Three teaching things: week of February 28
This week: a paper on peer instruction; seven ideas for formative assessment; and a tool that turns rough sketches into graphics.
Issue #38
1. The paper
Why does peer instruction benefit student learning?
I tweeted about this paper earlier this month, but want to make sure you don’t miss the opportunity to learn about it here. Peer instruction is a instructional practice shown to improve learning, typically used in class time where students are asked a question, develop an answer on their own, and then are asked to share their answer with a peer (this other paper offers a lit review in support of the technique).
But why does this approach work? As you’d anticipate, there are multiple factors at play, but forcing students to verbalize their answer, and underlying rationale to a peer seems to help them create a “coherent explanation” (p. 8), and hearing others’ explanation can “fill in gaps in their own understanding, correct misconceptions, and construct new, lasting knowledge” (p. 9).
One interesting conjecture from the paper: “Peer instruction could potentially benefit from randomly pairing students together (i.e. not with a physically close neighbor) to generate the most disagreements and generative activity during discussion” (p. 10).
That sounds logistically complex to pull off in a classroom, but, uh, hello peer instruction and online breakout rooms? Who said this remote teaching thing was all bad… 😉
Tullis, J. G., & Goldstone, R. L. (2020). Why does peer instruction benefit student learning? Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 5(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-020-00218-5
2. The resource
7 Ways to Do Formative Assessments in Your Virtual Classroom
It’s around the middle of the Winter semester here in Canada, and it is a perfect time to get feedback from students to tune your course (the Stop-Start-Continue technique is a great approach for this kind of feedback; see the tool from Issue 25 for more on the approach). This resource details other formative assessment approaches to try, focused on getting a sense of how students are doing with course material. I try to include one such formative assessment a week (total rule of thumb, though) when I’m teaching to fine-tune my future approach. While written with a K-12 audience in mind, they can still act as inspiration from which to adapt.
3. The tool
Google Autodraw
Mouse out a shape, and this tool from Google will suggest an vector-based image based on your drawing. Includes some basic tools (like fill) to customize the image you select. This took 2 minutes to create. Easy way to illustrate a concept?
On the downside, the export options don’t look great. If I was looking add the image to a website, I would have to screenshot the final version.
(Just note that I have a bunch of privacy-related browser add-ons and the tool didn’t work unless I used an incognito / private browsing window)
Three Teaching Things is a weekly newsletter compiled by Gavan Watson, which shares three different teaching and learning resources (papers, resources or tools) worth your attention.
Thanks for reading!