Impact on Student Learning
In my opinion, the students learned much more from this nontraditional course format than from more traditional formats in previous semesters. Initially, students were slightly resistant to the open-ended problem format. They complained in lecture about not seeing "an answer" at the end, rather than realizing that the goal was the development of their thought processes involved in analyzing a problem. Later in the semester, students seemed to overcome this initial resistance and embraced these types of questions.
At the end of the semester, student interest and enthusiasm was definitely much higher than in previous semesters. Only one team out of six (the only team with two members) required instructor intervention and counseling. Based on discussion with those two students, I believe their lower performance happened because of limited discussion and support as opposed to less work put in by fewer team members. One problem for several teams was that they put off the bulk of the final project work until the last two weeks before it was due, despite intermediate deadlines for locating papers and a one-paragraph statement of the project purpose. Several student groups changed their initial topic after the intermediate statement because they had not developed the concept to a high enough level. Resolution of this problem is required to improve student success.
Next Steps
As I continue to refine the course, I will use this same format but will change my lecture and interactions approach with student groups. In order to have more inter-group discussion, I will hold ten-minute periods at the beginning of the lecture period one time per week for all student groups together to discuss problems encountered in the projects. In this way, students will learn from each other and will (hopefully) keep the project on task in a more timely fashion.
An additional way that I plan to keep students on track and emphasize the importance of timely progress on a project will be through log/date books. I will require students to keep a record of major steps in the development of their projects. I'll review and grade this book weekly; this score will be included in the final project grade. When I meet weekly with the student teams, I'll make sure they have shown a sufficient quantity of work with quality analysis.
Printable version of all poster pages
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