Activity pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Learn on the Move: A Problem-Based Induction Activity for New University Chemistry Students Dylan P. Williams* University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, United Kingdom S Supporting Information *
ABSTRACT: An open-ended team induction activity was developed in order to help introduce new year-one chemistry students at the University of Leicester to other members of their Problem Based Learning (PBL) teams and to facilitate development of a problem-solving strategy for PBL activities. The activity was based on the design, development, and evaluation of a learning resource intended for use by year-one chemists. Students were given the freedom to select the format for their resource, the topic the resource focused on, and the methods used to evaluate it. The level of student engagement with the activity was very good, and student feedback indicates a perceived benefit to transferable skills development, meeting fellow students and learning how to approach PBL problems.
KEYWORDS: First-Year Undergraduate, General, Problem Solving, Decision Making, Inquiry Based, Discovery Learning, Collaborative, Cooperative Learning, Communication, Writing
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other members of their cohort20 and allows instructors to integrate the development of key transferable skills22 in the chemistry curriculum.16 Previous work has shown that for a PBL implementation to succeed, it is vital to provide mechanisms which allow students to become familiar with the approach and its aims.13 PBL activities are now embedded in a range of core modules at Leicester with the primary aims of exposing students to active learning experiences that require teamwork and familiarizing students with the communication, critical thinking and problem-solving skills required of practicing chemists.17,20 Student feedback at Leicester has revealed that one of the major challenges year-one chemistry students encounter when working on a PBL activity is the open-ended nature, which can differ significantly from the pre-university teaching approaches they were used to. Although there has been some work on using PBL approaches in preuniversity chemistry teaching,23 the number of reported examples remains low, so many students still encounter the approaches for the first time when they arrive at university.
INTRODUCTION
Background
Active learning approaches are known to be the most effective teaching and learning approaches in undergraduate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) degree programs.1,2 Problem Based Learning (PBL) is an established student-centered approach which facilitates active learning based on the use of contextualized, open-ended problems.3−6 The first reported uses of PBL were in medical science programs in the 1960s.4 Since the 1990s, the approach has become increasingly common in other disciplines, including chemistry.7−15 Open-ended approaches such as PBL have been used in a variety of contexts within chemistry, including laboratory teaching,8−12 classroom teaching7,13−15 and in teaching chemistry to students studying interdisciplinary degree programs.16 Previous work has shown that PBL implementations in chemistry have helped students gain experience of learning situations that require critical thinking and reflection17 and can help students solve complex scientific problems.7 PBL has also been used as a pedagogical tool to introduce students to the applications of chemistry in a range of real-world interdisciplinary contexts.13,15−17 In the past decade, a significant amount of work has been done to facilitate the school to university transition for new chemistry undergraduate students.18,19 The Department of Chemistry at the University of Leicester has used PBL as a mechanism for introducing students to the student-centered teaching approaches used in chemistry degree programs.20,21 Using PBL with year-one undergraduate students at Leicester has been shown to help students form strong social links with © XXXX American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
Aims
In order to introduce year-one students to the concept of working within a team on open-ended problems, a short induction activity was designed which was used at the start of the first term. This problem was embedded in a series of yearone PBL activities which are designed to help students make Received: June 9, 2017 Revised: August 8, 2017
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00399 J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
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these with the rest of the team. Each team then needed to agree on a single problem summary based on the discussion of their individual summaries. The team discussion of the activity was supported by the use of the SET (Summary-Existing knowledge-Things to research) sheet which was developed at Leicester for students to develop plans for solving open-ended problems (see Supporting Information).20,21 This scaffolded approach to problem solving was inspired by the Maastricht seven-step process that was designed to help students identify the nature of the problem they were working on; to set their own agreed learning targets; and to reflect on the effectiveness of their working solutions.26,27 The problem-solving process was structured in a way to encourage students to reflect on their own skills development at all stages. The SET sheet requires students to audit their own knowledge and skills in the context of the problem they are presented with. Students were encouraged to identify the skills and knowledge they lacked and to construct a development plan that supported them in addressing these deficits and solving the problem. The teams were told to review the SET sheet periodically to evaluate the progress they had made. The problem statement provided teams with some triggers to help focus their discussion. In order to promote creativity and to reaffirm the open-ended nature of the task, teams were asked to consider who the key stakeholders were and how the resource design could accommodate the needs of these stakeholders. The teams were given control of the selection of the topic that they based the resource on (although they were asked to ensure that the design aligned with some of the intended learning outcomes from the opening stages of the Leicester introductory organic and inorganic chemistry modules) and were allowed to select the most suitable format for their resource. Students were given a full list of Intended Learning Outcomes for the relevant modules. In order to facilitate this, students were asked to use part of the first team meeting to engage in a reflective discussion on what types of learning resources they had found particularly useful (and why) and what chemistry topics they thought their target audience would benefit from more resources in. Teams were encouraged to think about whether they needed to conduct “market research”. By the end of the first team meeting, students were told they should have developed an initial plan (including a draft time scale) for resource development which was to be presented to a facilitator for feedback. Some teams decided what form their resource would take and what topic it would be based on by voting; other teams deferred this decision until they had performed some “market research” (e.g., by collecting responses to a short questionnaire or holding informal discussions with other students). Teams were asked to prepare a preliminary draft of their resource ahead of the second scheduled team meeting (1 week later). The draft could have been as simple as a story board and script for a video or a hand drawn outline of a poster, but teams were reminded of the importance of bringing something to the second session to discuss with their facilitator.
connections between different areas of the curriculum (i.e., to link between aspects of inorganic, organic and physical chemistry), develop a range of transferable skills and to gain an appreciation of how chemistry is applied in solving problems of interest to society. The primary aims were to introduce students to the other members of their PBL team and to their team’s staff facilitator; to give students experience of how to approach an open-ended problem; to support student creativity in problem solving; and to facilitate development of transferable and subject-specific skills.
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METHODOLOGY
The Activity
“Learn on the move” is a two week long induction activity based on the design, development, and evaluation of a learning resource. The activity was contextualized by stating a target audience for the resource as well as some outline specifications that the resource had to address. The problem took the form of a university competition (“Learn on the move”) to develop student-generated learning resources in chemistry that could be used by other students on the approximately 20 min long bus commute from the University’s Halls of Residence in Oadby, Leicestershire, UK to the University’s campus in Leicester City Centre (the context could easily be adapted for commutes at other universities or even as an activity for students to work on during free periods between scheduled activities). Students were told that they would need to pilot their resource on a representative group and write a one page report outlining the decisions they had made in designing the resource and summarizing the pilot of the resource and any changes made following the pilot. The problem was designed in a way which maximized the amount of decision making required of students (e.g., choice of the topic, the type of resource, the mechanism for collecting feedback, deciding how to respond to feedback, etc.). The 103 students were arranged into 18 medium-sized teams (five or six members) due to practical considerations and the benefits to the student learning experience reported in the literature.24 Teams were organized by instructors in a way that ensured a balance of gender and ethnicity. The teams were given a short (approximately 45 min long) introductory talk on the PBL approach. The teams were then scheduled to attend two 1 h long team meeting sessions (midday on Tuesdays) in the first 2 weeks of the term. During these meetings, teams were guided through the problem-solving process by a facilitator (a member of staff or trained postgraduate student). Each facilitator was shared between two or three teams. Facilitators had regular meetings to ensure the level of support provided to all teams was consistent. Students were also encouraged to schedule additional unfacilitated team meetings by booking group study rooms. Each team was also given access to an online collaborative workspace on the University’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) that included a wiki, team discussion board, and file exchange space. Team Meeting One
The first PBL team meeting session started with a short (10− 15 min) icebreaker activity (Alliterative Introductions25) to give the students a framework within which they could introduce themselves to the rest of the team. Following the icebreaker, students were asked to spend 5 min writing individual summaries of the problem statement (which had been available on the VLE for 3 days before the session) and to then share
Team Meeting Two
The focus of the initial part of this session (approximately 20 min) was a discussion of the draft of the resource. The team’s facilitator provided verbal feedback on the draft and encouraged team members to critically reflect on their own efforts. Each B
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00399 J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
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team was asked to document (by updating the SET sheet) the strengths of their draft and to note what they felt they needed to improve. The next 30 min of the session were used to construct a plan of how to complete the resource development and how to evaluate the resource. Students were told that they should complete resource development within the next 2 weeks (this was to allow students to complete the task before the next PBL problem). Teams were also asked to carefully consider how they would evaluate their resources: What kind of data would they need to collect? How would they write the questions? How would they collect the data? Who would they collect data from? What information did they need to collect help them make choices about the design of the final version of the resource? The evaluation design process was supported by feedback from facilitators through discussion in the team meetings. Teams were required to submit their final resources along with a one page report summarizing the intended aims of the resource and the key findings from the pilot implementation (electronic submission was chosen, but hard-copy submission could also be used) within 2 weeks of the final team meeting in order to give teams enough time to reflect on the outcomes of the meetings and to feed this into their problem solution.
helped us learn how to work as a team and develop our communication skills. It prepared us for a working environment.” “It helped us organize an approach to plan the PBL.” “It was helpf ul for Assigning tasks and roles within the group. Time management and communication skills.” “It allowed me to work in a team and contribute. Interact with team members.”). When asked what they most disliked about the problem, the most popular response was the fact that the problem was based on material that students had already encountered (e.g., “The problem didn’t introduce new science of information.”) and the fact that students partly depended on one another to develop a solution to the problem (e.g., “I didn’t like having to rely on other people to do their work”).
OUTCOMES The activity resulted in the production of diverse types of resource ranging from printed materials to apps on a range of topics in introductory inorganic (e.g., a booklet on molecular geometry) and organic chemistry (e.g., an organic nomenclature app). Figure 1 shows a breakdown of the topics selected by students. There is a roughly equal split of topics from the organic and general chemistry modules.
Corresponding Author
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT
S Supporting Information *
The Supporting Information is available on the ACS Publications website at DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00399. Student version of the problem (PDF, DOCX) Instructor version of the problem (PDF, DOCX) SET sheet information (PDF, DOCX)
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
*E-mail:
[email protected]. ORCID
Dylan P. Williams: 0000-0002-1260-5926 Notes
The author declares no competing financial interest.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author would like to thank Antonio Guerreiro, Vicki Emms, and Raissa Patia for helping with the delivery of this activity and the collection of data.
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REFERENCES
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Figure 1. Breakdown of the number of developed resources providing coverage of each of the specified subject areas. Note, the sum of the number of resources covering the subject areas (24) is greater than the total number of teams (18) as some teams developed resources which covered multiple subject areas.
Staff and postgraduate facilitators observed a high level of engagement from students throughout the activity (“Students spent most of their time on-task during team meeting sessions, an improvement on student engagement at this stage in previous years”). Student feedback in the end of activity questionnaire (N = 86) indicated they appreciated the benefits to transferable skills development and the fact that the activity provided an introduction to the PBL learning approach (e.g., “The task C
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00399 J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00399 J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
