Throughout the Sep-Dec, 2010 term, I worked with an astronomy instructor to create a more learner-centered classroom. As I described elsewhere, we spent just over one third of the instructional time on interactive activities: think-pair-share using clickers, lecture-tutorial worksheets, ranking tasks and a couple of predict-observe demonstrations. And it resulted in a learning gain of 0.42 on a particular assessment tool, the LSCI. That means the students learned 42% of the concepts they didn’t already know at the beginning of the term. That’s not bad — we’re pretty happy with it.
So, students can learn in a learner-centered classroom. But maybe they can learn in a more traditional classroom, too.
We don’t have LSCI data from previous years (note to self: think ahead! Collect standardized assessment data on classes before attempting any transformations!) To investigate if transforming the instruction class makes any difference, we re-used, word-for-word, a handful of questions from the same instructor’s 2008 Final Exam (pre-transformation) on this term’s Final Exam: 10 multiple-choice questions and 4 longer-answer questions. We made sure the questions assessed the concepts we covered in 2010 in sync with the learning goals.
I extracted students’ marks on these 14 questions from the 2010 exams (N=144). And from the old, 2008 exams (N=107), being sure to re-mark the longer-answer questions using the 2010 rubric. (Note to self #2: buy aspirin on the way home.)
What were we hoping for? Significant increase in student success in the transformed, learner-centered course.
How I wish I could report that’s what we found. But I can’t. Because we didn’t. Here are the results:
There is no significant difference in student success on the 10 multiple-choice questions. Their scores on the entire exams are also the same, though the exams are not identical, only about 1/4 of the 2008 exam is re-used in 2010. Nevertheless, these nearly identical Exam scores suggest the populations of students in 2008 and 2010 are about the same. There are are differences in the 4 long-answer questions: the 2008 students did better than their 2010 counterparts.
Two things jumped out at me
- Why did they do so much better on the long-answer questions? I said we used the same marking rubric but we didn’t use the same markers. A team of teaching assistants marked the 2010 exams; I(re) marked the 2008 exams. The long-answer questions are work 10 marks, so a little more (or less) generosity in marking – half a mark here, half a mark there – could make a difference. I really need to get the same TAs to remark the 2008 exams. Yeah, like that’s gonna happen voluntarily. Hmm, unless there’s potential for a publication in the AER…
- Why, oh why, didn’t they do better this year? Even if we omit the suspicious long-answer marks and look only at the multiple-choice questions, there is no difference. Did we fail?
No, it’s not a failure. The instructor reduced her lecturing time by 35%. We asked the students to spend 35% of their time teaching themselves. And it did no harm. The instructor enjoyed this class much than in 2008. We had consistent 75% attendance (it was much lower by the end of the term in 2008) and students were engaged in material each and every class. I think that’s a success.
The next step in this experiment is to look for retention. There is evidence in physics (see Pollock & Chasteen, “Longer term impacts…” here) that students who engage in material and generate their own knowledge retain the material longer. With that in mind, I hope to re-test these 2010 students with LSCI in about 3 months, after they’ve had a term to forget everything. Or maybe not…