Michelle French, Franco Taverna, Melody Neumann
At universities, knowledge is typically compartmentalized into courses or subjects, and often students do not recognize the connections between them. As well, opportunities to reinforce learning are lost due to lack of cross-course/cross-departmental curriculum design. To address this, we are developing a cross-disciplinary, interactive teaching model that will be tested in three large courses with a combined yearly enrollment of 3500 students. Specifically, we have created video case studies with a storytelling arc that spans three disciplines in biology: cell and molecular biology, physiology and neuroscience. The case studies form the basis for interactive classes in each course with small group work and teaching assistants to facilitate discussion to foster learning. A feature is the in-class use of Team Up! (developed by Dr. Neumann). It allows students to use their devices to form groups and submit group answers, and provides immediate feedback: groups get full marks if they select the correct answer on the first try and partial marks thereafter. To pilot Team Up!, we examined two active learning approaches in two classes of a physiology course. Content was delivered via both on-line and in-class lectures with the final 30-40 min of class time devoted to group work: groups either used Team Up! or completed a worksheet. In a survey, the majority of students (62% vs 38%, n = 110) reported that active learning helped them learn the material better and that they enjoyed it more than traditional lectures. Of those who preferred active learning, the majority preferred Team Up! to worksheets for both learning (71%) and enjoyment (81%). To examine actual learning, we compared student performance on test questions related to active learning content (6 questions) to overall test scores (30 questions) and also compared performance of students who attended both active learning sessions to those who attended one or were absent. As expected students who attended both sessions had significantly higher test scores, but scores for group work questions were not significantly different to the overall test score within each group. Multiple measures of learning are likely a better way to assess new teaching methods. Our results, however, suggest that Team Up! engages students, and we look forward to examining its use in our cross-course initiative.
