Tag: think-pair-share

This Summer, my center is supporting a cohort of 24 graduate students who are teaching for the first time. They’ve participated in our teaching and learning class, The College Classroom, and we strongly encourage them use evidence-based, student-centered instructional activities in their classes.

We work a lot on peer instruction (PI) with clickers so that’s a natural choice. We’re thrilled that 12 of the 24 chose to use peer instruction with i>clickers, in physics, linguistics, engineering, philosophy, marketing, psychology, cognitive science, math, management, and economics.

There were some instructors in visual arts, communications, anthropology and other disciplines who wanted to use PI but didn’t want to use clickers. Their reasons were understandable:

it’s a small class (8-10 students) so the instructor didn’t need the reward of participation points to get students to engage. The instructor can just “look ’em in the eye” when they’re not participating.
the students’ cost of buying a clicker
the overhead of having to learn the software (and how to make it play nice with the UCSD course management system). They’re teaching for the first time, creating all content from scratch, without a TA to mark essays, in a compressed, 5-week course that meets twice a week for 3-hour classes.
the desire to pose more open-ended questions where there is neither a right answer nor 3-5 common responses. Questions like, “Do you the person who painted this picture was a woman or a man? Why?” (Sure, you could make that a clicker question “Do you think a woman or a man painted this? A) woman B) man” but that’s just a survey and you don’t need clickers for that.)

I met with each instructor before they started teaching to talk about their plans. One instructor in Visual Arts suggested using think-pair-share. That’s got a lot in common with peer instruction. Actually, since TPS has been around for ages, peer instruction has a lot to thank TPS for. In TPS, recall

the instructor poses a thought-provoking question
students think on their own
students pair with neighbors to discuss their thoughts
students and the instructor share the thoughts in a class-wide discussion

Let’s compare that to a good episode of PI in a discussion-based class. That’s one where every choice in the question is plausible and the goal of the activity is to get students to pick a prompt they’re comfortable with and explain it to their neighbors, citing evidence when possible. That is, there’s no “convincing your neighbor you’re right” because all the answers are right. Okay, so here’s what PI looks like:

the instructor poses a thought-provoking question with 2-5 conversation starters for choices
students vote using their clickers
instructor says, “Hmm, really interesting to see you choosing different prompts. Please turn to your neighbor, tell them why you picked the choice you made. Support your choice with evidence from the readings.”
the students pair and discuss
there is NOT a 2nd vote – no one is expected to change their minds. The discussion was a chance to summon the evidence and practice putting together an argument.
the instructor leads a lively, class-wide discussion drawing out the students’ evidence for each of the prompts

My colleague and historian, Heidi Keller-Lapp, adds one more step. When she’s preparing the class, she adds a slide after the PI question with a list of all the points she wanted to cover via the PI question. After step 6, Heidi

flips to the discussion points slide, goes down the list, “Yep, we talked about this and this and this and, oh, we didn’t mention this. Okay, remember…. Good, and this and this. Great! Terrific discussion, everyone.” This can take 20 minutes in Heidi’s class. That’s 20 glorious minutes of students thinking critically and making arguments with evidence.

What makes peer instruction effective?

There are a couple of necessary, though not sufficient, components of effective peer instruction.

students must think on their own and commit to an idea. That’s critical for learning because they need something to talk about, something to contribute to the “turn to your neighbor” and something to XOR their neighbor’s thinking against.
students engage more when they know they’re accountable. Participation points – points for clicking – are a good way to support this. A few points go a long way.

And that’s what is often missing in TPS unless the instructor has the presence and respect of the students to get them all to engage each time. In TPS,

students don’t need to commit: they can look at the prompts and think, “Hmm, a couple of those look plausible,” wait until their neighbor starts talking, and then respond, “Yeah, that’s totally what I was thinking, too.” They can get away with it.
so what if a student doesn’t pick a prompt? What’s the instructor going to do about it? Cold-call on students? That’s not TPS anymore; it’s anxiety-inducing, imposter-syndrome-reinforcing arm-twisting. Ask for students to raise their hands? Sure, and the same 3 students answer (and I don’t have to talk, ever, if I don’t want to.)

Introducing TPS/cards

Okay, back to Vis Arts. When we brainstormed how to do peer instruction without clickers (What’s that you say, use ABCD voting cards? Two words: card fade. And see 5 below), we stumbled onto a variation of TPS that, I believe, resolves these weaknesses by borrowing from PI:

the instructor poses a thought-provoking question. It can be open-ended. It can be multiple-choice. It can even be “Draw a picture of…” or “Sketch a graph of…” Whatever the instructor decides will provoke the best discussion.
students think on their own and write their thoughts on 3 x 5 inch index cards that the instructor distributes every day. By writing on the card, students commit to one of the choices. (Bonus: writing!)
students pair with neighbors to discuss their thoughts, referring to their index cards as necessary
students and the instructor share the thoughts in a class-wide discussion
at the end of class, students hand in their index cards (after writing their names on them). The instructor uses these cards to award participation points. Yes, this takes time that scales with the size of the class. But does flipping through a stack of cards, putting tally marks on a class list, really take that much longer than syncing your clicker software with course management system (don’t forget, there is no frustrating, pull-your-hair-out battle with freakin’ Blackboard! Arrggghh! at the beginning of the term.)

Super Bonus: Education Research

Like any experimental teaching and learning activity, we need to ask, “But did it work?” We have a post-course student survey that probes deeply how student perceived and learned from peer instruction, and we’re running essentially same survey in these TPS/cards classes with “peer instruction” search-and-replaced with “think-pair-share.” I’m really excited to see how the courses taught with TPS/cards turn out.

Double Super Bonus

The instructor kept all the index cards from her classes, in chronological order. She’s going to run some content analysis on the students’ thoughts to see if, for example, their thinking grew more sophisticated and expert-like as the course progressed. An awesome teaching-as-research project!

Your thoughts

What do you think? Have I missed something critical about PI or added something harmful to TPS? Is this something school teachers have been doing for decades and HigherEd is only now re-inventing it? What research question would you try to answer if you had a record of what your students were thinking throughout the term? All ideas welcome!

Motivation for pre-reading assignments

January 5, 2012

Peter Newbury

physics teaching 10 Comments

chain_pratani_flickerCC — Image: chain by pratani on flicker (CC)

For the next 4 months, I’ll be working with an instructor in an 4th-year electromagnetism course. If you’ve taught or taken a course like this, let me just say, “Griffiths”. If you haven’t, this is the capstone course in E&M. It’s the big, final synthesis of all the electricity and magnetism and math and math and math the students have been accumulating for the previous 3-1/2 years. This is where it all comes together and the wonders of physics are, at last, revealed. It’s the course all the previous instructors have been talking about when they say, “Just learn it. Trust me, it will be really important in your future courses…” That’s the promise, anyway.

The instructor came to us (“us” being the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative) because he wasn’t happy with the lecture-style he’s been using. Students are not engaging, if they even bother to come to class. He’s trying to use peer instruction with clickers but it’s not very successful. He wants to engage the students by giving them worksheets in class but he’s not sure how.

So much enthusiasm! So much potential! Yes, let’s totally transform this course, flipping it from instructor- to student-centered! Yes, and I purposely using the word “flipping” with all its baggage!

Hold on there, Buckaroo! One thing at a time. Changing everything at once rarely works. It takes time for the instructor to make the changes and learn how to incorporate each one into his or her teaching.

So, we’re tackling just a few things this term. The first is to create learning goals (or objectives) so we can figure out how to target our effort. In talking with the instructor, I learned there are very few new, mathematical techniques introduced in the course. Instead, the course is about selecting the right sequence of mathematical tools to distill fundamental physics out of the math describing E&M. That led us to this draft of one of the course-level, big-picture goals:

While you are expected to remember basic relationships from physics like F=dp/dt and λ=c/ν, you do not have to memorize complicated formulas we derive in class because a list of formulas will be given. Instead, you will be able to select the applicable formula from the list and know how to apply it to the task you’re working on.

The biggest change we’re making is the introducing effective pre-reading assignments. Oh sure, the instructor always said things like “Pre-reading for Lecture 1: Sections 12.1.1 – 12.1.3” but that’s not doing the trick. More and more of my colleagues are having success with detailed, targeted reading assignments. Rather than the “read the whole thing and learn it all” approach, we’re going to help the students learn (ha! Imagine that!):

Reading assignment (prior to L1 on Thu, Jan 10)
==================

Read Section 12.1.1. Be sure you can define an "inertial reference frame"
and state the 2 postulates of special relativity.

Review Section 12.1.2 (these concepts were covered in previous courses)
especially the Lorentz contraction (iii) and write out the missing steps
of algebra at the top of p. 490 that let Griffiths "conclude" Eqn (12.9).
Be sure you can explain why dimensions perpendicular to the velocity are
not contracted.

Read Section 12.1.3. Look carefully at Figure 12.16 so you're familiar
with the notation for inertial frames at rest (S) and inertial frames in
motion ( S with an overbar )

Now comes the hard part: getting the students to actually do it. It’ll take effort on their part so they should be rewarded for that effort. A reading quiz, probably in-class using clickers, worth marks could be that reward. (An online quiz we can use for just-in-time teaching might be even better but one thing at a time.) A straightforward quiz-for-marks promotes sharing answers (that is, cheating) and clicking for students not there (that is, cheating). I don’t want them to participate for that sole reason that they’ll be punished for not participating. I’d rather use a carrot than of a stick.

How do we present the pre-reading assignment as something the students WANT to do? Here’s a chain of reasoning, developed through conversations with my more-experienced colleagues. It’s addressed to the students, so “you” means “you, the student sitting there in class today. Yes, you.”

link 1: Efficient. You have a very busy schedule full of challenging courses. You want to use your E&M time efficiently.

link 2: Effective. We want the time you have allocated to E&M to be effective, a good return on your investment.

link 3: Learning. We recognize that many of the concepts will be learned when you do the homework. But rather than using class time to simply gather information for future learning, what if you could actually learn in class? Then you’d better follow along in class and you’d already be (partially, at least) prepared to tackle the homework.

link 4: Engagement. We’re going to create opportunities for you to learn in class through engaging, student-centered instructional strategies. But you need to be prepared to participate in those activities.

link 5: Preparation. To try to ensure everyone has neighbours prepared to collaborate and peer-instruct, we’re asking you to complete the pre-reading assignment. It will also save us from wasting valuable class time reviewing material that some (most?) of you already know.

link 6: Reward. This takes some effort so we’re going to reward that effort. If you do the readings as we suggest, the reading quiz questions we ask will be simple, a 5-mark gimme towards your final grade. Oh sure, you’ll be allowed to miss X of the quizzes and still get the 5%. Those marks are for getting into the habit of preparing for class, not a penalty for being sick or not being able to come class. The quizzes are also continuous feedback for you: if you’re not getting 80% or more on the reading quizzes, you’re not properly preparing for class. Which means you’re not link 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

The big message should be, your effort in the pre-reading assignments will help you succeed in this course, not just with a higher grade but with better grasp of the concepts and fewer all-nighters struggling with homework.

Is it all just a house of cards? I don’t think so. And I’ll find out in the next few weeks.

My brief encounter with iclicker2 ranking tasks

November 11, 2011

Peter Newbury

astro 101 clickers 8 Comments

As I’ve mentioned before, the folks at i>clicker lent me a set of the new i>clicker2 clickers. I had a chance to try them out this week when I filled in for an “Astro 101” instructor. I sure learned a lot in that 50 minutes!

iclicker2-front — (image: Peter Newbury)

Just to refresh your memory, the i>clicker2 (or “ic2” as it’s also called, which is great because the “>” in “i>clicker2” is messing up some of my HTML) unit has the usual A, B, C, D, E buttons for submitting answers to multiple-choice questions. These new clickers (and receiver and software) also allow for numeric answers and alphanumeric answers. That last feature is particularly interesting because it allows instructors to ask ranking or chronological questions. In the old days, like last week, you could display 5 objects, scenarios or events and ask the student to rank them. But you have to adapt the answers because you have only 5 choices. Something like this:

Rank these [somethings] I, II, III, IV and V from [one end] to [the other]:

A) I, II, V, III, IV
B) II, I, IV, III, IV
C) IV, III, IV, I, II
D) III, I, II, IV, V
E) V, II, I, III, IV

These are killer questions for the students. What are they supposed to do? Work out the ranking on the side and then check that their ranking is in your list? What if their ranking isn’t there? Or game the question and work through each of the choices you give and say “yes” or “no”? There is so much needed to get the answer right besides understanding the concept.

That’s what’s so great about the ic2 alphanumeric mode. I asked this question about how the objects in our Galaxy appear to be moving relative to us:

ic2rankingtask_q — The alphanumeric mode of the ic2 allows instructors to easily ask ranking tasks like this one about the rotation of the Galaxy.

(Allow me a brief astronomy lesson. At this point in writing this post, I think it’ll be important later. Oh well, can’t hurt, right?)

The stars in our Galaxy orbit around the center. The Galaxy isn’t solid, though. Each star moves along its own path, at its own speed. At this point in the term [psst! we’re setting this up so the students will appreciate what the observed, flat rotation curve means: dark matter] there is a clear pattern: the farther the star is from the center of the Galaxy, the slower its orbital speed. That means stars closer to the center than us are moving faster and will “pass us on the inside lane.” When we observe them, they’re moving away from us. Similarly, we’re moving faster than objects farther from the center than we are, so we’re catching up to the ones ahead of us. Before we pass them, we observe them getting closer to us. That means the answer to my ranking question is EDCAB. Notice that location C is the same distance from the center of the Galaxy as us so it’s moving at the same speed as us. Therefore, we’re not moving towards or away from C — it’s the location where we cross from approaching (blueshifted) to receeding (redshifted).

As usual, I displayed the question, gave the students time to think, and then opened the poll. Students submit a 5-character word like “ABCDE”. The ic2 receiver cycles through the top 3 answers so the instructor can see what the students are thinking without revealing the results to the students.

I saw that there was one popular answer with a couple of other, so I decided enough students got the question right that -pair-share wouldn’t be necessary and displayed the results:

ic2rankingtask_results — Students' answers for the galaxy rotation ranking task. The first bar, EDCAB, is correct. But what do the others tell you about the students' grasp of the concept?

In hindsight, I think I jumped the gun on that because, and here’s what I’ve been trying to get to in this post, I was unprepared to analyze the results of the poll. I did think far enough ahead to write down the correct answer, EDCAB, in big letters on my lesson plan. But what do the other answers tell us the students’ grasp of the concept?

In a good, multiple-choice question, you know why each correct choice is correct (yes, there can be more one correct choice) and why each incorrect choice is incorrect. When a student selects an incorrect choice, you can diagnose which part of the concept they’ve missed. The agile instructor can get students to -pair-share to reveal, and hopefully correct, their misunderstanding.

I’m sure that agility is possible with ranking tasks. But I hadn’t anticipated it. So I did the best I could on the fly and said something like,

Good, many of you recognized that the objects farther from the center are moving slower, so we’re moving toward them. And away from the stars closer to the center than us.

[It was at this moment I realized I had no idea what the other answers meant!]

Uh, I notice almost everyone put location C at the middle of the list – good. It’s at the same distance and same speed as us, so we’re not moving away from or towards C.

Oh, and ABCDE? You must have ranked them in the opposite order, not the way I clumsily suggested in the question. [Which, you might notice, is not true. Oops.]

[And the other 15% who entered something else? Sorry, folks…]

Uh, okay then, let’s move on…

What am I getting at here? First, these ranking tasks are awesome. Every answer is valid. None of that “I hope my answer is on the list…” And there’s no short-circuiting the answer by giving the students 5 choices, risking them gaming the answer by working backwards. I know there are lots of Astro 101 instructors already using ranking tasks, probably because of the great collection of tasks available at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, but using them in class typically means distributing worksheets, possibly collecting them, perhaps asking one of those “old-fashioned” ranking task clicker questions. All that hassle is gone with ic2.

But it’s going to take re-training on the part of the instructor to be prepared for the results. In principle, there are 5! = 120 different 5-character words the students can enter. Now, of course, you don’t have anticipate what each of the 119 incorrect answers mean. But here are my recommendations:

Work out the ranking order ahead of time and write it down, in big letters, where you can see it. It might be easy to remember, “the right answer to this question is choice B” but it’s not easy to remember, “the correct ranking is EDCAB.”
Work out the ranking if the students rank in the opposite order. That could be because they misread the question or the question wasn’t clear. Or it could diagnose their misunderstanding. For example, if I’d asked them to rank the locations from “most-redshifted” to “most-blueshifted”, the opposite order could mean they’re mixing up red- and blue-shift.
Think about the common mistakes students make on this question and work out the rankings. And write those down, along with the corresponding mistakes.
Nothing like hindsight: set up the question so the answer isn’t just 1 swap away from ABCDE. If you had no idea what the answer was, wouldn’t you enter ABCDE?

I hope to try, and write about, some other types of questions with my collection of ic2 clickers. I’ve already tried a demo where students enter their predictions using the numeric mode. But that’s the subject for another post…

Do you use ranking tasks in your class, with ic2 or paper or something else, again? What advice can you offer that will help the instructor be more prepared and agile?

What makes peer instruction effective?

Introducing TPS/cards

Super Bonus: Education Research

Double Super Bonus

Your thoughts

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