Monthly Archives: October 2018

Collaboration is the Key to Success in Publishing Your Work

As an Assistant Professor, you are under a lot of pressure to teach new classes, perform service and of course publish. Often times you do not have a mentor to guide you and you are off on your own pathway to tenure. While I had many good ideas about some teaching research I wanted to perform with my students I needed help in executing a study and publishing my work. While the goal was clear, the plan and the execution were not. Where to start was the biggest and most difficult hurdle.

I assumed incorrectly that the best way to be successful in publishing was to do it on my own. After all, I would only be accountable to myself and need not worry about collaborators who might be hard to reach and would take a long time to complete their portion of a manuscript. I tried this path initially and it was incredibly difficult as I could only work on one project at a time. The turning point came when I attended an Experimental Biology (EB) meeting Teaching Section symposium several years ago; I vividly recalled an excellent presentation where the speaker showed us an elegant study of how he used active learning and student grades improved. This talk inspired me and I got excited to try this with my class by performing a similar study. The excitement abruptly ended when he stated the two sections of students he used for his study had 250 and 300 students respectively. My own classes are between 12-20 students, quite small in comparison and I was completely disheartened thinking it would take years of study before I surveyed that many students. After the talk, I went up to him to ask a question, there was someone in front of me that asked the question that I had planned to ask. She said “I have small classes and for me to do a study of significance would take years”. I chimed in “I am in the same situation”. He answered us both with one word “Collaborate”. I walked away disheartened as I did not know anyone that I could collaborate with on a study.

After some time to reflect that this course of action was what I needed I developed an active plan to execute at the next EB meeting. At the Claude Bernard Lecture, I introduced myself to Barb Goodman. This was an excellent choice, as Barb knows everyone and she was kind enough to introduce me to everyone who approached her. From there my confidence grew. The next smart decision I made was to sit in the front during the lecture and all future Teaching Section Symposia. Do not hide in the back as people sometimes come in late and this can be distracting. In the front of the room are the friendly people who are very happy to talk with you and share ideas.

The next step was to follow the program and attend the Teaching Section luncheon. At this event, a small group of people dedicated to teaching and student success sit and talk about the different classes they teach and share ideas about teaching challenges. The tables are small and round so you can meet everyone at your table. Another key event to attend at EB is the Teaching Section Business meeting and dinner. At the dinner, you get a chance to meet more people in a relaxed setting. Some of the attendees have attended the other events and this is a great way to practice your recall and talk with them on a first name basis.

The final step in meeting people with whom to collaborate is to participate in an Institute on Teaching and Learning (ITL). There have been three of these meetings so far (2014, 2016 & 2018) and the meeting actively encourages you to meet new people at each meal and form new collaborations. Through this meeting, I met many of my collaborators and successfully published abstracts and papers (listed below), received one grant, was a symposium speaker, and chaired a symposium. The meeting is energizing as the program is packed with new ideas and teaching strategies to try in your classroom. It is easy to ask questions and be an active participant in the discussions. Thus, taking advantage of a number of opportunities for physiology educators through the American Physiological Society can be just the push you need to get going on a successful promotion and tenure process. Join the APS and its Teaching Section to keep up-to-date on what is going on in physiology education.

References

Aprigia Monteferrante G, Mariana Cruz M, Mogadouro G, de Oliveira Fantini V, Oliveira Castro P, Halpin PA, and Lellis-Santos C (2018). Cardiac rhythm dance protocol: a smartphone-assisted hands-on activity to introduce concepts of cardiovascular physiology and scientific methodology. Advances in Physiology Education, 42: 516-520, doi:10.1152/advan.00028.2017.
Blatch, SA, Cliff W., Beason-Abmayr, B. and Halpin PA. (2017).The Artificial Animal Project: A Tool for Helping Students Integrate Body Systems. Advances in Physiology Education. 41: 239-243 DOI: 10.1152/advan.00159.2016
Gopalan C., Halpin PA and Johnson KMS (2018). Benefits and Logistics of Non-Presenting Undergraduate Students Attending a Professional Scientific Meeting. Advances in Physiology Education. 42: 68-74. DOI.org/10.1152/advan.00091.2017
Halpin PA, Golden L, Zane Hagins K, Waller S, and Chaya Gopalan C. (2018). SYMPOSIUM REPORT ON “Examining the Changing Landscape of Course Delivery and Student Learning;” Experimental Biology 2017. Advances in Physiology Education, 42: 610–614. doi:10.1152/advan.00096.2018.
Lellis-Santos, C and Halpin PA (2018).”Workshop Report: “Using Social Media and Smartphone Applications in Practical Lessons to Enhance Student Learning” in Búzios, Brazil (Aug. 6-8, 2017). Advances in Physiology Education, 42: 340–342. https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00011.2018.

Patricia A. Halpin is an Associate Professor in the Life Sciences Department at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester (UNHM). Patricia received her MS and Ph.D. in Physiology at the University of Connecticut. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth Medical School. After completion of her postdoc she started a family and taught as an adjunct at several NH colleges. She then became a Lecturer at UNHM before becoming an Assistant Professor. She teaches Principles of Biology, Endocrinology, Cell Biology, Animal Physiology, Global Science Explorations and Senior Seminar to undergraduates. She has been a member of APS since 1994 and is currently on the APS Education committee and is active in the Teaching Section. She has participated in Physiology Understanding (PhUn) week at the elementary school level in the US and Australia. She has presented her work on PhUn week, Using Twitter for Science Discussions, and Embedding Professional Skills into Science curriculum at the Experimental Biology meeting and the APS Institute on Teaching and Learning.

Questioning How I Question

For some, “assessment” is sometimes a dirty word, with visions of rubrics, accreditation reports, and piles of data. Readers of this blog hopefully do not have this vantage point, thanks in part to some great previous posts on this topic and an overall understanding of how assessment is a critical component of best practices in teaching and learning. Yet, even as a new(ish) faculty member who values assessment, I still struggle with trying to best determine whether my students are learning and to employ effective and efficient (who has time to spare?!) assessment strategies. Thus, when a professional development opportunity on campus was offered to do a book read of “Fast and Effective Assessment: How to Reduce Your Workload and Improve Student Learning” by Glen Pearsall I quickly said “Yes! Send me my copy!”

Prior to the first meeting of my reading group, I dutifully did my homework of reading the first chapter (much like our students often do, the night before…). Somewhat to my surprise, the book doesn’t start by discussing creating formal assessments or how to effectively grade and provide feedback. Rather, as Pearsall points out “a lot of the work associated with correction is actually generated long before students put pen to paper. The way you set up and run a learning activity can have a profound effect on how much correction you have to do at the end of it.” The foundation of assessment, according to Pearsall is then questioning technique.

Using questions to promote learning is not a new concept and most, even non-educators, are somewhat familiar with the Socratic Method. While the simplified version of the Socratic Method is thought of as using pointed questions to elicit greater understanding, more formally, this technique encourages the student to acknowledge their own fallacies and then realize true knowledge through logical deduction^[1],[2]. Compared to the conversations of Socrates and Plato 2+ millennia ago, modern classrooms not only include this dialectic discourse but also other instructional methods such as didactic, inquiry, and discovery-based learning (or some version of these strategies that bears a synonymous name). My classroom is no different — I ask questions all class long, to begin a session (which students answer in writing to prime them into thinking about the material they experienced in preparation for class), to work through material I am presenting (in order to encourage engagement), and in self-directed class activities (both on worksheets and as I roam the room). However, it was not until reading Pearsall’s first chapter that I stopped to question my questions and reflect on how they contribute to my overall assessment strategy.

Considering my questioning technique in the context of assessment was a bit of a reversal in thinking. Rather than asking my questions to facilitate learning (wouldn’t Socrates be proud!), I could consider my questions providing important feedback on whether students were learning (AKA…Assessment!). Accordingly, the most effective and efficient questions would be ones that gather more feedback in less time. Despite more focus on the K-12 classroom, I think many of Pearsall’s suggestions^[3]apply to my undergraduate physiology classes too. A brief summary of some strategies for improving questioning technique, separated by different fundamental questions:

How do I get more students to participate?

We can “warm up” cold calling to encourage participation through activities like think-pair-share, question relays, scaffolding answers, and framing speculation.
It is important to give students sufficient thinking time through fostering longer wait and pause times. Pre-cueing and using placeholder or reflective statements can help with this.

How do I elicit evidentiary reasoning from students?

“What makes you say that?” and “Why is _____ correct?” encourages students to articulate their reasoning.
Checking with others and providing “second drafts” to responses emphasizes the importance of justifying a response.

How do I sequence questions?

The right question doesn’t necessarily lead to better learning if it’s asked at the wrong time.
Questions should be scaffolded so depth and complexity develops (i.e. detail, category, elaboration, evidence).

How do I best respond to student responses?

Pivoting, re-voicing, and cueing students can help unpack incorrect and incomplete answers as well as build and explore correct ones.

How do I deal with addressing interruptions?

Celebrating good practices, establishing rules for discussion, making it safe to answer and addressing domineering students can facilitate productive questioning sessions.

After reviewing these strategies, I’ve realized a few things. First, I was already utilizing some of these techniques, perhaps unconsciously, or as a testament to the many effective educators I’ve learned from over the years. Second, I fall victim to some questioning pitfalls such as not providing enough cueing information and leaving students to try their hand at mind-reading what I’m trying to ask more than I would like. Third, the benefits of better questioning are real. Although only anecdotal and over a small sampling period, I have observed that by reframing certain questions, I am better able to determine if students have learned and identify what they may be missing. As I work to clean up my assessment strategies, I will continue to question my questions, and encourage it in my colleagues as well.

¹Stoddard, H.A. and O’Dell, D.A. Would Socrates Have Actually Used the Socratic Method for Clinical Teaching? J Gen Intern Med 31(9):1092–6. 2016.

²Oyler, D.R. and Romanelli, F. The Fact of Ignorance Revisiting the Socratic Method as a Tool for Teaching Critical Thinking. Am J of Pharm Ed; 78 (7) Article 144. 2014.

³A free preview of the first chapter of Pearsall’s book is available here.

Anne Crecelius (@DaytonDrC) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health and Sport Science at the University of Dayton where she won the Faculty Award in Teaching in 2018. She teaches Human Physiology, Introduction to Health Professions, and Research in Sport and Health Science. She returned to her undergraduate alma mater to join the faculty after completing her M.S. and Ph.D. studying Cardiovascular Physiology at Colorado State University. Her research interest is in the integrative control of muscle blood flow. She is a member of the American Physiological Society (APS), serving on the Teaching Section Steering Committee and will chair the Communications Committee beginning in 2019. In 2018, she was awarded the ADInstruments Macknight Early Career Innovative Educator Award.

Likely or unlikely to be true? I like to have students hypothesize

Throughout my science education career, if I was asked what I do, I responded “I write standardized tests.” Let me assure you, this doesn’t win you too many fans outside of science education assessment circles. But in my opinion, there is nothing better to help one develop an understanding and intuition about how students learn than interviewing hundreds of students, listening to their thinking as they reason through questions.

When I listen to students think aloud as they answer questions, I learn a lot about what they know and about their exam-taking processes too. For example, while interviewing a student on a multiple true-false format physiology question, the student answered all the true-false statements then said “Wait, let me go back. There’s always some exception I might be missing.” For this student, physiology always broke the rules and the exams they typically took tried to test whether they knew the exceptions. Although my intention for the question was to have the students apply general conceptual knowledge, the student, like most others I interviewed, was instead spending a lot of time making sure they had recalled all the right information. Eventually, moments like this led to a simple change in question format that created an interesting shift in the way questions elicited thinking from faculty and students alike.

The interview mentioned above occurred during the process of writing a programmatic physiology assessment, Phys-MAPS.² The goal of this assessment and the others in a suite of Bio-MAPS assessments was to build tools that could measure student learning across biology majors. Our working team³ and I chose to build all the assessments using a multiple true-false format, where for each question, a short scenario is described, followed by several (often 4-6) statements about the scenario that students identify as either true or false. We chose this format for its high utility assessing how students can hold both correct and incorrect ideas about a topic simultaneously,⁴ highly pertinent to learning across a major. In addition, the multiple true-false format has the benefit of facilitating easy and quick grading for a large number of students while still allowing for a rich understanding of student thinking comparable to essay assessments.⁵

Example of Modified Multiple True-False Design (from a question similar to but not on the Phys-MAPS)

However, as I was creating the physiology-specific assessment and Dr. Mindi Summers was creating the ecology-evolution-specific assessment, we ran into challenges when writing statements that needed to be absolutely “true” or “false.” Sometimes we had to write overly complex scenarios for the questions because too many constraints were needed for a “true” or “false” answer. In addition, discipline experts were refusing to ever say something was “true” or “false” (especially, but not solely, the evolutionary biologists). Thus, many of our statements had to be re-written as something that was “likely to be true” or “unlikely to be true”, making the statements bulky and long.

Dr. Summers was the first to bring up in our working group meeting the idea of modifying the true-false format. She suggested changing the prompt. What initially read “Based on this information and your knowledge of biology, evaluate each statement as true or false,” became “Based on this information and your knowledge of biology, evaluate each statement as likely or unlikely to be true.” I was instantly sold. I thought back to the student who had spent so much extra time trying to search her brain for the exceptions to the general rules. Surely, this was going to help!

It did. For starters, the discipline experts we were consulting were much more inclined to agree the answers were scientifically accurate. And for good reason! We science experts do not often work in the absolutes of “true” and “false”. In fact, I’m pretty sure a whole field of math was created for exactly this reason. I also saw a difference in how students responded to the new language. In my interviews, I noticed students took considerably less time on the assessment and I never again heard a student stop to try to remember all the exceptions they might know. Better yet, I started hearing language that reflected students were applying knowledge rather than trying to remember facts. For example, in the previous true-false format, I often heard “Oh, I just learned this,” and then I would watch the student close their eyes and agonize trying to remember a piece of information, when all the information they needed to answer the question was right in front of them. With the new “likely or unlikely to be true” format, I was hearing more “well that’s generally true, so I think it would work here too.” It appeared that students had shifted to a more conceptual rather than factual mindset.

But what really convinced me that we were on to something worthwhile was the awareness of some students of what they were truly being asked to do. “Wait, so basically what you want me to do is hypothesize whether this would be true [in this new scenario] based on what I already know?” YES!!! (I do my inner happy dance every time.)

We educators hear the message from a million places that we should teach science as we do science. I maintain that this should count towards how we assess science knowledge and skills too, asking students to apply their knowledge in new contexts where there is no known answer. But when science explores the unknown, how do you ask about the unknown and still have a right answer to grade? (Easily, on a scantron, that is.) As scientists, we use our knowledge to make predictions all the time, not thinking that our hypotheses will absolutely be true, but that they are the mostly likely outcome given what we already know. Why not show our students how much we value that skill by asking them to do the same?

¹ Answer: Likely to be true.

²More information about the Phys-MAPS and all of the Bio-MAPS programmatic assessments can be found on: http://cperl.lassp.cornell.edu/bio-maps

³ The Bio-MAPS working group includes: Drs. Michelle Smith, Jennifer Knight, Alison Crowe, Sara Brownell, Brian Couch, Mindi Summers, Scott Freeman, Christian Wright and myself.

⁴ Couch, B. A., Hubbard, J. K., and Brassil, C. E. (2018). Multiple–true–false questions reveal the limits of the multiple–choice format for detecting students with incomplete understandings. BioScience 68, 455–463.

⁵ Hubbard, J. K., Potts, M. A., and Couch, B. A. (2017). How question types reveal student thinking: An experimental comparison of multiple-true-false and free-response formats. CBE Life Sci. Educ.

Dr. Katharine (Kate) Semsar finally found a job that uses all her diverse training across ecology, physiology, genetics, behavioral biology, neuroscience, science education, and community building. Kate is the Assistant Director of STEM Programming for the Miramontes Arts & Sciences Program (MASP), an academic community for underrepresented students in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

She received her PhD from North Carolina State University and continued her training at University of Pennsylvania. She then became a science education specialist with the Science Education Initiative in the Integrative Physiology department at the University of Colorado Boulder, studying how students learn and collaborating with faculty to incorporate fundamental principles of learning in their courses. She continued her science education research with the Bio-MAPS team before finally landing in her dream career, teaching and mentoring students in MASP. Despite the career shift, she still loves watching people’s reactions when she tells them she used to write standardized assessments.