one reason many don’t ‘get’ science

This is something a bit different – those of you who might have visited my ‘other’ blog will know that from time to time I write about pseudoscience, & along with this express concern about why acceptance of ‘woo’ is relatively widespread. This post takes up on that, but I’m mirroring it here as it is relevant to science education (& I hope may generate some fruitful discussion here :-)

Over at this post by Seth Mnookin** in the new HuffPo science section (like Orac I will be rather interested to see how this section pans out), a commenter with the ‘nym Seeking Clarity remarked:

What our mainstream science education curricula apparently fails to adequately teach is why the process of science tends to produce information of relatively high reliability and why this process is such useful compensation for human limitations.

We are instead taught to recite the requisite repertoire of science fact and vocabulary that may be useful to science majors but which (divorced from its epistemological context) is experienced by average students as irrelevant to their own lives.

As a result, the findings of science are seen as one of any number of engines of opinion. The public often misses the role of carefully and collaboratively vetted empirical corroboration as a basis of confidence.

Therefore the relative tentativeness, incompleteness, and internal controversies that characterise the products and the community of science can be mistaken for weakness in contrast to those persons who unhesitatingly and appealingly claim to have access to conclusive truths.

I’ve reproduced the comment here as it’s very relevant to discussions I’ve had with colleagues & fellow science bloggers about the voluminous quantities of pseudoscience circulating on the internet & also available through the media (some of the latter masquerades as ‘entertainment’ but some - Ancient Aliens for example – is presented with a seemingly straight face). There seems to be a huge demand for this sort of stuff, as witnessed by the number of websites offering up kitty-litter as a cure-all (not that they come out & call zeolite ‘kitty-litter’), or the‘miracle mineral supplement’ (knock back bleach & it will cure your ills), or detox foot-pads, or… the supply seems endless, & that’s not even counting the more ‘mainstream’ things like homeopathy.

People do tend to seek certainty in their lives, & as the comment above notes, scientists simply can’t give absolute certainty. But that’s often not understood, & it may well make the ‘alternatives’ seem that much more attractive. Hopefully the implementation of the 2007 science curriculum will help to redress that, at least with current & future students. But at the same time we do need to address the sheer volume of information (aka facts) that students must learn; in my opinion that discussion is long overdue!

 

** which is an excellent commentary  on the importance of & need for vaccination – & for responsible science journalism.

the status & quality of year 11 & 12 science in australian schools

My reading assignment today was a report just out from the Australian Academy of Science(the AAS) on science in Australian secondary schools (Goodrum, Druhan & Abbs, 2011). Not what you might expect on a reading list in the week before Christmas, but I was up to speak (briefly) about it on Radio NZ & needed to have an idea what the report contained.

It’s a really thorough study of the state of senior school science across the Tasman, based on an extensive literature review, a survey of students (both those taking science, & those who aren’t) in NSW, South Australia & the Australian Capital Territory, a phone survey of senior science teachers in the same states, and a series of focus groups involving not only teachers and students but also scientists & members of the wider community. This allowed Goodrum & his colleagues to describe the ideal state of senior school science education in Australia (my marginal note at this point says ‘Wonderful! but does it/can it happen?) in terms of students & the curriculum, teaching as a profession, the resourcing of science teaching & learning, and the value of science education. They describe the last item thusly:

Science and science education are valued by the community, have high priority in the school curriculum and science teaching is perceived as exciting and valuable, contributing significantly to the development of persons and to the economic and social well-being of the nation.

And then… they identified the actual state of affairs, “by focusing on different dimensions of the school experience: the students, the curriculum, the pedagogy, the teachers and finally the resources.”

I must say that I think we are well ahead of the Australian state of play in terms of the curriculum document as discussed in the AAS report: Yes, the NZ curriculum is probably still too content-heavy, but at least the clear understanding and expectation is that senior school science should do much more than simply prepare a relatively small cohort of students for university. (This is something that I believe the universities need to be much more aware of, as otherwise we will continue to have a disjunction between lecturer expectations and the actual prior learning experiences of our new first-year students.) Also, the NZ Science curriculum explicitly requires that students be given the opportunity to learn about the nature of science; it’s not all about content knowledge. However, the AAS survey found that both students and teachers in the Australian school system believed that

Year 11 and 12 science is constructed to prepare students for university study. This university preparation perspective has resulted in an overcrowded content-laden curriculum. WIth the amount of content to be covered there is little room for flexibility from either the teacher or student.

Goodrum & his colleagues also found that most senior science teaching** in the schools they surveyed is done using the transmission model (teacher talks or writes on the board – or uses powerpoint – & students simply write it all down); that teacher demonstrations are common; and that practical sessions tend to be of the ‘cook-book’ variety where the outcomes are already known and the students are simply following a pre-determined method. Where there isopportunity for more inquiry-based learning in labs, teachers reported that these really sucked through the time & that this in turn led schools using open-ended student projects to advise students not to take all three sciences as the demands on their time would be too great.

So what did they find when they looked at levels of participation in senior science: the proportion of students in each year’s cohort who were enrolled in science subjects in their final 2 years of secondary school? The news was not good, and it’s news that’s obviously generating a lot of concern: looking at the proportion of students enrolled in each discipline in each year, they found that

[s]ince 1991, the percentage of students enrolled in Biology, Chemistry and Physics has been gradually falling. For Biology the fall has been from 35.9% in 1991 to 24.7% 2007, for Chemistry 23.3% in 1991 to 18.0% in 2007, and for Physics 20.9% in 1991 to 14.6% in 2007. While the fall has slowed there is no indication that it has stopped.

(The proportion taking Psychology, on the other hand, has almost doubled – from 4.9% in 1991 to 9.2% in 2006. Geology – this in a country where mineral resources are so significant to the economy – has remained at a fairly constant 1% throughout the study period.)

And looking at total science enrolments in Year 12:

there has been a dramatic fall in the percentage of students studying science in Year 12 from a height of 94.1% in 1992 to a low of 51.4% in 2010

with a particularly large drop-off in the period 2001-2002. The researchers weren’t able to identify any reason for this in terms of policy changes. Part of the decline may be linked to how students perceive science in schools – something that probably needs to be addressed in junior schools, because

Some non-science students report that if science was more ‘interesting and relevant to their lives’ then they would consider enrolling in it… Many, however, think so poorly of their experience and achievements in junior secondary science** that they won’t consider senior science under any circumstances.

This is a real pity, as the community members surveyed clearly felt that all students need to study science throughout their schooling – it shouldn’t be just for those who need it for their careers. They felt that science in schools

should be relevant… and demonstrate how science understanding and process impacts daily life.

Which is great – but I did wonder if those sentiments are shared by the wider school community as a whole (parents, teachers, students, the works). Schools do seem to be under pressure to broaden their curriculum, which places time constraints on teachers in the various subjects, & at least some of that pressure comes from the communities in which the schools are situated.

So how do the Australian data stack up compared to senior science education in New Zealand? I gathered from my radio host that the PM’s Chief Science Advisor, Sir Peter Gluckman, will be soon releasing a report on just this issue. Watch this space.

** The researchers make the point that this is different from the teaching methods used in junior (our years 9-11) science classes, and suggest that “[p]erhaps this more enlightened approach in the junior years should influence how science is taught in Years 11 & 12.” (Some students obviously gained a different impression…)

D.Goodrum, A.Druhan & J.Abbs (2011) The Status and Quality of Year 11 and 12 Science in Australian Schools. A report prepared for the Office of the Chief Scientist.

using pseudoscience to teach science

The following post is an article that I originally wrote for the New Zealand Science Teacher journal (the official journal of the New Zealand Association of Science Educators), and is reproduced here (& also on my ‘other’ blog) by kind permission of the editor.

We live in a time when science features large in our lives, probably more so than ever before. It is  important that people have at least some understanding of how science works, not least so that they can make informed decisions when aspects of science impinge on them. Yet pseudoscience seems to be on the increase. While some argue that we simply ignore it, I suggest we use pseudoscience to help teach the nature of science (and I recommend Jane Young’s excellent book, The uncertainty of it all: understanding the nature of science,(2010) as a resource).

The New Zealand Curriculum (MoE, 2007) makes it clear that there’s more to studying science than simply accumulating facts: Science is a way of investigating, understanding, and explaining our natural, physical world and the wider Universe. It involves generating and testing ideas, gathering evidence – including by making observations, carrying out investigations and modeling, and communicating and debating with others – in order to develop scientific knowledge, understanding and explanations (p28). In other words, studying science also involves learning about the nature of science: that it is a process as much as, or more than, a set of facts. Pseudoscience offers a lens through which to approach this.

1. Check the information
Students should be encouraged to think about the validity and reliability of particular statements. They should learn about the process of peer review. They should ask: has a particular claim been peer reviewed; who reviewed it; where was it published? There is a big difference between information that’s been tested and reviewed, and information (or misinformation) that simply represents a particular point of view and is promoted via the popular press (and Internet).

‘Cold fusion’ is a good example. Cold fusion was a claim that nuclear fusion could be achieved in the laboratory at room temperatures. The claim was trumpeted to the world via a press release, but was subsequently debunked because other researchers tried, and failed, to duplicate its findings.

Thus checking the source of the information is vital. There is a hierarchy of journals, with publications such as Science considered prestigious, and publications such as Medical Hypotheses considered less so. The key distinction between these journals is the peer review process. For example, papers submitted to Science are subject to stringent peer review processes (and many don’t make the grade), while Medical Hypotheses seems to accept submissions uncritically, with minimal review.

By considering the source of information students can begin to develop the sort of critical thinking skills that they need to make sense of the cornucopia of information on the Internet. When viewing a particular Internet site they should ask (and answer!) questions about the source of the information: has it been subject to peer review (you could argue that the Internet is an excellent ‘venue’ for peer review, but all too often it’s simply self-referential), does it fit into our existing scientific knowledge, and do we need to know anything else about the data or its source?

2. Analyse the information
The following example is excellent for a discussion around both evolution and experimental design, in addition to the nature of science. There is an online article entitled Darwin at the drugstore: testing the biological fitness of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (Gillen & Anderson, 2008) where the researchers tested the concept that a mutation conferring antibiotic resistance rendered the bacteria less ‘fit’. Note: There is an energy cost to bacteria in producing any protein, but whether this renders them less fit – in the Darwinian sense – is entirely dependent on context.

The researchers used two populations of the bacterium Serratia marcescens: an ampicillin-resistant lab-grown strain, which produces white colonies, and a pink, non-resistant (‘wild-type’) population obtained from pond water. ‘Fitness’ was defined as ‘growth rate and colony “robustness” in minimal media.’ After 12 hours’ incubation the two populations showed no difference in growth on normal lab media (though there were differences between 4 and 6 hours) but the wild-type strain did better on minimal media. It is difficult to know whether the difference was of any statistical significance as the paper’s graphs lack error bars and there are no tables showing the results of statistical comparisons. Nonetheless, the authors describe the differences in growth as ‘significant’.

The authors concluded that antibiotic resistance did not enhance the fitness of Serratia marcescens: wild-type [S.marcescens] has a significant fitness advantage over the mutant strains due to its growth rate and colony size. Therefore, it can be argued that ampicillin resistance mutations reduce the growth rate and therefore the general biological fitness of S.marcescens. This study concurs with Anderson (2005) that while mutations providing antibiotic resistance may be beneficial in certain, specific, environments, they often come at the expense of pre-existing function, and thus do not provide a mechanism for macroevolution (Gillen & Anderson, 2008).

Let us now apply some critical thinking to this paper. Your students will be familiar with the concept of a fair test, so they will probably recognise fairly quickly that such a test was not performed in this case because the researchers were not comparing ‘apples with apples’. When one strain of the test organism is lab-bred and not only antibiotic-resistant but forms different coloured colonies from the pond-dwelling wild-type, there are a lot of different variables involved, not just the one whose effects are supposedly being examined.

In addition, and perhaps more tellingly, the experiment did not test the fi tness of the antibiotic-resistance gene in the environment where it might convey an advantage. The two Serratia marcescens strains were not grown in media containing ampicillin! Evolutionary biology predicts that the resistant strain would be at a disadvantage in minimal media. This is due to it using energy to express a gene that provides no benefit in that environment, making it short of energy for other cellular processes. And, as I commented earlier, the data do not show any significant differences between the two bacterial strains.

Also, the authors work at Liberty University, a private faith-based institution with strong creationist leanings, and the article is an online publication in the ‘Answers in Depth’ section of the website of Answers in Genesis (a young-Earth creationist organisation). This is not a mainstream peer-reviewed science journal. This does suggest that a priori assumptions may have coloured the experimental design.

3. Verify the information
Your students should learn how to recognise ‘bogus’ science. To begin with, students should scrutinise information presented via the popular media (including websites) and ask: why is this happening? Another warning sign is the presence of conspiracy theories.

One conspiracy theory worth discussing relates to the validity of vaccination programmes: “Is vaccination really for the good of our health, or the result of a conspiracy between government and ‘big pharma’ to make us all sick so that pharmaceutical companies can make more money selling products to help us get better?”

Dr A. Kalokerinos is often quoted on anti-vaccination websites as saying: My final conclusion after forty years or more in this business is that the unofficial policy of the World Health Organisation and the unofficial policy of ‘Save the Children’s Fund and almost all those organisations is one of murder and genocide. They want to make it appear as if they are saving these kids, but in actual fact they don’t.

This quote is a good example of how conspiracy theorists often use an argument from an ‘authority’. Yet it is easy to pull together a list of names with PhD or MD after them to support an argument. Try giving your students a list of names of ‘experts’ and see if they can work out their field of expertise.

Recently, New Zealand schools received a mailout from a group called ‘Scientists Anonymous’ offering an article purporting to support ‘intelligent design’ rather than an evolutionary explanation for a feature of neuroanatomy. The article was authored by Dr Jerry Bergman.

A literature search indicates that Dr Bergman has made no recent contributions to the scientific literature in this field, but he has published a number of articles with a creationist slant. So Dr Bergman cannot really be regarded as an expert authority in this particular area. Similarly, it is well worth reviewing the credentials of many anti-vaccination ‘experts’ – the fact that someone has a PhD by itself is irrelevant; the discipline in which that degree was gained, is important. Observant students may also wonder why the originators of the mail out feel it necessary to remain anonymous.

Students need to know the difference between anecdote and data. Humans are pattern-seeking animals and we dohave a tendency to see non-existent correlations where in fact we are looking at coincidences. For example, a child may develop a fever a day after receiving a vaccination. But without knowing how many non-vaccinated children also developed a fever on that particular day, it’s not actually possible to say that there’s a causal link between the two.

Another important message to get across to students is that there are not always two equal sides to every argument, not withstanding the catchcry of “teach the controversy!” This is an area where the media, with their tendency to allot equal time to each side for the sake of ‘fairness’, are not helping. Balance is all very well, but not without due cause.

For example, apply scientific thinking to claims such as the health benefi ts of homeopathy. Homeopathy makes quite specific claims concerning health and well-being. How would you test those claims of efficacy? What are the mechanisms by which homeopathy – or indeed any other alternative health product – is supposed to have its effects? Claims that homeopathy works through mechanisms as yet unknown to science don’t address this question, but in addition, they presuppose that it does actually work.

Students will have some knowledge of the properties of matter and the effects of dilution, and senior classes may be aware of Avogadro’s number. They could apply this to the claim that homeopathic remedies become more effective at higher and higher dilutions, something that, if correct, would overturn our understanding of basic chemistry and physics. The 10:23 Campaign – in which people take ‘overdoses’ of homeopathic remedies – is a humorous way of highlighting the improbability of such claims.

Finally…
If students can learn to apply these tools to questions of science and pseudoscience, they will become better equipped to find their way through the maze of conflicting information that the modern world presents, regardless of whether they go on to further study in the sciences.

A.Campbell (2011) Using pseudoscience to teach science. New Zealand Science Teacher 128: 38-39

prior learning & university success in biology

Like the previous post (in fact, like most of my posts!) this is something I originally wrote for the Bioblog. Much of what I write there is on biological issues of one sort or another, but it’s nice to be able to share the teaching-focused ones here :-)

One of the sessions at FYBEC - on the changes in NCEA Achievement Standards in order to align them with the 2007 Curriculum document – generated a lot of discussion. It was great to have this session, as a heads-up to the changes in prior learning that we’ll see in students coming in to uni-level biology from 2013 (genetics will be moved to year 12, for example). Not least because I think many tertiary educators are still not really clear on how NCEA (the National Certificate in Educational Achievement, for my non-NZ readers) & the curriculum work, in the sense that there is plenty of room for flexibility in which (& how many) standards schools may decide to offer. From the uni perspective, this means that there will be a lot more diversity in prior learning among that 2013 cohort. (Even more than exists now, that is.)

I think it’s fair to say that at FYBEC responses to this information were quite wide-ranging. At one end there were those who found this quite worrying: surely schools should be given guidelines on just what they should be teaching those year 13 students, so that they all came to uni with the same general background in biology? This is certainly something that’s been discussed before, but my own opinion is that if we went down that route, it would suggest that we’re out of touch with what’s going on in the secondary schools. It also ignores the fact that a lot of year 13 students are not actually going on to university study, & schools have a responsibility to prepare all their students for their future lives & careers, not just the uni-bound cohort. Plus, the new curriculum actually encourages schools to offer a mix of standards that suit the needs of their own students & community (eg it’s possible to combine standards in chemistry & biology so that students can focus on biochemistry).

The thing is, while the current changes in standards & curriculum may increase the diversity in student backgrounds, that diversity is actually nothing new. A reasonably large number of students in my own first-year bio classes will have last studied biology in year 12, for example, and there’s usually a smattering of people who’ve not studied the subject beyond year 11 (if that). But research has shown that this doesn’t really matter: by the end of the semester there’s no real difference in levels of achievement between those different groups -provided we adapt our teaching accordingly (eg Buntting, Coll & Campbell, 2005).

So when my friend Pip gave me a paper entitled Prior learning in biology at high school does not predict performance in the first year at university, by Elisa Bone & Robert Reid (2011), I was eager to read it.

There are many factors that can affect a student’s transition from secondary school to university life, and Bone & Reid expected that one predictor of academic success in biology classes would be prior study in the subject. They set out to look for any correlation between students’ results in a paper on cellular & molecular bioloty wtih their school results, predicting that students with prior learning in biology would have higher results than those without it, but that chemistry might also be important (for students in this particular paper, anyway). The research was carried out at the University of Adelaide which (as is the case in New Zealand) has no requirement for previous study in biology or chemistry for students intending to enrol in the paper.

Now, introductory classes typically cover a lot of material (see my previous post on the issue of content), fairly quickly, & so it’s reasonable to expect that some prior learning in that area would be beneficial. Other factors that might affect success include the need to get used to large class sizes & the expectation from teaching staff that students are, or are becoming, independent learners; the need to adapt to high workloads & to become enculturated into the sometimes rather impersonal life of an academic institution; and  things outside the institution’s control, such as family responsibilities or work (Bone & Reid, 2011; Zepke et al., 2005).

In the period 2004-2007 the paper’s organisers had streamed students, with everyone having the same lectures & labs but students who hadn’t completed the final year of bio at school attended a 2-hour long tutorial each week (as opposed to the normal 1-hour class). The idea was that the students would have extra time to ask questions & work on problems but – I suspect rather to the surprise of the organisers – overall this intervention had no significant effect on either student success or retention. So, for students in the 2007-2009 cohorts, Bone & Reid looked at student performance for 3 groups: those who’d taken biology but not chemistry, those who’d completed chem but not bio, & those who’d done both subjects right through their final year of school.

Much to the researchers’ surprise, they found no difference in outcomes for students who had, or hadn’t, studied biology in their final year of school – unless they’d also studied chemistry:

[There] were no differences between final… grades [in the cellular & molecular paper] for students who completed biology in Year 12** and those that had not, whereas students who completed chemistry in Year 12 performed better… than those who had not.

(** In Australia year 12 is the equivalent of year 13 in New Zealand.)

Deeper analysis showed that around a third of students who studied biology weren’t taking any other science, while those who took chemistry were highly likely to take another science (most commonly physics). Bone & Reid wondered if the chemists were likely to have a higher level of scientific literacy & that this was more likely to influence success than prior experience in biology. Now that would be a very interesting question to delve into! But presence or lack of prior learning in biology was not a predictor of success in the subject at university.

Because prior learning in the sciences seemed to be most important, the researchers felt that a comparison of secondary and tertiary curricula in biology would be useful – and indeed it would. For a start, students don’t come to us as blank slates, & without some idea of their prior learning experiences, how on earth can we help them develop a schema that lets them build new knowledge onto that previous base?

They also noted that, while lecturers might often expect students to read the primary literature, “the language of science as presented at secondary school level may be very different to that used in the primary scientific literature”. This is almost certainly true – and to be expected considering that schools are necessarily catering to a much wider range of needs. But it does imply that first-year teachers might need to develop ways to help students learn the language of academic discourse – and maybe also teach them how to read a scientific paper.

What’s more,

[much] secondary school science teaching also aims to focus on broad conceptual understanding and the application of concepts to real-life experiences, whereas in the tertiary environment educators may place less emphasis on these applications and more on the learning of fundamental, potentially abstract principles… [This] change in teaching styles could lead to a decrease in student engagement.

As Deslauriers, Schelew & Wieman showed for physics students, there’s no “could” about it. And – while large class sizes are pretty much the norm at university, this doesn’t mean that university lecturers can’t use a range of techniques to engage, encourage, and support students in their learning – and to maximise their students’ chances of success regardless of background in the subject.

Bone & Reid conclude that

educators and administrators cannot expect students to be suitably prepared for first-year biology simply because they have completed biology at the senior high school-level… In addition, first-year educators face continuing issues as a result of the mismatch and need to tailor their teaching activities to suit students with widely varying levels of background knowledge.

To which I respond: hear hear!

E.Bone & R.Reid (2011) Prior learning in biology at high school does not predict performance in the first year at university. Higher Education Research & Development, 30(6): 709-724

C.Buntting, R.Coll & A.Campbell (2005) Using concept mapping to enhance conceptual understanding of diverse students in an introductory-level university biology course. Paper presented at the 36th Annual Conference of the Australasian Science Education Research Association

N.Zepke, L.Leach, T.Prebble, A.Campbell, D.Coltman, B.Dewart, M.Gibson, J.Henderson, J.Leadbeater, S.Purnall, L.Rowan, N.Solomon & S.Wilson (2005) Improving tertiary student outcomes in the first year of study. TLRI report, NZCER Distribution Services.

challenges in teaching biology

I spent Monday & Tuesday of this week down in Wellington, attending the 2nd First-Year Biology Educators’ Colloquium. (Yes, that’s a mouthful! We usually just say FYBEC to those in the know.) It was really refreshing to spend time focusing on how we teach first-year biology at university, and on research into ways to enhance that teaching.

The first keynote was by Pauline Ross, who’s at the School of Natural Sciences, University of Western Sydney. Pauline’s won a large number of teaching excellence awards & it was a real privilege – & a pleasure! – to learn from her. She started her talk by identifying a number of things (aka the ’7 deadly ways to see’) that can offer significant challenges to students beginning their uni-level studies in biology. But before I get onto those, I’m going to quote Pauline’s own words on receiving an Australian national teaching excellence award:

Although biology is supposedly the “easiest” of the science disciplines, research on student learning has shown that even high calibre, high achieving biology students at elite institutions taught by universally admired academics, fail to build a scientifically conceptual and contextual foundation in biology, perhaps because learning, teaching and assessment strategies in the discipline of biology have become ritualised. [However, a Kuhnian] paradigm shift allows me to communicate a deep conceptual and contextual understanding of biology to students. At the cornerstone of this paradigm shift is creativity; requiring students and staff to relearn their capacity for creativity and self-belief; inquiring, uncovering and overcoming barriers in their conceptual understanding, so that they think and practice as biologists.

Which pretty much sets the stage for the idea of the 7 deadly ideas (actually there were only 6, but the ’7 deadly sins’ thing has a certain resonance!).

(1) First up was content, something that we have an awful lot of – and of course this is as much an issue for secondary school teachers as it is for those of us at university. The textbook I use with my classes, Campbell Biology, seems to get thicker with each new edition as the frontiers of our knowledge continue to expand. Ross asks, can we decrease our coverage of content? How do we decide just which are the key content areas for students to learn about? She suggests that we should pay more attention to the research on threshold concepts, something that my colleague Michael Edmonds has previously written about over on Sciblogs.

Mastery of a threshold concept is sort of an ‘aha!’ moment, says Ross, because it opens your eyes to new ways of exploring a topic. (As Michael says, they’re sometimes called ‘troublesome knowledge’, because they can clash with existing worldviews and (mis)conceptions. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, as it can – should? – lead to a re-examination of those views & conceptions in the light of this new knowledge.) Placing more weight on threshold concepts may mean there’s a reduction of content overall, but it should also lead to a much deeper conceptual and contextual understanding. And that is definitely a Good Thing, as when students don’t understand they are stuck, unable to really move on in their learning. While they may be quite active in trying to gain understanding, they can also be quite confused and anxious – & they can stay that way, says Ross, for months.

So, considering threshold concepts rather than simply focusing on content knowledge can provide us with a new tool for revisiting and reviewing our teaching curricula.

(2) Next in the list was process. This is something I believe all tertiary science educators should ask themselves: do our students really graduate with all the science process skills that we fondly imagine they do? After all, our graduate profile probably says that they can do x, y, & z – but what opportunities do we give them to actually practise thinking like a scientist, for example? (Hint: they won’t learn it by osmosis.) We really do need to teach science as a fluid process, not as a fixed body of knowledge (all that content again!) – and to give students plenty of opportunity to experience that fluid process that is the essential nature of science. Similarly, the writing and literacy skills that we’d like them to have – are we providing sufficient opportunities to practice and learn those skills? Here Ross gave the example of meiosis & mitosis: we tend to teach about these forms of cell division as a series of steps (interphase, prophase etc) but we don’t teach their significance in context. She argues that if we want students to do more in (say) exams than simply parrot the names and chromosome states of those steps, then we need to give relevant, everyday examples to which they can anchor their knowledge. Her example was a question about a grazed knee that needed some pretty deep knowledge and writing about cell division to answer – & which couldn’t be answered but just listing those steps.

Of course, that would require some reasonably large changes in assessment (see # 5)…

This is getting a bit long :-)

(3) Inquiry ie inquiry-based learning, something that’s intimately linked to process. This is gaining in emphasis in schools & it’s worried me for some time that students who’ve gained by learning using this approach in school must find ‘traditional’ university teaching rather a rude shock. It’s why Brydget (our wonderful first-year tutor) & I are always looking for ways to include more possibilties for genuine inquiry-based learning in our lab classes, for example, & it’s possible to do the same in lectures using opportunities for group problem-solving sessions. As Carl Wieman & his team (among others) have shown, this sort of approach enhances engagement & improves learning outcomes, while also giving the opportunity to practice thinking like a scientist. What’s not to like?

(4) Language ie jargon. There’s an awful lot of it. Yes, of course there are technical terms that students must master, but we need to ensure that mastery is properly scaffolded. I had an ‘aha!’ moment at this point, because Ross commented even saying a word correctly can help with learning it, but we seldom give them the chance to practice. (Phil Bishop picked up on this in his own presentation, noting that very few of his students could say ‘coelom’ correctly.)

(5) Assessment. Ah, I could write a whole post, in fact several of them, about assessment. Probably will, at some point. (At which point the audience may step away from the computer & walk, not run, from the room, lol.) Suffice it for now to say that how we assess has a very significant impact on how, and what, students learn – and that we may use too much of the type of assessment that encourages shallow, not deep, thinking and learning and which works against deep conceptual and contextual understanding.

(6) And innovation – how much do we really value and encourage it, Ross asks. Not innovation for innovation’s sake, but innovation for good pedagogical, research-based reasons, that changes how we teach (including assessment) in ways that should have a positive impact on how students learn. Things like the ‘flip teaching’ described by Deslauriers, Schelew & Wieman (2011), for example, and which Kevin Gould has trialled with his first-year botany students at Victoria University: they’re given a handout of information on all sorts of things (shade/sun leaves, controlling gas exchange/water loss, etc), tasked with designing a plant for a particular environment – & then asked to present their design to the rest of the class.

I am so going to steal that one, Kevin!

visualising a curriculum

Sorry about the long break in my postings – I’ve been ridiculously busy at work & my limited spare time has gone into walking the dog & making up new recipes for the family’s dinners (both walking & cooking are a really good de-stress mechanism for me). Anyway, I’m trying to get back into it now & the following item is a cross-post from the Bioblog (where I am also kick-starting my writing).

I’m always looking around for ways to improve my teaching, & my students’ learning. (The two go hand in hand. I might think I’m a good teacher, but unless my classroom practices improve my students’ learning experiences & outcomes, then I’m not. Not really.) Part of my search involves quite a bit of reading from the science education literature, and recently I read something that gave me a bit of a wake-up call. As Brydget (who runs our first-year labs) said, “it seems so obvious when you think about it!”, but neither of us had actually thought from that particular viewpoint before?

So what was the idea that made us that little bit uncomfortable, & shifted our thoughts on communicating science in the classroom? (That discomfort, incidentally, is a Good Thing, & something we should seek to elicit in our students every now & then.) It’s contained in my current ‘light reading’: a book by Linda Nilson (2007) called The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map.

I bought the book because I’d been wondering for a while how better to communicate with my first-years about my papers: what they’ll be doing, when they’ll be doing it, that sort of thing. There’s always been a proportion of the class who fairly obviously don’t bother reading the ‘standard’ paper outline (they’re the ones who are startled to find out that yes, there’s a test tomorrow night! even though that information is there in black-&-white in the paper outline that they received on the first day of semester. That, plus the fact that I use concept maps a fair bit in my teaching anyway, made Nilson’s book catch my eye.

We use paper outlines (syllabi – or should that be syllabuses??) to communicate (we think!) a lot of information to our students. Of course there’s the list of topics to be taught & when they’ll be taught, plus a list of student learning outcomes. (The latter are intended to allow the students to judge their progress towards the paper’s goals.) But then we include a whole pile of administrative stuff, like required textbooks, due dates for items of assessment, what constitutes plagiarism & why they should avoid doing it… And we expect them to read all of it.

Nilson suggests there are good reasons why many students don’t or, if they do, why they don’t seem to process the information particularly well. Part of the problem may be that the syllabus is all text – she cites research indicating that [only] half of 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States read a book of any kind in 2002, and only 22% of 17-year-olds read daily in 2004. And worse – for many of those who do read the document, it may not actually make much sense to them.

This is the point where Brydget & I had that ‘aha’ moment. When a lecturer puts together a paper outline, they do it from the perspective of someone who’s totally mastered the content and the language involved. But for students, especially first-year students who are ‘content novices’, it’s a different story:

Even if students do read the syllabus, the content-heavy sections might not make much sense to them. Certainly one of the most content-laden sections is the schedule of topics that the course addresses. The topics usually contain technical terms of the discipline, terms with which the students are initially not familiar. if they already knew these terms, they wouldn’t be in the course to learn about them. Not surprisingly, the topics in syllabi in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering are almost exclusively technical worlds that a typical student wouldn’t understand until well into the course.

This is actually a deeper issue than a simple failure to read all that ‘stuff’ at the start fo the study guide, or in the first handout of the semester. It may also mean that the students don’t get any real idea of how the course is organised. You might think, “what does this matter? They’ll have it sussed by the end of the semester.” But there’s more to it than that. When we learn new things, if we’re to learn them in any meaningful way we need to be able to fit them into some sort of mental scaffolding, or schema. As Nilson says,

learning and storage take place only in the context of a logically organised conceptual framework. Deep processing, as opposed to simple memorisation, necessitates seeing the structure of new knowledge and integrating it into one’s existing structure of prior knowledge.

What’s more,

Our thinking is so dependent on structure that if we don’t have an established, complete logical structure to interpret and explain an observed phenomenon, we will make up connecting pieces or entire theories.

So there’s a real risk that many students won’t actually be learning what we think they’re learning, however well-structured our classroom teaching practices may be. So how can we help them understand the organisation of a course, so that they can use that to help incorporate the things they’ll be learning into their existing body of knowledge? nelson suggests the use of ‘visual’ syllabi that present course structure in flow charts or concept maps, showing what they’ll be learning (both content & process knowledge), how it all fits together, and how it links to material they might have already learned and to future courses.

I’ve used concept maps in class for years now, but while I know how well they help students to come to a deep understanding of complex information, I’d honestly never thought of using them to visualise the organisation of an entire paper. So that’s my next little project – to develop such a visual syllabus for the first-year biology papers I coordinate. And, at the end of the semester, I’ll be asking students for some feedback, so that I can gauge how useful that schema might have been to their own learning.

After all, my own learning journey is nowhere near its end :-)

Linda B. Nilson (2007) The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map. pub. Jossey-Bass. ISBN978-0-470-18085-3

the carnegie hall hypothesis: practice makes perfect

There’s another paper out on ways to improve student performance in university science papers, this time with a focus on biology. Again, what follows is a cross-post from something originally written for the Bioblog.

Hot on the heels of the paper on methods for improving learning in first-year physics (Deslauriers, Schelew & Wieman, 2011), comes one by Haak, HilleRisLambers, Pitre & Freeman (2011) that casts a critical eye on methods for teaching first-year biology classes.

Today’s students come from more diverse backgrounds, and have far more diverse prior learning experiences, than when I was a student myself. Those differences can contribute to a gap in achievement in first-year biology – something that’s exacerbated by academic assumptions about prior learning & which can contribute to poor student retention into subsequent study in the subject. 

Interestingly, when I showed the paper to a couple of colleagues, their first response was ‘let’s get clickers!’. Personally I’m rather cool on the idea: partly because they’re not exactly cheap, but also because what both papers show is that it’s not the clickers themselves that make the difference, it’s what you do with them. If all you do is use them to find out what answers students give to multichoice questions, & nothing more, this technology won’t actually add anything to student learning (eg Deslauriers et al., 2011). If, however, clickers are used as an integral part of a wider, active learning, experience, then you’ll see biiig improvements in student learning outcomes.

And that is amply demonstrated by this latest study by Haak & his colleagues. They note that, especially when dealing with disadvantaged students in the US, the response has often been to throw money at the problem to support reasonably comprehensive heavily targeted programs. Because this can quickly become rather expensive, such programs rarely become a regular, normal part of teaching programs. And they ask:

Can an existing STEM course [1] be modified to improve performance by students from disadvantaged educational and socioeconomic backgrounds who are at high risk of failing, without requiring increased resources in the way of staffing or external funding?

In other words, is it possible to set things up in a large-group lecture classroom that lets students achieve as they would if they were getting one-on-one instruction? This is something that should be of interest to university academics for several reasons, including the fact that in New Zealand there is an increasing focus from the government on improving student retention and completion rates, and on enhancing the proportion of Maori & Pasifika students enrolling & succeeding in university programs.

To answer this question, the research team worked with a big first-year Biology class at the University of Washington, specifically looking at the performance of students in the university’s Educational Opportunity Program (EOP). Students in this program come from disadvantaged backgrounds (educationally &/or economically), & the majority of them are from non-Caucasian ethnic groups. Analysis of a very large number of student records found a large ‘achievement gap’ between EOP and non-EOP students, such that over the period 2003-2008 EOP students in Biology 180 had an average failure rate of 21.9% (cf 10.1% for the non-EOP cohort). Haak & his colleagues hypothesised that this was because grades in the paper were heavily dependent on exams that ‘test higher-order cognitive skills’, and that students in the EOP program aren’t as well prepared as the non-EOP group to that assessment style.

The paper was originally taught by the standard, traditional lecture format, with little involvement by the students. Previous work led by one of the team (Freeman) found that if the lecturer incorporated active-learning exercises in his class (daily multichoice questions and weekly practice tests), then all students’ performance improved compared to the outcome from that traditional format. This makes sense, as the students were practicing the skills they’d need to achieve well in the final exam.

But wait, there’s more. A third course design saw the class taught (by the same instructor) without any lectures at all, where the active-learning exercises were combined with ‘pre-class reading quizzes and extensive informal group work in class’ – exactly what Deslauriers & his team did with their experimental cohort of physics students.  No surprises here:

The highly structured [third] approach resulted in another increase in overall performance by all students, compared with the low-structure, lecture-intensive course with no required active learning and [my emphasis] the moderate structure design based on clickers and a weekly practice exam.

That in itself is an excellent outcome. What about the EOP students in particular, since that’s where the big achievement gap is apparent?

… although all students benefit from [highly-structured teaching], EOP students experience a disproportionate benefit.

Way to go! Importantly, in these straitened economic times, this intervention didn’t cost any extra money. What’s more, the second time the ‘highly structured’ intervention was used, class size had gone from 345 to 700, lab clases had been cut to one every 2 weeks, and the ratio of teaching assistants to students went from 1:49 to 1:87.5. (Note to the Finance people: this is not a reason to cut funding for demonstrators!)

You could ask how, exactly, this intervention is having its effect. Are the students simply learning more ’stuff’ as a result of the different teaching methods, or are they also gaining higher-order cognitive skills? During Cathy Buntting’s PhD research she found that teaching students how to develop concept maps had a significant impact on their ability to answer ‘thinking’ questions, as opposed to ‘recall’ questions, so I’d have put money on Haak’s team finding that active learning has a positive impact on cognitive abilities. Haak & his colleagues comment that because Biology 180 relies heavily on higher-order thinking-type questions in its exams, then better results in those exams does suggest ‘actual learning gains’ and an improved understanding of the content covered in the paper. They suggest that

active learning that promotes peer interaction makes students articulate their logic and consider other points of view when solving problems, leading to learning gains.

Hopefully this will be the focus of a future research project.

Deslauriers L, Schelew E, & Wieman C (2011). Improved learning in a large-enrollment physics class. Science (New York, N.Y.), 332 (6031), 862-4 PMID: 21566198

Haak DC, HilleRisLambers J, Pitre E, & Freeman S (2011). Increased structure and active learning reduce the achievement gap in introductory biology. Science (New York, N.Y.), 332 (6034), 1213-6 PMID: 21636776

[1] STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics

Oh, and the ‘Carnegie Hall’ hypothesis? It’s named for the story of a tourist who asked a New Yorker how to get to Carnegie Hall. The local guy answered, ‘practice!’

engaging students effectively in science, technology and engineering

This is another little something that I originally wrote for the Bioblog. It’s a look at a new report published by Ako Aotearoa, the organisation charged with promoting and enhancing tertiary teaching excellence here in New Zealand.

My eye was caught by that title to a paper just out on the Ako Aotearoa website (click here for the summary document & here for the full report). The sub-title is The pathway from secondary to university education, a topic that is dear to my heart.

Tim Parkinson & his co-authors were keen to get a handle on just how university students make the transition from secondary school to university, and how they become/remain engaged with science during that process. The project’s underlying aims were to:

• improve student engagement in the study of science at university;
• improve the transition from the school learning environment to that of university;
• identify and promolgate pedagogical ‘best practice’ for science education in the first year at university.

(I know this is nit-picking, but surely the aim was to provide information that will help universities enhance student engagement and transition, using a range of ‘best practice’ options identified during the project. They weren’t looking at whether particular interventions actually had that result.)

In order to know how to make these changes, you really need to know what’s currently happening – and also how lecturers & students percieve what’s happening in their classrooms. We already know (eg Buntting, 2006) that there’s a mismatch between lecturer & student perceptions about prior knowledge, in biology at least, so I think it’s a fairly safe bet that the same mismatch exists around perceptions of teaching quality and engagement. The research team looked at all this using a combination of questionnaires & focus groups, working with secondary school science students (N=421), university students in their first year of a science degree (N=630), school science teachers (N-33) and uni science lecturers (N=69). Each of the four groups in the study answered the same questions, although the wording differed a bit depending on the group. For example,

Teacher questionnaire: I give students the opportunity to influence the way that they are taught. Student questionnaire: I am given the opportunity to influence the way I am taught.

(Parkinson et al, 2011; answers were scored on a 5-point Likert scale.)

As you might expect, it turns out that lecturers’ style, personality & enthusiasm had a big impact on students’ engagement with science at university, and on their ability to move smoothly from secondary school to higher-level study. But the lecturers’ abiltiy to present information in contexts that students see as relevant to their own specific interests is also important – not least because this would allow students to fit that information into their own internalised understanding of & knowledge about science (their ‘schema’). In addition

learning science in a contemporary context… stimulates engagement, and students enjoy learning when it is connected with a sense of discovery.

And there were definitely notable differences in perceptions related to teaching and learning. For example, the team commented that

… school and university students thought less highly of the abilities of their teacher in [the area of teacher qualities ie things like presentation skills, quality of feedback] than did the teachers and lecturers themselves. For example, university and school learners perceived their lecturers’ qualities to be of a moderate standard, whereas lecturers themselves reported that their own lecturing qualities were of a high standard.

Something that I found intriguing was that none of the groups felt that self-directed learning was a significant facet of classroom activity – its reported frequency fell around ‘sometimes’ and ‘rarely’. Our graduate profile document indicates that we expect students to be independent learners by the time they complete their degree – developing the necessary skills must surely begin in first year! Surely there’s a need – noted by the researchers in their summary, to make sure that we reward such things as critical thinking and other higher-order learning skills (which of course has an impact on how we assess our students’ learning).

It is tricky for uni staff though, for our students come into class with a wide range of previous learning experiences, depending on what subjects and which standards they’ve studied at school. This means that we’re a bit between a rock & a hard place, needing to extend able students with a lot of existing content knowledge without losing those who might not have the same skills or learning experiences. Parkinson & his colleagues suggest that universities – certainly university staff engaged in first-year teaching – need to become much more aware of the learning outcomes gained by students in their NCEA studies. This would mean that those lecturers would be able to

build on the diversity of knowledge that results from the standards-based NCEA high school education.

It occurs to me that doing this would send a powerful message to students – that their lecturers really do care about helping manage the transition from school to uni and are personally interested in their learning outcomes. (I don’t mean to suggest that we aren’t, only that students may not perceive things that way!) And that can have a big impact on how students perceive and approach their studies.

C.Buntting (2006) Educational issues in tertiary introductory biology. PhD thesis, University of Waikato.

T.J.Parkinson, H.Hughes, D.H.Gardner, G.T.Suddaby, M.Gilling & B.R.MacIntyre (2011) Engaging students effectively in science, technology and engineering (full report) Ako Aotearoa ISBN 978-0-473-18900-6 (online)

effects of changing teaching styles on student learning

This is a repost of an item I’ve just written for my ‘other’ blog. It would be good to hear what others think of the teaching methods it examines :-)

I know I’m creeping into Marcus’s territory here but the research I’m going to discuss today would apply to pretty much any tertiary classroom :-)

This story got a bit of press about a month ago, with the Herald carrying a story under the headline: It’s not teacher, but method that matters. The news article went on to say that “students who had to engage interactively using the TV remote-like devices [aka 'clickers'] scored about twice as high on a test compared to those who heard the normal lecture.” However, as I suspected (being familiar with Carl Wieman’s work), there was a lot more to this intervention than using a bit of technology to ‘vote’ on quiz answers :-)

The methods traditionally used to teach at university (ie classes where the lecturer lectures & the students take notes) have been around for a very long time & they work for some – after all, people of my generation were taught that way at uni, & it’s not uncommon to hear statements like, we succeeded & today’s students can do it too. But transmission methods of teaching don’t reach a lot of students particularly well, nor do they really engage students with the subject as well as they might. (And goodness knows, we need to engage students with science!)

Wieman has already documented the impact (or lack of it) of traditional teaching methods on student learning in physics, but this paper (Deslauriers, Schelew & Wieman, 2011) goes further in examining the effect on student learning and engagement of changing teaching methods in one group of first-year students in a large undergraduate physics class. It can be hard to manage a class of 850 students, and so the lecturers at the University of British Columbia had split it into 3 groups, with each group taught by a different lecturer. While the lecturers prepared and taught the course material independently, exams, assignments and lab work were the same for all students.

Two of the three groups of students were involved in the week-long experiment; one continued to be taught by its regular, highly experienced instructor, while the other group was taught by a graduate student (Deslauriers) who’d been trained in ‘active learning’ techniques known to be effective in enhancing student learning. And ‘active learning’ wasn’t just using clickers: the ‘experimental’ group had: “pre-class reading assignments, pre-class reading quizzes [on-line, true/false quizzes based on that reading], in-class clicker questions…, small-group active learning tasks, and targeted in-class instructor feedback” (Deslauriers et al, 2011). Students worked on challenging questions and learned to practice scientific reasoning skills to solve problems, all with frequent feedback from the instructor. There was no formal lecturing at all; the pre-class reading was intended to cover the factual content normally delivered in class time. While the control group’s lecturer also used clickers, this was simply to gain class answers to quiz questions & wasn’t used along with student-student discussion, which was the case with the experimental class.

One reason often given by lecturers for not trying new things in the classroom is that the students might resist the changes. But you can avoid that. I know Marcus finds his students are very accepting of change if he explains in advance what he’s doing & how the innovation will hopefully enhance their learning, and Deslauriers, Schelew & Wieman did the same, explaining to students “why the material was being taught this way and how research showed that this approach would increase their learning.”

So, what was the effect of this classroom innovation? Well, it was assessed in several ways.

During the experiment, observers assessed how much the students seemed to be engaged in & involved with the learning process; they also counted heads to see what attendance was like. At the end of the intervention, learning was assessed using a multichoice test written by both instructors – prior to this, all learning materials were provided to both groups of students. And students were asked to complete a questionnaire looking at their attitudes to the intervention.

In both classes, only 55-57% of students actually attended class, prior to the experiment. Attendance remained at this level in the control group, but it shot up to 75% during the experimental teaching sessions. Engagement prior to the intervention was the same in both groups, 45%, but nearly doubled to 85% in the experimental cohort. Test scores taken in the week before the experiment were identical for the two groups (an average mark of 47%, which doesn’t sound very flash) – but the post-intervention test told a completely different story. The average score for the control group was 41% and for the experimental class it was 74% (with a standard deviation in each case of 13%). And the intervention was very well-received by students, with 77% feeling that they’d have learned more if the entire first-year course had been taught using interactive methods, rather than just that one week’s intervention.

Which is fairly compelling evidence that there really are better ways of teaching than the standard ‘transmission-of-knowledge’ lecture format. I try to use a lot of interactive techniques anyway – but reading this paper has cemented my intention to try something completely different next year, giving readings before a class on excretion (a subject which a large proportion of the class always seem to struggle with), and using the lecture time for questions, discussion, and probably a quiz that carries a small amount of credit, based on the readings they’ll have done. And of course, carefully explaining to the students about what I’m doing.

I’ll keep you posted :-)

Deslauriers L, Schelew E, & Wieman C (2011). Improved learning in a large-enrollment physics class. Science (New York, N.Y.), 332 (6031), 862-4 PMID: 21566198

teaching with panopto

I’ve written previously about the lecture-capture system Panopto as a tool for supporting student learning. Anyway, our Teaching Development folks asked me to write a short piece about it for our in-house teaching support publication & very kindly said that I could post it here as well :-)

Panopto’s a tool for capturing classroom teaching and making it available on-line for students to access whenever they please. I first became aware of it when the University was gearing up for its i-TunesU presence, and decided that the technology had a lot to offer me and my students as a tool to enhance teaching and learning practices. (I am definitely not a fan of technology for technology’s sake – it needs to have a pedagogical benefit.) And I’ve been using ever since – for lectures, for podcasts, for catching up when I’ve had to cancel a lecture due to illness.

Panopto isn’t perfect. In a lecture theatre it picks up what the lecturer’s saying, but misses most or all of the other goings-on – the questions (remember to repeat them) & the discussion around various points. It also loses ‘sight’ of the speaker if they move too far to the left or right, although that shouldn’t stop you moving around, to speak to a group maybe, or to get closer to someone who’s speaking very quietly. But students viewing a recording can see the speaker (provided there’s a camera in the room; otherwise they’ll just get the voice-over), see the powerpoint slides (& any notes or diagrams added to these in class), and watch any videos or animations that were shown in class. They can stop the recording, replay it, view tricky points again and again. To me, this was a key reason for using panopto, because I could see how it gave students the chance to revise and review difficult concepts in their own time and at their own pace.

This was borne out by an informal survey I did with my first-year class last year. The most common reason they gave for using Panopto – and not everyone used it – was as a means of reviewing material that they hadn’t understood in class. ‘Used it to revise for exams’ was also a common response, & indeed, you could tell that anyway by looking at the usage statistics within the Panopto system. But it also turned out to be really useful for students with lecture clashes – and given that we emphasize the ‘flexible learning’ opportunities available at Waikato, that’s got to be a good thing. Students liked knowing that if they were sick they wouldn’t be missing out on too much from my classes. And someone said, ‘you could use it as an excuse to miss classes – but then you’d be missing out on a lot of the ‘extra’ stuff that goes on in the lecture room’. In other words, the students were using Panopto as an additional means of supporting and enhancing their learning.

It’s also an excellent tool for reflecting on my own teaching practices. I often watch a lecture later, looking to see whether something that seemed to go well at the time, really did. It’s actually quite hard to do this to start with, because you’re seeing and hearing yourself as the students do, & that may or may not fit with your own image of how you look and sound in the classroom! It can form the basis of discussion with a friend or mentor: ‘I did this particular thing because I hoped that it would… – do you think it would have had that effect?’ I know TDU have used a recording of mine as the basis of discussion with other lecturers on delivering constructive criticism of a colleague’s class – and the feedback I received from that was extremely useful (thanks, guys!).

So, if you’re toying with the idea of trying out Panopto in your classroom, I’d say, go for it. It’ll seem strange, the first time or two, but after that (as long as you remember to press ‘record’ & turn on the microphone! been there, done that) you really don’t notice it. I was told that the students just wouldn’t come to class but I can’t say I’ve noticed that – if they’re going to wag, they’ll wag, & this is just another excuse. But more seriously – your students will see your use of Panopto as just another sign that you’re interested in & keen to support their learning, & both you and they will gain from the experience.