Barbara Harvey

Basic Biological Concepts

CASTLE

Case Analysis Questions

May 13, 2004

1.  What are the important classroom teaching/learning issues in this case?

 

• Many students lack confidence in their ability to understand the more complex information taught in the Basic Biological Concepts course.
• Many students come to the course with little or no background in biology
• Much of the course material, particularly the section on “cellular respiration”, is complex and difficult, particularly for students such as described above.

2.  What teaching/learning strategies might be helpful?

• For students who have little background knowledge in a particular content area some way needs to be found to provide them with—or to find within themselves—an appropriate foundation in long term memory onto which they can add new, related information.
• Students with little relevant background knowledge to build on, and students who lack confidence in their ability to learn new, complex information may benefit from a teaching strategy that presents such information in small but self-contained units
• Such students may also benefit from a small-groups approach to learning new information in which each group member is responsible for learning part of the information and then sharing it with the rest of the group, and/or in which the group presents the information to the rest of the class.
• Presenting information on cellular respiration may be more effective if the information can be presented in a way that captures students’ attention and interest and that makes the information personally meaningful, relevant, and memorable.
• Having small groups of students learn cell respiration processes and then present skits to the whole class that “act out” the various processes may be an effective means to capture students’ attention and improve their learning. 
  
  
• Students presented skits on the following processes:

Electron transport

Glycolysis

Kreb's cycle (note student holding two
potatoes representing starch molecules)

3.  What learning theories might support or inform these teaching/learning strategies?

·       Constructivist theories of learning propose that learners construct meaning by associating new information with knowledge already stored in long term memory.

·      The Teaching With Analogies (TWA) model (Glynn, Duit, and Thiele, 1995; Glynn and Takahashi, 1998) lists several guidelines for the use of analogies in teaching, and also lists several cautions (e.g., analogies generated by teachers may be less useful in particular situations than are those generated by students themselves).

·        Cooperative learning techniques offer strategies for helping both able and less able students learn more effectively in particular situations, following particular guidelines (e.g., Slavin, 1990; O’Donnell, et al., 1987)

·      Bandura’s (1977, 1997) notions of social modeling and observational learning may be factors in cooperative learning outcomes if less-able students internalize the actions and/or attitudes of more-able students, for example, in planning and conducting library research on a topic and in preparing and presenting topics in class.

      4. What research questions and hypotheses does this case raise that might be further investigated in a classroom researach project?

• Does having students work in small groups to learn, teach to each other, and then teach to the rest of the class various processes associated with cell respiration result in higher average test scores on this content than does traditional instructor-based lecture presentation of material?
• Does having each student learn one part of a concept/process in cell respiration and then teach it to the rest of the small group improve the retention and understanding of that information by the student as measured by exam scores?
• Do small group presentations of difficult material make the material more interesting to the students as a whole?
• Do small group presentations of difficult material result in improved performance for the students as a whole?

5.  What classroom assessment data could be collected to test out these research questions or hypotheses?

• Quizzes immediately after the material has been presented may help determine effectiveness of small group presentations
• Surveys and ratings by the rest of the class on the quality, interest level, helpfulness, and other such attributes of the in-class presentations can help determine the degree to which students generally found value in the presentations.
• Final exam data can be broken down to reflect student performance on test items that relate to each presented topic to evaluate longer-term retention and understanding of presented material
  
  

Conclusion

Having each student learn one part of a concept/process in cell respiration and then teach it to the rest of the small group, and then have the group present a skit that “acts out” the process to the whole class did in fact improve the retention and understanding of that information by the students in each group as measured by questions on the exam covering that information.  However, students in those groups did not score significantly better than the rest of the class on the exam.