The Benefits of Active Learning through Discussion in an Advanced Classroom

The Benefits of Active Learning through Discussion in an Advanced Classroom Nathanial E. Watson This paper was completed and submitted in partial fulfillment of the Master Teacher Program, a 2-year faculty professional development program conducted by the Center for Teaching Excellence, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, 2009. Introduction It is better for college students to be active seekers than passive recipients of learning (Lowman, 1995). This statement codifies what many educators intuitively realize, the fact that students actively seeking an understanding will learn better than those hoping to learn by osmosis. Despite this intuitive understanding of the benefit of active learning the traditional lecture is still ubiquitous in our vision of the college classroom. Perhaps this stems from the fact that encouraging active learning requires a greater level of participation and risk on the part of the instructor (Lowman, 1995). Classroom discussions are one of the most common methods to promote active learning (Bonwell & Eison, 1991). The Advanced General Chemistry Course (CH 151/2) presented at the United States Military Academy (USMA) attempts to enhance student interest and understanding in the material by allowing for greater depth in classroom discussion. The students are selected based on high predicted aptitude in the material and it is assumed they have a basic understanding in many of the simpler ideas. Their skills in basic algebra are also expected to be significantly more developed than their General Chemistry peers. As an instructor I am able to go into greater detail without the risk of losing the students with only a marginal understanding. In addition, the instruction is condensed from 40 to 6 lessons and academic field trips, enrichments, are implemented in the extra time. These enrichments are designed to enhance understanding, provide real life examples of the principles learned in the class, and to inspire students towards a path in the physical/biological sciences. At the same time, 1

these enrichments provide a rich base of applications to take back to the classroom for discussion. This study attempts to discern the real benefit to students in an advanced classroom where discussion is utilized as the primary instruction technique. Specifically, I endeavor determine if there is a benefit and what the benefit is to students in an advanced general chemistry classroom. The hypothesis is that an advanced general chemistry classroom that solely utilizes discussion will realize a benefit to grades. It is further hypothesized that advanced students in a discussion based classroom will be motivated to pursue advanced science coursework and become more likely to select chemistry or another science/engineering program as their major. Methods The advanced General Chemistry course is typically composed of 110 to 120 students who are hand selected volunteers for the course. These students are evenly distributed between six different sections of approximately 18-20 individuals. I taught two of the sections and two other instructors taught the other four sections (total of three instructors teaching two sections each). Data was collected during the Fall 2008 semester and the first half of the Spring 2009 semester at the USMA. The primary action I took as an instructor was to include discussion in every facet of my class. The Thayer Method (Palladino, 1979), (Ertwine & Palladino, 1987), utilized and developed at the USMA, already emphasizes the importance of student preparation and discussion, but in reality much of the instruction conducted at the academy is in a lecture format. The reasons for this are numerous and variable ranging from instructor preference to lack of student preparation and fall in line with the reasons presented in chapter six of Lowman s Book. I attempted to counter this equilibrium shift toward lecture by including demonstrations and soliciting student feedback frequently. The use of demonstrations is commonplace in chemistry instruction, but feedback is collected less frequently. Feedback was collected on five different occasions during the course of this study to ensure students were grasping the material and to allow me to refocus my instruction as necessary. Feedback was collected electronically via the USMA Center for Teaching 2

Excellence website each time. The difficulty of the material increased over the course of the study so most of the feedback was collected during the later portions of the fall and spring semesters. Feedback included interim questionnaires and muddiest point papers (Angelo & Cross, 199). In addition to the formal feedback collected via the CTE website, I frequently questioned individual students in an informal manner to gauge comprehension of the material. I also kept a daily journal of how the lessons went to aide in my reflection on the previous lessons and to allow me to better focus future classes. Student end-of-semester grades for Fall 2008, pre-spring Break (halfway point) grades for Spring 2009, predicted scores, and AP pre-test scores were evaluated as quantitative assessments of performance. The course grades are self-explanatory, but the predicted scores and AP pre-test require some clarifying details. The predicted score is calculated from admission and placement data that includes class rank, participation in extracurricular activities, high-school GPA, SAT score and chemistry validation exam score. The AP pre-test is a final draft of the Advance Placement Exam presented by the Education Testing Service (Princeton, NJ). The test is administered to students completing first semester college chemistry to both scrutinize the exam for the Educational Testing Service and to provide colleges a tool to assess their programs with respect to the rest of the nation. Unfortunately, the national data were unavailable for inclusion in this study. Additionally, two different sets of semi-quantitative data were collected. One was student responses to the statement, Advanced General Chemistry has (increased/not changed/decreased) my interest in chemistry and the other physical sciences. The other data set was end-of-course survey responses to several questions related to active learning. The end-of-course survey responses include data for both Advanced General Chemistry and General Chemistry in an attempt to provide a comparison between both student populations. Results and Discussion

The hypothesis of this study is that teaching an advanced class primarily by discussion will have a positive impact upon both course grades and student desire to continue study in chemistry and the related sciences and engineering disciplines. All of the data is designed to either prove or disprove one of the two subparts of the hypothesis. The grades data in Table 1 address the first sub-hypothesis and the survey data in Tables 2 and address the second sub-hypothesis. Table 1. Grades earned by advanced general chemistry students along w ith AP Pre-test scores and predicted grades. The scores are organized into nine categories sorted by CH 151 (first semester) and CH 152 (second semester) section. The grades are nor malized to the course average and are displayed as percentages. Positive percentages indicate perfor mance above the course average and negative percentages indicate the converse. The overall course average is indicated in parentheses in the column heading. Grades are only included for students w ho participated in both CH 151 and CH 152. CH 151 Section (1 st Sem.) CH 152 Section (2 nd Sem.) CH 151 Grade (94.7%) CH 152 Grade (88.82%) AP Grade Predicted Grade (89.9%) (54.88%) 1 1 0.78%.22% 5.51% 1.42% 2 1-1.00% 0.60% -.08% -0.28% 1-0.15% -0.29% -4.01% -1.6% 1 2 0.15% -2.20% 1.54% 1.0% 2 2-0.18% -0.49% -2.69% -0.51% 2-0.99% -5.60% -4.17% 2.9% 1-1.2% -1.12% -6.9% -0.88% 2-0.74% 0.90% 4.19% -2.54% 1.21%.45% 6.65% 0.22% Table 1 depicts end of semester grades for the first semester of advanced general chemistry, mid semester grades for the second semester of advanced general chemistry, Advanced Placement Pre-test grades and predicted scores. All of the grades are normalized to the average for each graded event. The numbers listed are relative to the averages for each graded event which are listed in the column headings. The scores are separated into nine categories by first and second semester instructor. The nine categories are grouped by second semester section number. The goal of these groupings was to discover a correlation between instructor and grade. I served as the instructor for section two and instructed with a conscious effort to include discussion in every aspect of my section s instruction. This does not assume that the 4

other instructors did not include discussion, however it does assume that section two had a deliberate focus on discussion. A cursory glance at the data in Table 1 does not glean much useful information. We can see that grades in the first semester were on average better than those from the second semester. This is expected as the material from the second semester is generally considered more difficult than the material from the first semester. No clear benefit is visible to the students who participated in section two where discussion was the primary means of instruction. In fact, it appears that in some cases the discussion classroom may have had a negative effect; specifically in section categories 2/1, 1/2, /2, and 2/ (the categories are labeled: CH 151 section/ch 152 section). In an attempt to statistically quantify this perceived negative effect I performed Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on the raw grades data (these data are not presented here completely, but are summarized in Table 1). PCA attempts to discern patterns in data through linear algebra methods (Massart & Kaufman, 198). The data was imported to MATLAB version R2008a (The Mathworks, Natick, MA) and analyzed using the PCA algorithm published with PLS Toolbox.5 (Wise, Gallagher, Bro, Shaver, Windig, & Koch, 2004). The PCA results showed no pattern and thus any perceived correlation in the data has no statistical significance. Ultimately, a classroom utilizing discussion as the sole instructional technique showed no benefit to the students in the form of an increase in grades. These grades results are not conclusive and it could be possible to show a benefit with an increase in the size of the sample set or better control on the sectioning of the student population. I was unable to enact stricter controls due to the limited size of the advanced chemistry course s population and the limited flexibility of the student s schedules. Fortunately, the semi-quantitative data in Table 2 were more conclusive. Table 2 attempts to quantify student motivation to continue study in a science or engineering program through their responses to the question, Advanced General Chemistry has (increase/not changed/decreased) my interest in chemistry and the other physical sciences. The CH151/2 population is already motivated towards the sciences since they volunteered for the advanced chemistry course and thus I expect increase and not changed to be the baseline results. The most significant result for the 5

advanced population is the decrease response. Accordingly, most responses indicate either an increased desire or no change to continue in science. The most interesting result depicted in Table 2 is that sections A1 and C1 show a decrease in desire to continue in the sciences when compared to G2, I2, A and C. Admittedly, there is no way to say that the student populations were equivalent and that the only difference was the instructor, but I would describe the A1 and C1 instructor as the least likely to utilize discussion and the most likely to lecture. The section 1 instructor typically follows a prescribed routine of demonstrating sample problems followed by the students solving several problems with instructor supervision. This technique is markedly similar to the general course and may discourage gifted students while still providing them with the tools to perform well on graded events. Table 2. Student responses to the question, Advanced General Chemistry has (increased/not changed/decreased) my interest in chemistry and the other physical sciences. Responses w e collected anony mously by all three of the course s instructors. CH 152 Section Increased No Change Decreased A1 7 7 5 C1 10 6 7 G2 11 4 2 I2 4 11 2 A 10 6 2 C 11 5 2 Table lists questions from the Fall 2008 end-of-course survey that directly or indirectly tie to aspects of active learning. The hypothesized goal is to depict that students in the advanced course are benefiting from the open discussion atmosphere vice their general course peers. The majority of both populations of students totally or strongly agree with the active learning statements (scale scores 4 & 5). This contradicts my hypothesis, but does show that the advanced course students were satisfied with the course format. However, it also shows that the general course population is equally satisfied. Perhaps the teaching formats in each course are best formatted to each course s respective population? The data in Table do not provide sufficient data to decide either way. 6

Table. Fall 2008 End of Course Survey Responses collected v ia the Academy Management System for both Advanced Gener al Chemistry ( CH 151/152) and General Chemistry (CH 101/102). The numbers are presented as both total number of responses and as percentages. The scale slides from 5 to 1 w here five indicates total agreement and 1 indicates total disagreement. The percentages are listed as portion of the total number of responses for each course. Survey Question CH101/102 CH151/152 5 4 2 1 5 4 2 1 0 0 This instructor encouraged students to be responsible for their own learning 419 52% 4 4% 29 4% 1 0% 1 0% 6 66% 29 29% % This instructor used effective techniques for learning, both in class and for out-of-class assignments 425 54% 02 8% 41 5% 22 % 0% 54 57% 40 42% 1 1% 0 0 My motivation to learn and to continue learning has increased because of this course 25 2% 9 4% 154 19% 9 5% 8 1% 1 % 44 46% 17 18% % 0 This instructor stimulated my thinking 42 4% 75 47% 50 6% 21 % 5 1% 41 4% 52 55% 2 2% 0 0 In this course, my critical thinking ability increased 266 4% 91 49% 112 14% 21 % 0% 24 25% 5 56% 15 16% % 0 This course helped to improve my problem solving, critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills. 218 27% 451 57% 10 1% 17 2% 4 1% 29 1% 56 59% 8 8% 2 2% 0 7

Conclusion The idea that active learning via discussion is beneficial to learning was analyzed in the context of an advanced chemistry classroom. The results gleaned from this study were largely anecdotal, but some evidence was discovered to support the hypothesis that student interest in chemistry and the physical sciences would be better maintained through discussion rather than lecture. In addition, no evidence was conclusively found to show a negative impact from the use of discussion as the primary tool for instruction. Specifically, no correlation was found between course grades and the method of instruction used. The culture of K-12 education (passive learning) means that time is required to acclimate to and benefit from active learning. Long term results may provide more enlightening data, but are beyond the scope of this study. Based on this study I intend to continue the use of discussion as the primary tool in my classroom, especially considering the high caliber of student that I get to teach in the advanced chemistry course. Perhaps over time greater benefits (or negative impacts) will be discovered. 8

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