I served as a Course Assistant with BIOL 415/615 (4 cr.)- Evolution (senior capstone course for Biology majors) for Dr. Beth Pringle during Fall 2018. In this role, I was responsible for helping to develop and organize the Webcampus course site into modules, ease grading for graduate TAs by collapsing sections into one course grade book, and creating (and grading) new online assessments for students.
Course Description: Pattern and process in the evolution of life on earth. This will be a challenging course that will require intellectual engagement and critical thinking. Evolution is the Department of Biology's "capstone" course for majors. Students will have the opportunity to synthesize all that they have learned in the major in the context of evolution and to think critically about the unifying themes of life. An emphasis will be placed on the student's ability to communicate scientific information effectively.
Student Learning Outcomes: At the end of this course, students should be able to demonstrate the ability to:
Describe scientific evidence of evolution using one or more of the following kinds of data: fossil record, molecular biology, comparative anatomy, physiology, or behavior.
Explain the roles of mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, and natural selection in bringing about evolutionary change within populations.
Differentiate between species concepts and/or explain the various mechanisms through which a species can arise.
Critically evaluate, formulate, and effectively communicate scientific arguments relating to evolutionary biology.
Determine the veracity and value of published information in evolutionary biology.
Traditionally, the majority of the points for this course have been based on midterm or final exams (summative assessments) however students don’t receive many opportunities to be assessed or practice with content problems before the exams since their weekly discussion groups cover supplementary material. The weekly discussion groups led by graduate TAs already focus on formative assessments: reading peer reviewed primary literature, writing a summary and critique, participating in verbal discussion and group project presentations. To address this shortcoming or lack of opportunity for students of different neural types to earn points and prepare for exams, we decided to implement TopHat as a polling participation tool for in-class formative assessment.
the plan
We decided to employ an in-lecture polling technology (TopHat) to track real-time student comprehension and higher-order educational goals (e.g. analyze, evaluate and create from Bloom’s Taxonomy). By re-visiting concepts taught during the previous lecture, reviewing problem questions from the weekly review assignments or checking real-time comprehension, students have an opportunity to try engaging in this new material immediately and with peer support. This lecture style drives more active participation from students and in fact, instead of only multiple choice questions, this polling technology allows for students to enter text for short answer questions or to create Wordles (word clouds) from definitional questions. We also used an 80% participation: 20% correctness gauge such that not only is attendance indirectly being taken and considered in the final course grade, but as a senior capstone course, we felt that making polling points based on 100% participation fails to hold students accountable for foundational knowledge from their major pre-reqs or at least content from earlier in the course. We have used exact short answers from students in the next lecture to revisit complex concepts and provide a more in-depth argument for different answers or ideas. I acknowledge that polling technology is not an inclusive or accessible assessment type for those that are English as a second language learners (having to quickly type out answers in English). Wedo show the question on the big screen for visually impaired students and also repeat it verbally. By allowing students to discuss these polling questions with a partner (think-pair-share), my hope is that ESL students get a chance to check that they understand the question with another student.
Lecture participation (i.e. TopHat) accounted for 100/ 935 points or 10% of the total course grade. Please refer to the syllabus below for greater detail regarding course requirements!
To implement this polling technology (e.g. TopHat), a number (~4-6) and mixture of question types (e.g. multiple choice or short answer) were released during each lecture.
Below is an example of a multiple choice question that was used to review a difficult concept that came up in the weekly Review Assignment due the previous week.
Question is the intellectual property of B. Pringle
Later on in the semester, students received a follow-up question on this topic that required them to type in a short response rather than multiple choice which might allow some students to get the correct answer just by random chance. Some of the responses are shown below, note that the anonymity likely enables students to feel more comfortable in attempting an answer compared to having to raise their hand. In addition, because the responses show up on the projector screen, students are able to view their peers' responses in real-time which gives them a sense of how their answer compares.
Question is the intellectual property of B. Pringle
Below is a different type of TopHat polling question from this semester that required students to click on the node indicating the hominid dispersal event to Africa in the phylogeny below. Although accessibility issues needs to be accounted for when implementing a question like this that requires fine-motor skills, it has the power to demonstrate true misconceptions for figure interpretation in particular.
Question is the intellectual property of B. Pringle
assessment & student learning outcomes
In addition to enabling student engagement during lecture, polling tools can be helpful in evaluating student learning however, strategies for developing "good" multiple choice questions needs to be taken into account. For example, if questions contain many "okay" answers but only one truly correct answer then real-time feedback can address some of these subtleties and enable deeper discussion of the topic itself. Although we introduced a good variety of question types including recall, student perspective, and application/critical thinking, I think some of our TopHat (and Review Assignment) questions could benefit from greater attention to multiple choice item construction (e.g. not using "all of the above" or "none of the above"). Ultimately, TopHat worked well for a class of ~150 students although next semester, we plan to address the issues associated with students logging in outside of class perhaps by only allowing students to see the question and answer choices on the projector screen rather than their personal screens.
To determine whether this new EdTech approach had an impact on student learning, we released a midterm survey which indicated that TopHat and Review Assignments were identified as the top two components of the Evolution course enabling students to learn the content more effectively. In addition, very few students considered TopHat a detriment to their learning (see EdTech Artefact I for details). Finally, I averaged all TopHat scores and currently, the average score is 81.8% which should help most students in terms of the overall course grade.