Couple of new strategies that I
tried lately are
I found it very interesting how students
perform differently when they are working in groups. I had intentionally formed
the groups in such a way that there was at least one strong student in each of
the groups comprising of 5 students each. I noticed that the weaker students
tend to rely on the stronger student to do most of the research. Hence I
changed the rules so every student was responsible for one part of the
assignment.
When I collected feedback from the students using
informal interviews a few interesting points were raised. The weaker students were
happy being coupled with the stronger student but the same feeling was not reciprocated
by the stronger student. A few of them even admitted to willingly doing the
work for the weaker ones so that his own grade did not get affected by the bad
performance of his team mate. Some of the stronger students also complained
about being grouped with weaker ones as it was affecting their assignment and
eventually grades.
On the positive side there was general consensus
that this exercise did teach them how to work in teams and how to rely on each other
and it was a good simulation of how teams operate in workplaces.
Another strategy I used was for the
students to find applications of three-dimensional geometry in real life before
they even started learning about them. Previously all the groups who I had
taught this topic had difficulty understanding the uses of this complex
concept. I referred most of the students to vessel design firms, geo-spatial
data organisation or the air control department at the airport.
When the students gave their feedback
(in form of a section in their research report) it was evident that although
the students manage to get some useful information from these sources, they
were unable to really link their curriculum to the way it is applied in the
industry. This was caused by two main reasons. Firstly the level at which the students
cover the topics in class is very basic compared to the extensive level that it
gets used in the industry. Hence they had to take crash course in the deeper concepts.
Secondly and most importantly most of the work in the industry gets done via
very powerful softwares whereas at the college we are still using the good
old-fashioned way of pen and paper. The students were totally at sea with the technology
that is getting used by industry and could not relate to them at all.
On the positive side the students did manage to
learn the real use of their course concepts and these visits to some of the relevant
workplaces also motivated a few of them to consider employment at these organisations
into these chosen fields.
Hi Atif, I've had the same experience in setting group tasks and I suspect so has everybody else. I'm not quite sure if there's a way of avoiding the scenario you described unless we keep all students in isolation until they have to integrate all the parts of the assessment. Even with on-line collaborations where logs of student activity are kept, passwords can be shared and it may again be the more able student doing the work for the weaker student! In the past I have given 2 sets of grade for assessments and aggregated them to make the final grade. I give a grade for the project overall and then another individual grade based on an interview with each participant in which they explain the project and their specific role in it. I find this works well but is time consuming.
ReplyDeleteAs for your second strategy - I can see your point. This is much easier to implement with simple concepts and with industries that use materials and resources that are more aligned with what we have available to us.