accurate data.
| S-EPMC4278496 | biostudies-literature
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC7386322 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In introductory microbiology courses for non-biology majors, it can be difficult to ensure that students gain a functional understanding of the interplay between the host immune system and an invading infectious agent. Immune Battle is a board game that allows students to explore pathogen evolution and the immune system's response to incursions in a captivating way, leveraging battleship and worker placement styles of gameplay. Students play in teams as either a pathogenic microbe attempting to reproduce and transmit itself to new hosts or as the immune system trying to defend the host from infection. Immune Battle seeks to mimic real-world interactions between immune cells and microbes using board game mechanics. For example, students will quickly find that adaptive immune system actions are better at fighting off microbial incursions than innate immune actions but require more time to activate. In this way, Immune Battle reinforces student's understanding of the immune system and pathogenic virulence in an exciting and interactive way that keeps them thinking about host defenses long after the end of the class period or exam. This board game is well suited for advanced high school courses and introductory college-level courses that have only limited time to cover the immune system and microbiology. Documents containing the necessary components of the board game (not including a six-sided die) are included in the supplemental materials, so educators can print out their own copies and use this board game in their classes with no cost to themselves or their students.
| S-EPMC11636227 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The flip teaching model is being increasingly adopted by higher education institutions as an active learning alternative to traditional lecturing. However, the flip model shares a number of critical premises with the classical didactics. The further flips of the flip are thus advocated and the fear of returning the method to its initial state, prior to the flip, via such flips of the flipped dispelled. Proposed here is a seminal variation to the flip model based on the active involvement of students in searching, finding, selecting, and assembling knowledge from various literature sources into the learning material for the entire class. Because students actively co-create the learning content together with other students and the instructor, one such open-ended collaborative model is christened "co-creational." Its conception and corollaries in relation to co-educational methods in general are discussed. The model is represented algorithmically, exemplified by a topic of choice and compared in a quasi-experimental setting against the standard flip and the traditional lecturing in a medical devices graduate class. Students were able to retain and reproduce the content covered using the co-creational pedagogic method better than using the standard flip or traditional lecturing. They also had a positive perception of the method, as compared to traditional lecturing. They did not have a preference for the co-creational method over the standard flip, but felt that they learned more using the co-creational method compared to the standard flip and that the co-creational model best prepared them for job searches in high-tech industry and academia. The co-creational model was also more open to the intrusion of moral instructions than traditional lecturing, going hand-in-hand with the community-building aspect of the ideal form of knowledge acquisition and creation.
| S-EPMC6294219 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The primary measure used to determine relative effectiveness of in-class activities has been student performance on pre/posttests. However, in today's active-learning classrooms, learning is a social activity, requiring students to interact and learn from their peers. To develop effective active-learning exercises that engage students, it is important to gain a more holistic view of the student experience in an active-learning classroom. We have taken a mixed-methods approach to iteratively develop and validate a 16-item survey to measure multiple facets of the student experience during active-learning exercises. The instrument, which we call Assessing Student Perspective of Engagement in Class Tool (ASPECT), was administered to a large introductory biology class, and student responses were subjected to exploratory factor analysis. The 16 items loaded onto three factors that cumulatively explained 52% of the variation in student response: 1) value of activity, 2) personal effort, and 3) instructor contribution. ASPECT provides a rapid, easily administered means to measure student perception of engagement in an active-learning classroom. Gaining a better understanding of students' level of engagement will help inform instructor best practices and provide an additional measure for comprehensively assessing the impact of different active-learning strategies.
| S-EPMC5459250 | biostudies-literature
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC4690579 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The COVID-19 pandemic has forced higher-education institutions to shift to nearly 100% online delivery of didactic coursework nationally. Besides the stress and isolation that many students experience simply due to the physical distancing requirements imposed by the crisis, students new to learning in an online environment may feel further isolated and disengaged from the course content. Consequently, we explored the use of an existing online social networking tool, Instagram, to enhance students' engagement with online course material. In this study, students enrolled in both undergraduate and graduate online science courses were invited to participate. Course instructors posted materials related to the topics covered in the course weekly sessions, including links to news reports, cartoons, and short quizzes. At the conclusion of each course, a questionnaire focusing on the students' experience was distributed to all participants. Results from the survey showed that the weekly Instagram posts allowed students to feel more engaged with the course content and connected with the course instructors and classmates. However, some students reported that the posts were not helpful or that they did not feel comfortable using social networking tools for education purposes due to privacy concerns. In this article, we provide tips for how to improve the effectiveness of using social networking tools to augment didactic online courses.
| S-EPMC8060131 | biostudies-literature