A Catalyst for Effective Teaching and Learning
Simone Laughton
Judith Poë, Senior Lecturer and Associate Chair of the U of T Mississauga Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences, reflects upon pedagogical approaches and the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning with Simone Laughton, Instructional Technology Liaison Librarian at the U of T Mississauga Library.
Q: As an instructor, your students have indicated in their comments and evaluations that they truly value your teaching and you have won numerous teaching awards, including most recently the 2007 University of Toronto President's Teaching Award. What are some of the teaching and learning approaches you have explored?
JP: When I first came to the University of Toronto, I came from a graduate department which had no undergraduate equivalent. So I had zero teaching experience, I had never even been a TA. I thought that if I learned my students' names, the students will at least think I'm friendly. This turned out to be a good approach with the students, although over the years I haven't known the names of all the students as the classes have gotten so big. This helps to develop a personal rapport with students.
In addition to some upper year courses, I have focused mainly on the first year Chemistry course. In terms of approach, the first year students need to learn the language of the discipline. So in the same way that you have to learn to conjugate verbs in French before you can read the poetry of Baudelaire, let alone write poetry in French, so too you have to learn all the basic organic reactions before you could appreciate the beauty of a natural product synthesis or design one yourself. Even when lecturing on well-worn material, the key is to try to bring something that is new and relevant to it, so that students appreciate why anyone would want to know that material. I would say that is the basic philosophy behind my approach – to make sure that students are always aware of what we call the "who cares" clause. And that is both in terms of why you'd want to know this in terms of developing the subject itself, but also why you'd want to know it for social, political, and other kinds of decisions you might be called upon to make.
Q: You have engaged in research to study the impact of teaching and learning pedagogies on student learning within your own classes. What have been some of your findings to date? What teaching methodologies and approaches have been most helpful for the chemistry students you have taught?
JP: Starting back in the 1970s, together with the late Professor Jacques Deckers, I got into Computer Assisted Learning. These were in the days when we used the huge things that looked like teletype machines. One of the things that we developed in partnership (I was doing the Chemistry part, and Professor Deckers was the computer programmer), was a series of lessons in which students were faced with a question, and had an opportunity to enter their results for the question on the computer. If the answer was incorrect, the program would begin to give them hints as to how to approach the problem. These hints were designed to respond to the nature of their incorrect answer.
What we found from our studies was really what one would expect, and that is that the greatest predictor of success for the student was time spent on task. It wasn't how many right answers they got or how quickly they came to the right answer. It was how much time in total they spent on these computer programs. The interesting thing was that although those who spent more time on task did better on the subjects for which we had those programs, there wasn't any overall increase in performance in the course as a whole.
So we came to the conclusion, after a few years of collecting data on this, that students are prepared to spend a certain amount of time on each course. If they spend more time on one aspect of the course, then they will end up spending less time on other aspects of the course, and so their overall performance is not improving, although, clearly, the time on task did have an effect on learning that particular material. I guess we know from many other forms of data and observations that instructors have made over many years that time on task is the most important thing. Presumably all, or nearly all, of our students are capable of doing well; that is why they were admitted to the university. But the ones who do the best are the ones who are able to spend the most time on it.
It was really very interesting for us when we looked at the data. At first we were so buoyed up by the fact that they were doing so much better on those particular topics. Then in the end we realized that it was taking them away from other studies.
Q: Ensuring that University of Toronto Mississauga Chemistry students are equipped for future success seems to be a strong theme in your career over the years, and you have adapted different technologies to support the teaching methodologies you employ. What technologies have you used to support your teaching, and what has been successful and not so successful with your students? Why?
JP: Problem-Based Learning is an interest of mine because it is a pedagogy that has been shown by those who study education, and also has been shown by those who have used it extensively in engineering and medical faculties largely, that it is a pedagogy that works. It does improve student learning and student engagement with the subject.
You ask what has not been successful and I guess my first foray into Problem-Based Learning was not successful. The first step that I took in this direction was with a first year class divided up into small groups of 4-5 students working face-to-face in their tutorial classes and outside of class as well. At the end of the year when I did a survey of the students – their interests and impressions of studying this way – I discovered that they hated it (something that I had hints of during the year). At least 75% of the students suggested that they were the only one in their group who did any work. Since they were in groups of 4-5 this couldn't possibly have been an accurate assessment of what had happened. One student wrote, in answer to the question of what he had learned by using this method of teaching, that he had learned that "Workers work, and loafers loaf and sponge on humanity and that's life". Although I thought that to be a very valuable lesson, it was not exactly the one I had been trying to teach.
My conclusion was that this kind of small group work was not successful in a large survey, heterogeneous first year class. There are people who are very interested in the subject, and there are others who are not. Inevitably some of these people are put together, and the ones who work resent the ones who don't.
That is how I came to mount Problem-Based Learning on the web. I thought to myself that perhaps if they formed groups on the web, then the ones who wanted to work would be the ones forming these groups and doing the work. The ones who were not comfortable participating could still read what was being put up on the website, but they wouldn't be in the face of the workers. It turned out to work much better. People were put into groups, but they were large groups. There were hundreds in a group, and they had a dedicated bulletin board for discussing their particular PBL project, and the workers did the work and exchanged ideas on the web, and gave each other references, and really worked very cooperatively with each other. The students who didn't want to work, read what the workers were doing and some eventually joined in the activity. Another change that I made was that they worked together and exchanged ideas together, but they each had to write their own report at the end. Normally in Problem-Based Learning, there is a single report from the group when they are working in small face-to-face groups.
We used the web as a mode of communication between the students, and as a mode of searching for the information required to address the actual problems. This worked much better with the first year students than the face-to-face encounters. It was also interesting that in this environment, people who in a face-to-face environment would not emerge as leaders did so emerge, so it really made the whole process much more accessible to a wide range of students. It brought in a lot of students who would otherwise not be engaged.
Culturally at University of Toronto Mississauga we have quite a mixture of people. We have some people from cultures for example where the young women would not be allowed to stay here in the evening and work in groups, and would not be allowed to work in groups with young men, and all of that kind of problem disappears. Rather than limiting communication, I think the web really opened up communication for greater diversity in the groups. I've done the same kind of face-to-face groups with third and fourth year students, and of course there is always the odd loafer, but for the older students face-to-face groups seem to work just fine. Of course with third and fourth year students, presumably they're still taking chemistry courses because they're actually interested in the subject. That makes a big difference.
Another one of the things that we started back in the 1970s, and which I've continued from time to time with particular experiments in various classes of mine, is linking the actual laboratory work with virtual exercises through a Virtual Laboratory. Our laboratory space, and the time that students have available to be in the laboratory, is quite limited. So they can't do real research-type experiments because there isn't enough time to change all of the variables and see how all of the different parameters affect the results of a reaction. But what is very effective is to have the students do the experiment under one set of conditions, conditions that a) we know are safe and b) we know can be completed within the time allotted for their laboratory classes. This allows them to get a hands-on feel for how you actually measure a particular property. Then couple that with an interactive computer experiment in which they can test the other variables, change the other variables and see how the results would change as a function of the various parameters. In this Virtual Laboratory, they can actually design the test because we don't have to worry about it blowing up. If they make a mistake and decide to try a pressure that is too high, nothing disastrous will happen to them. So the students can then get a feel for the investigative part of it, which in our normal laboratory classes, they have less of an opportunity to do. This has proved to be an effective use of technology that supplements the physical laboratory experiments.
Q: In Towards 2030, one of the strategic priorities identified includes "linking education and scholarship". How have you worked towards this in the courses you teach? How have you used technology to support your work in this area?
JP: First of all I'd say that Towards 2030 and other administrative documents may use too narrow a definition of scholarship, and may ignore what others would call the scholarship of teaching. I want to clarify that what I think they mean in Towards 2030 is linking teaching and research. Here again I'd have to go back to Problem-Based Learning, because in Problem-Based Learning the students are confronted with a problem or a situation before they have done any study of the topics necessary to solve that problem or deal with that situation. So in that process, the students have to first decide what it is they need to know in order to address the problem. Then they will generally divide up to search and seek this information, get together and share the information. This is an iterative process until they have sufficient information and skills to address the problem. The whole process itself parallels the research process. Because of our limited time available, and the limited facilities available for laboratory work, not all of our students who wish to have the experience of research are able to get it in a laboratory environment. I think that we can bring research skills to students by teaching their more conventional courses using more of a Problem-Based Learning pedagogy.
Q: What has been the most exciting aspect of using technology in your teaching and/or research and what has been the biggest challenge?
JP: The most exciting aspect is Virtual Office hours. I say it is the most exciting because it has been more successful than I ever could have imaged when setting it up. Before describing it to you, I'll say that it has also presented the biggest challenges because of the time commitment. When I set it up, I never imagined it would become as popular as it is, with the great number of questions that are asked. I continue to answer all of the questions myself because I think my participation as the instructor is one of the keys to its success. The students know that when they go to this place, they will get what, in this course, is considered the answer – whether it be a question about course administration or about chemistry.
The students access a single form on the web which can be used to submit either confidential or public questions. Confidential questions should be things that are only of interest to that student, and things that are related to personal matters. Confidentially submitted questions go automatically to a dedicated email account that I have for that purpose, and I answer the students by email. All other questions on chemistry and any matters of course administration, that is essentially anything that would be of interest to other students, must be submitted publicly. The publicly submitted questions first go to an Unanswered Questions webpage, so that all students can see what questions have been asked and are waiting to be answered. The point of this is to not have to answer the same question 800 times. That is the key difference between Virtual Office Hours and face-to-face office hours or communicating with students via email. Once answered, the question and the answer together are automatically transferred to the Answered Questions webpage and all students in the course can read these. While not all students submit questions, nearly all students regularly browse through these pages. The most valuable thing I think is how the students report learning from other students' questions. It's only when they see the other's question that they realize that they also didn't understand a particular point. So in that sense, one is establishing a tutorial environment on the website. Students can learn from the instructor and also learn from the questions of other students. They just love this, but it does take a long time to answer all of their questions, especially when it is test or exam time.
Q: How many questions would you get in your Virtual Office Hours, how often do students use the Virtual Office Hours, and what are the benefits?
JP: Last year there were 1688 Public postings representing over 2000 questions. In total there were over 30,000 visits to the site. The number of questions indicates how much of a real need there is for information. Virtual Office Hours are used every day of the week, and every hour of the day. I generally answer questions 6 days out of the week. And with Virtual Office Hours, I don't have to answer the same question over and over again; it allows me to answer a greater variety of questions, so it really frees up the instructor to provide more information than they could do otherwise.
The skills that seem to be critical for students who are graduating are communication skills and cooperative teamwork skills. One area that has been helped by the use of Internet communication is improving the students' writing skills. That is something I would mention that has been a positive outcome from Virtual Office Hours. When students have to submit their questions in writing, they tend to ask much better questions. Frankly, when I give my answers in writing, they tend to be better answers. Probably the first year students do more writing on the Virtual Office Hours system than they do in their actual coursework. It is an exchange between the students and me as their professor.
I don't think that technology has hindered my students, except perhaps those who believe everything that they read on the Internet. If there is something that perhaps needs more attention paid to it, it's helping students determine reliable sources on the Internet.
Students are more competent technically as each year passes. However, there are still many students who have all of the gadgets but don't know how they all work. For example, we ask that all of the lab reports be produced with word processing and spreadsheet technologies. Although most of the students have these software packages loaded onto their computers, certainly they don't know spreadsheets (if at all) very well. Mindy Thuna and Andrew Nicholson have just developed an excellent online tutorial for Excel for students who need extra help. We have instructions in our lab manual as well.
I don't see any downsides to these technologies. I see a lot of downsides to some things that people do such as posting their complete lecture notes on the Internet. I don't consider that to be a creative use of technology, nor does it seem to be based on sound pedagogy.
Q: In your view what have been some of the most truly innovative advances in teaching and using technology to support teaching? In your view where do we need to focus attention in order to improve higher education in the next 5 - 10 years?
JP: I think many people are doing now exactly the same thing that we did in 1970, only with more sophisticated equipment. We haven't really exploited technology as much as could be done. In the last 10 years everyone has developed a webpage, but a great many of these webpages are just the same information that was previously given out on paper (the syllabus, the reading list, etc.). So it's just another way of providing that information. It's adding some value; it's more convenient to have it on the web; but that's not a really creative use of technology I would say. The more creative uses have involved either the technical visualizations, like molecular modelling for example, or have involved enhancing communication.
One really innovative advance that I can tell you about involves some colleagues in the United States and it is called Physical Chemistry Online. They all teach at small liberal arts colleges, and each of these colleges has some chemical equipment, but not the full complement that we would have here at the University of Toronto. So one might have a mass spectrometer, another might have an NMR spectrometer, but none of them have all of these different types of equipment. They have developed a series of small research projects for 3rd and 4th year students in the area of physical chemistry. They have students from colleges across the United States working together on research projects. Each group of students does the part of the research project that is compatible with the equipment available in their college. They share this information and then synthesize the results into their research reports.
At one university in Minnesota, one of the members of the Physical Chemistry Online consortium has developed a way for the students to actually do the experiment on-line. Once someone on site puts the samples into the spectrometer, the students from any external institution can control the instrument from their home computer and actually do the experiment and vary wavelengths and other parameters in order to do that experiment. These are really innovative examples of using technology way beyond simply having a course website.
In terms of where we need to focus in the next 5-10 years, I will refer primarily to science education. As Carl Wieman said at the Office of Teaching Advancement's Teaching & Learning Symposium, we need to encourage more cooperative learning and more active learning. With Professor Wieman's talk, I don't think that he said anything that those of us who are teaching science didn't already know. The real value of his talk and his work is putting the weight of a Nobel laureate behind these ideas and encouraging increased attention for science education. He has the opportunity to be a real ambassador for science education.
As has been pointed out so many times, you can't learn to be expert in a sport by reading a book about the sport, you have to actually go out and do the sport, and it's the same for any of the science disciplines that we teach. One of my interests, when we get our new chemistry laboratories at University of Toronto Mississauga, would be to set up some studio teaching where we integrate the teaching and the investigations of a laboratory environment, so that we can have more hands-on learning and a more active approach. We certainly want to include a space for studio science teaching here at University of Toronto Mississauga.
Websites:
Problem-Based Learning, University of Delaware http://www.udel.edu/pbl/
Physical Chemistry Online: Building Mastery Through Collaboration http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/~tzielins/PCOLWEB/ChemOnLine/
Carl Wieman's Presentation Office of Teaching Advancement Teaching &Learning Symposium, University of Toronto, October 25, 2007 http://www.provost.utoronto.ca/tlsymposium.htm