LIFE363 - Final report plan

Remember:
Cover Page
Contents Page
Abstract
Lay Summary

Your introduction should be about 500 words – this means you have to be really concise and you have to
make sure you are fully focused on relevant things to your study.

As this is a pedagogical project, you also need a separate 500 word introduction on the science of what
your resource will be teaching, written at graduate level.

Introduction

Introducing active learning:

 Standard definitions and technical language

- Define active learning as a broad umbrella term with many different approaches and techniques
constituting as ‘active learning’
- Engagement of ‘higher order cognitive abilities’ (blooms taxonomy)
 Include how part of its definition means to be the opposite of ‘didactive’ lecturing style
- Definition of didactive learning from the literature

 Examples from the wide literature describing the efficacy and evidence for active learning
- Define the different active learning techniques
- Be clear as to what active learning teaching technique is being used in the literature studies
- Not only to prove the efficacy of active learning, but also its preference over didactive teaching
styles

 Cite examples where the active learning method is similar to the one used in this resource build
- Interactive formats, non grade bearing, a component of learning through trial and error

 Therefore must cite studies which compare active learning with didactive teaching
- To highlight the importance and relevance of active learning, and why its promotion over didactive
styles should be prioritised to:
A) Aid the student in their conceptual understanding of the content
B) Aid students in becoming more engaged and active in learning environments
C) Help consolidate lecture content in the student’s memories
D) Ultimately yield higher student academic gains through a combination of the above 3 factors
 - Must include how solely measuring ‘grade outcome’ or ‘memory retention’ is too ‘one-dimensional’
of an approach to assess something as broad as ones ‘education’
- Cite the literature that supports these claims

 Through introducing active learning and detailing it’s superiority over didactive teaching in student
engagement, content memorisation, and higher grades, this should be sufficient to justify the
importance and relevance of the work being done

Introducing the impact of stress on education:

 Defining stress as a situation where ‘one’s perceptions of one’s resources being sub-par to the actual
resources required to do any given task or operation’
- The pertinent resources in the higher education environment being: time, capacity, and to a lesser
extent (but still important), knowledge
- How these areas are factored into the e-learning resource (E-LR) build

 Literature of student stress levels on the rise

- The main sources of student stress, a main competent of that being academics (grades,
competency etc)
- Declarations of mental health issues (predominantly anxiety) also increasing
 Brief exploration into student anxiety
- Stress being a major symptom of anxiety disorders

 Briefly how the stress response glucocorticoids acutely impair PFC function
- This as the physical mechanism for how stress impairs academic performance
- Elevated glucocorticoid levels impair memory retrieval

The main points to communicate:

1) How active learning styles have been proven to be more efficacious than didactive learning
styles in > 1 regard
- Greater conceptual understanding
- Greater engagement in materials
- Better consolidation of memory

2) More students are suffering from stressed & anxiety related issues about more things and at
higher levels than before
- Stress impairs academic performance by acutely impairing memory retrieval
- The academic gains made from implementing active learning might be diminished if stress
performance impairment isn’t considered
The E-LR is designed for 1st year higher education students studying Biological Sciences, with the intention
of introducing some rudimentary microbiology techniques, and attempting to build competency &
confidence by simulating some standard procedures in a virtual environment

Methods & results

Have the methods and results as one section

You can start with a short method overview, including what kind of e-learning resource you were aiming
for

You could then have a learning outcomes section – i.e. what you identified that needed to be taught

You could also have a short section on the resources audience i.e. who it is intended for

 As the project is a resource build, the methods section will be primarily detailing how the Articulate
software was used to create different elements of the resource:
- The use of ‘layers’ and ‘triggers’ to create custom built MCQ sections allows custom feedback,
and links to direct the student to the relevant theory pages of the resource
- The use of triggers and markers to create an intuitive navigation system throughout the
resource
- Use of the ‘free-flow’ format to create ‘drag and drop’ interactive format
- How each slide was programmed to rest itself after each attempt at answering MCQ or drag
and drop, such that the student can take as many attempts as necessary
- How each major topic of the microbiology competency was broken down into separate menus,
and sometimes sub-menus, to make the content more manageable
- The conversion of online gifs to MP4 formats in order to be compatible with the Articulate
software

 Include how the content & design was created on Microsoft PowerPoint, and then imported into the
Articulate software
- Slides are imported into ‘story view’ in the software, where the creator can organise the slides
into a ‘storyboard’ where all the triggers can be seen

You might want a section on ethical considerations and/or a section on considering making resources
accessible to a wide audience eg some students may be colour blind etc

Results
 Results would include labelled screenshots of certain slides from the resource
- Labels would point out where layers and buttons were, as well as the interactive triggers that
initiated them
- Screenshot of an MCQ slide, labelling the radial interactive buttons, as well as their
programmed triggers to the corresponding feedback layers

 Screenshot of the free-flow drag & drop slide AND programming slide, showing which assets
correspond to which ‘drop’ piles

Discussion

You could start your discussion with a short reflection on how your project has gone. Did you encounter
any difficulties? What have you learnt?
First part of the discussion would be explaining how the e-learning resource fits the criteria of ‘active
learning’

What justifies the E-LR as active learning

Non-linear learning
 The E-LR advises the student to go through some theory content before attempting the interactive
element. However, the E-LR is built in such a way to allow the student to jump straight to the
interactive element.
- This design is to accommodate for different learning styles. Some students may prefer learning
by trial and error, some may want to test their base knowledge before engaging in the theory
content. Other students will feel more comfortable reading through the content before
attempting the interactive elements
 This ‘non-linear’ learning is learning by experience
- Discussion on how it can be useful to first identify what the student doesn’t know.
- Making connections between what the student already knows and what they don’t know. In
this way the student is constructing their own knowledge base
 This E-LR is classified as a formative assessment, meaning it is non-grade bearing
- This should give the student the confidence to attempt interactive elements multiple times,
without penalisation

Interactivity
 The E-LR includes interactive elements, both simulating procedures and simple multiple choice
questions
- This active component is a chance for the student to directly test what they have just read by
engaging in the material. It is not simple passive learning, the student is forced to test their
knowledge of the material, highlighting any gaps

There are two types of interactivity in this E-LR:

1) MCQ quiz
 This element is designed to primarily test comprehension and retention of material, which
are important components of education and are key learning outcomes of any successful learning
resource
 The student is able to see their feedback in real time, and make as many attempts as
necessary at the quiz without penalisation. This is to encourage the student engage in non-linear
learning, where they consolidate material and test comprehension by freely flowing between the
information and test slides

2) Simulated lab procedures

 This element is designed to test ‘conceptual understanding’
 The student must translate the content they have just learned from a word format to a
visual format.
 MCQ’s have the benefit of word ques to help stimulate the memory, but by designing this
interactive element into a more visual medium, the student must understand and process the
written content into another format
 This is an attempt to test the students’ conceptual understanding of the content, which is
useful in its own right as well as contributing towards academic gains
  The simulation is also supposed to familiarise the student with the relevant procedure,
including the steps, materials, and outcomes involved. This, in the hope that when they enter the
physical lab, the environment will have a familiarity to it and the task will not be so daunting
- This means that in the lab environment, valuable time doesn’t have to be spent trying to
understand the concepts and steps involved in the procedure. The student should be
sufficiently familiar with the concept and the steps involved to translate it into the physical
environment

 The student must engage in higher order cognitive abilities, such as rearrangement and application of
new knowledge to a novel task

Context & relevance of stress

 Active learning works so well as a method because it engages higher-order cognitive abilities to support
learning
- Citation of blooms taxonomy

 Student stress levels at all-time high, with academics being the main stressor (cite all the supporting
literature)

 Cover the basics of the stress response

- Release of glucocorticoids which prime the body for immediate action e.g. elevated heart rate,
blood pressure, the cessation of certain ‘growth & repair’ functions etc
- How this hormonal change can be induced by endogenous triggers too, such as elevated
emotional states in anticipation of an event, most relevantly an exam or assessment

 How stress relates to academic performance

- Literature of PFC function being impaired by the presence of stressor glucocorticoids
- Changes the regulation pathway of the amygdala to focus on salient stimuli etc

 Citation of the literature where induced stress was shown to impair performance
- Participants administered with cortisol performed worse on test
- Rats displaying impaired memory in the presence of a stressor
- Samples taken from students post-exam showing elevated levels of glucocorticoids

 Perhaps discuss the work of Bohus (1994) in which small amounts of stress have been shown to
promote memory consolidation
- This could be the aim of a further study, to discover at what stress levels diminishing returns of
academic gains are observed

 Stress response as impairing performance of ‘higher cognitive abilities’ (cite relevant literature), thus
highlighting the importance for active learning methods to be sensitive to this by:
- Formative assessment (to relieve the grade burden)
- No time restrictions (to relieve the time burden)
- No penalties of wrong answers
- As many attempts as necessary
 - In this case, building the E-LR as informal, colourful, and littered with popular culture
references

Must generally stress the case that by ignoring the stress impairment of performance, the academic gains
yielded by implementation of active learning methods will be sub-optimal

Possible applications

 This E-LR is designed to be a competency resource. It is a rudimentary introduction to some basic

principles and processes of microbiology
- This is to relieve the stress burden of novel information and expectations that first year
students might feel in the transition from school to higher education
- It is very much designed to be friendly, not too serious, laid-back, and including pop-culture
references
- However, the E-LR can still be robust enough to deliver more complex and specialised
information, if the teacher had the due time, training, and resources to create it.

 It is also suggested that the teacher could set this creation of a learning resource as an assignment
- The marking criteria would be less concentrated on depth of content, and more so on
creativity, use of interactions/quizzes etc to force students to actually create their own
content, and by doing so, recruit higher cognitive abilities to enrich and consolidate their own
learning process
- To create educational content such as the E-LRs would necessitate engagement of higher-
order cognitive abilities, to synthesise knowledge & information into content of their own
- This will force the student to really grasp a conceptual understanding of the information
themselves, before they are able to create educational content for others
 In this assignment, the student ‘learns for a purpose’, a purpose other than passing an exam or test.
- This should serve to motivate the student into becoming a protagonist of their own education.
The student should decide for themselves what is the relevant and important information to
include, and what format it should take
- When learning takes a purpose, where there is an end goal, the quality of learning and the
engagement of the student will be far superior to where it would have been in a traditional
method (i.e. didactive teaching/examinations)

 It is suggested that this assignment be set first as a formative, non grade-bearing assessment
- Cite literature on formative assessments
- This is again to relieve the stress burden associated with grades and outcome. This assignment
is primarily concerned with engaging the student’s higher order cognitive capabilities, to
promote conceptual understanding and build their own network of knowledge
- If set as a graded assessment, there is the temptation to engage with the assignment only at a
‘superficial level’, to secure the grade. On the other hand, there is always the possibility that
non-graded assessments aren’t taken seriously by the student, as it may be perceived to be
disproportionately more work for little immediate reward

 A possible solution would be to set two E-LR assignments; one grade bearing, one non grade-bearing
- First as a formative, non grade-bearing assignment so the student can become familiarised
with the process, is allowed to make mistakes, is more ‘process-orientated’ (less concerned
with final product grading)
 - Then after, to set the same type of assignment on different content as a grade-bearing
summative assessment. This assignment would be more ‘outcome-orientated’
- The fact that there will be a later graded assessment should be incentive enough for the
student to take the formative assignment seriously. The more they try and learn with the
formative attempt, the easier it would be for the second summative attempt

 This E-LR could also be used in a ‘flipped classroom’ setting

- Cite literature of flipped classroom active learning
- Basically, where the student engages in the E-LR before the lecture/class practical session.
- Here, the student must take charge of their education. Failure to properly engage with the E-
LR will lead to less value taken from the proceeding lecture/practical session

Potential limitations of active learning

 However, it may be that some content is too rich in detail to be effectively taught in this active learning
style.
- Due to limited resource of time, and considering the workload from other modules, the
traditional didactive lecture format still is very much relevant in teaching content
- It is up to the discretion of the teacher what would be appropriate to format in this E-LR
active-learning format, and what can best be taught in a lecture format

 There can be the possible trade-off between amount/quality of content taught, and the quality of that
teaching
- It is proved that active learning yields better results than didactive methods in terms of
student engagement, memory retention, and test performance.
- It would simply be too burdensome of an enterprise for teachers and lecturers to format all
course content into creative active styles like the one designed here. It is suggested that the
teacher should identify aspects of their course which would be possible to format in an active
learning style
- Cite the literature where students perceived higher value from didactive lecture than the
active learning ‘group sessions’

 However, even in the lecture format there is room for active learning techniques
- Cite Row’s pause procedure

Didactive Vs. Active

 Discuss the limitations/inadequacies of didactive methods,

 Learning becomes student-centric

- The student becomes an intimate part of the learning process, as opposed to being a
‘receptacle of knowledge’
- Teachers and students are taken to be ‘co-creators’ of content. Setting students the
assignment of creating this type of E-LR is an effective active learning method of teaching,
which will force the student to engage with the material on a deeper conceptual level, and not
simply memorising content
 - Students are encouraged to be active protagonists of their own education in this way

Your discussion has many good points but I am worried about its length. Make sure you focus on the most
relevant points for your study and on not having any repetition.