November 16, 2004

Charlotte Taylor, School of Biological Sciences

Learning from feedback: student perceptions, interpretation and use of feedback for first year science assignments

Feedback is acknowledged as an integral part of the writing process in undergraduate programs and has been a key area of the writing cycle in first year science for the past 10 years. Previous research has documented the importance of feedback both in the writing process and in the learning of discipline knowledge. However, it has also been well documented that there are frequent mismatches between teachers' and students' understandings of the role of feedback in written assignments, and in the way it is given and used. This project aimed to document students' perceptions of feedback, and to determine how useful it is, particularly during the writing task. Qualitative data were also collected, through interviews and analysis of student assignments, to determine how teachers give feedback, how students use it and to characterize the links between them.

October 12, 2004

Rachel Wilson, Faculty of Education and Social Work

A conceptual map of Social-science research methods.

In this talk I will venture to map out the various positions and interrelations between diverse social science research strategies and methods. This is not without dispute and there will be plenty of room for challenges to the structure of the map. However by attempting to map out different research methods some important conceptual issues will be raised, these include: nature/construction of knowledge (epistemology), structured v's unstructured approaches and the role of the researcher. Various research strategies will be introduced, so if you've always wondered what's the difference between ethnography and ethnomethodology, do come along. Discussion will also focus on how different strategies and methods can be brought together in dynamic mixed-methods research.

September 21, 2004

Justin Read, School of Chemistry

Students' perceived understanding and exam performance in Chemistry 1

In semester 1, 2003, surveys were conducted in most Chemistry 1 units of study. Students were asked to rate their level of understanding of each topic covered during their unit of study. This talk will describe the discovered relationship between students' perceptions and their actual exam performance, both on individual topics and overall. This discussion will focus primarily on the CHEM1405 (Chemistry 1 for Veterinary Science) unit of study, but will consider other units of study. A detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of students' exam scripts has also been carried out. Such analysis allows common student misconceptions to be identified, and also provided useful context for understanding the survey responses. The question of the effectiveness of exams as a measure of student understanding will also be discussed.

August 10, 2004

Dr Chris Stewart, Physics & Unit for History and Philosophy of Science

My first "First-Year Experience" experience: presenting on the Tutor Training Program at the FYHE conference, Monash, July 04

Several weeks ago I presented a paper on the Faculty's Tutor Training Program at the First Year in Higher Education conference at Monash University in Melbourne. As a lecturer, it was an educational experience - academics were clearly outnumbered at the conference and the talks, workshops and discussion sessions were an eye-opener for this lapsed-physicist. In this SciFER talk I will present the latest on our Tutor Training Program and give an overview of other work, both research and development, presented at the FYHE.

June 25, 2004.

Prof Yves Mauffette, University of Quebec

"Problem Based Learning in Science - a case study from Biology."

PBL in science and its implementation in a biology curriculum The amount of knowledge a biologist must acquire and the multi-facetted roles he or she will be called upon is extremely diverse. Even if educators tend to cover more and more material, it is impossible to imagine that students will graduate from a program with all the knowledge they will require to practice as biologists. The program must therefore concentrate on bringing the students to acquire the thinking process applied within the field, develop their curiosity and become self-learner. To overcome the shortcomings of traditional lectures in teaching science, we developed a PBL program in biology at the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM). This program integrates problem-based learning throughout three years. The first two years are intended to complete a general training in the field of biology and the last year permits students to specialise in three different options. The program is divided into blocks (or Units) integrating the various disciplines into domains of biology, rather than presenting disciplines into separate compartments. For instance, plant morphology, taxonomy, physiology and ecology are all addressed during the Plant Diversityunit. These units present a number of problems (Prosits) that portray professional situations. . Throughout the program students are given the opportunity to acquire knowledge at their own pace, but mainly, they are constantly encouraged to be confident in their ability to criticise, to use or to do science. Most of all, PBL is in itself an application of the scientific method. One of the most demanding and difficult task in developing this program, other than choosing the PBL learning approach, was to define each Unit. The views of faculty diverged considerably in defining what must a student learn to become a biologist and then translating it back into a curriculum. In retrospect, the establishment of the curriculum was not a simple task but provoked a considerable amount of discussion and led to major revisions in our objectives for higher education.

May 18, 2004.

Peter McGee (Biological Sciences)

"Integrated teaching in plant science, mycology and entomology."

March 16, 2004.

Judy Kay (School of IT)

"Strategies for supporting at-risk students in a core programming unit."

For several years, there has been a high failure rate in the 2000 level Computer Science programming unit which is a gatekeeper for many 3000 level IT units. It was unclear just what the problems were due to and, more importantly, it was unclear how best to help improve the situation.

In this Science TDG-funded work, we analysed and correlated various measures of student learning. In this seminar, we will report some of the most interesting observations, including some that are likely to be of relevance in other subject areas. In particular, some seem to relate to student disengagement. We will also describe the strategies we have put in place to help improve pass rates: a diagnostic phase at the beginning of the semester, intended to help both students and teaching staff to become aware of which students are at risk; streaming within the class; extra help for those appearing to be at risk; a comprehensive series of diagnostic quizzes run throughout the semester; radical changes to the assessment and new self-assessment resources. One particularly interesting aspect of our work has been the careful analysis of misconceptions observed in examinations to serve as the basis for the self-assessment resources. We will give demonstrations of the quiz generation system and the self-assessment web site. Participants in the project were: Alan Fekete, Tony Greening, Judy Kay, Bob Kummerfeld.

February 10, 2004.

Sandra Britton and Jenny Henderson (Mathematics and Statistics)

"Developing a program for improving the quality of casual tutoring in mathematics."

More than 150 tutorials are conducted each week in first year mathematics courses and approximately half of these are taken by casual tutors (generally postgraduate students). Surveys have consistently shown that students regard tutorials as a valuable part of the teaching and learning process. It is therefore important to foster and maintain high quality tutoring.

At the beginning of 2002 the School of Mathematics and Statistics embarked on a program to improve the teaching of casual tutors in tutorials. The program involves interviews, presentations by tutors, training sessions and mentoring of tutors by experienced staff members. In order to inform the development of this program we surveyed more than 1000 first year students, and ran several focus groups. Students were asked to comment on various aspects of tutorials, and to suggest ways in which they could be improved. An analysis of the data indicates that students have no single preferred tutorial model.

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