Motivation
The bachelor’s programme Pedagogical Sciences offers several courses based on problem-oriented education. Although this garners lots of positive reactions from students, they also indicate that they sometimes felt the work groups lack depth. In what way could depth be added?
In problem-oriented education, students work in small groups on realistic tasks which they later discuss with the help of literature. Studying this literature takes place during self-study. The goal of this set-up is for students to find underlying connections between literature and concepts together, and learn from each other.
Desired solution
Still, it seems that understanding and integrating sources, finding relationships between principles and concepts, as well as applying literature to the initial task, could be better. Since the preparation for this takes place on an individual basis, it could be beneficial to find out which aspects of the self-study could be adjusted or improved. Students could go into more depth when discussing the literature during work groups.
In this voucher project, Marianne van den Hurk and Noortje Janssen are researching how students prepare the literature, how they are motivated, and what the level of the follow-up discussion is. Based on this, it can be determined which methods are useful to further stimulate a critical follow-up discussion about the literature.
Action plan
In their study, the research team aims to use questionnaires and in-depth interviews to find out how students prepare literature on an individual basis. In addition, follow-up group discussions during the working groups are critically evaluated through audio recordings, which is conducted based on several taxonomies, such as Bloom’s taxonomy. These data form the basis on which a new design for follow-up discussions during lectures can be created.
Results
In their research, the team made and analysed audio recordings of working groups and administered questionnaires on self-study activities. Based on the analysis of the recordings, measures were devised to ensure the creation of depth in conversations between students during working groups. Three structure measures were implemented:
- Providing keywords for searching and studying articles.
- Assigning tasks within the working group (such as a chairperson and distributing learning objectives).
- Dividing students within the working group into smaller groups.
Audio recordings were again made after implementing these measures. This showed that after the implementation of the measures, more learning-centred interactions took place and students spent less time on organisational matters such as time monitoring. In other words, students interacted more about content than process. However, when zooming deeper into student interactions, it emerged that students asked fewer questions of each other and they were mostly engaged in explaining the literature by being tightly focused on their task.
A key lesson from the project is that small adjustments can make a big difference. Marianne van den Hurk:
With a few small measures, you can already see that procedural interactions decrease and learning-oriented conversations increase. That is promising.
Master's students in Educational Sciences Daphne and Evi also contributed to this project. Daphne investigated how much time students spend searching for and studying literature. She concluded that the new structure helps students to search more effectively, which means they spend less time on it. The amount of time spent on self-study varied greatly between students.
Evi examined the relationship between self-study time and the quality of conversations among students in the working group. It was striking that more study time did not automatically lead to more in-depth conversations. One explanation for this is that how study time is spent is particularly important. Student project members Daphne and Evi:
The circle is complete. In this project, lecturers stand in front of the class and do research. As a lecturer, it's important to keep looking for ways to improve. This project shows that you can improve your own lessons by researching them.
