From shoe experts to active collaboration: Building active reading into a Foundation Degree programm Home : ALT's Summer Summit 2020

Public Group Active 2 years, 5 months ago

Wed, Aug 26 2020, 12:00pm – 1:00pm

Authors: Wendy Garnham, and Matt East

Room: Bell Seminar Room

Type: Parallel Session (30mins)

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Description

Session Description

A common observation in higher education settings is that students often fail to complete assigned reading. In this session, we will present a solution to this problem by sharing our experience of using Talis Elevate, empowering students to take ownership of their assigned reading, developing a community of practice and extending their understanding of a topic area collaboratively. Far from being reluctant readers, we will show how students have embraced the reading and stretched not only their own but also their tutors understanding.

How many of our students complete the assigned reading before a teaching session? Estimates range from 41% (Pdolefsky and Finkelstein, 2006) to 27% (Clump, Bauer & Bradley, 2004) and 26% in Connor-Greene (2000). When taking an active learning approach to teaching, this engagement with key reading can be critical to the running of seminars.

Why does it matter? Failure to read assigned articles has been associated with declines in exam performance (Kerr & Frese, 2016) and according to Gorzycki et al (2016) reading is linked to attrition. As Railton and Watson (2005) suggest, one of the biggest challenges for students making the transition to university is enculturation into effective study practices. We expect students to automatically become autonomous learners but instead should be looking for ways to help “bridge the gap” (Railton and Watson, 2005).

On the Foundation programme at the University of Sussex, we often observed a lack of engagement with key reading ahead of seminar activity, resulting in a ‘mini lecture’ environment being created in seminars to answer questions, and draw out discussion from unprepared students. Strategies for fostering discussion around the subject matter using traditional approaches like VLE discussion boards have proven to be unsuccessful and haven’t added value for our students, and activity/discussion can often be dominated by the ‘vocal minority’. Quieter students often feel inhibited to speak up and their contributions are therefore not fed into the teaching session.

Using Talis Elevate as a core tool to combat this problem, we have flipped the task around, enabling our students’ to create an active, collaborative reading environment within the weekly reading. Talis Elevate enabled these students’ (the silent majority) to have not just an environment for discussion but one in which they could contribute anonymously. In addition, it provided an environment they had full ownership over. This has resulted in a lively, student-led ‘active reading’ environment, enabling students to deeply engage with each other, within resources, in a collaborative, inclusive, and impactful manner, whilst fundamentally changing the dynamic of the seminar environment.

This project started in September 2019 and ran throughout the duration of the Foundation course in the 2019/20 academic year, covering two core modules, 2 academics, and over 200 students. This session will detail the findings from the project, the impact on attainment, and student feedback on both the pedagogic approach and the product. This session will be of interest to any practitioner looking for ways to actively engage their students with resources, and those interested in gaining a deeper understanding of ‘how’ students engage with resources we use in teaching.

References

Connor-Greene, P.A., 2000. Assessing and promoting student learning: Blurring the line between teaching and testing. Teaching of Psychology, 27(2), pp.84-88.

Clump, M.A., Bauer, H. and Bradley, C., 2004. The Extent to which Psychology Students Read Textbooks: A Multiple Class Analysis of Reading across the Psychology Curriculum. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 31(3).

Gorzycki, M,. Howard, P,. Allen, D,. Geoffrey Desa, G,. & Rosegard, E,. (2016) An Exploration of Academic Reading Proficiency at the University Level: A Cross-Sectional Study of 848 Undergraduates, [online], available at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/19388071.2015.1133738?scroll=top&needAccess=true [accessed 22/4/20]

Kerr, M.M. and Frese, K.M., 2017. Reading to learn or learning to read? Engaging college students in course readings. College teaching, 65(1), pp.28-31.

Podolefsky, N. and Finkelstein, N., 2006. The perceived value of college physics textbooks: Students and instructors may not see eye to eye. The Physics Teacher, 44(6), pp.338-342.

Railton, D. and Watson, P., 2005. Teaching autonomy: ‘Reading groups’ and the development of autonomous learning practices. Active Learning in Higher Education, 6(3), pp.182-193.

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