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Gabriele Pinto, Baylor University
Key Statement: Implementing elements of active learning into a large course may seem daunting task, but think-pair-share aided by quizzing and clickers can be done in any size classroom.
Keywords: Active Learning, Think-Pair-Share, STEM
Background
Introductory undergraduate STEM classes are notoriously painful experiences, both for the students and for the teacher. Students in these classes, generally freshmen, often report feeling stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed (Bouchrika, 2023), and identify these feelings as the most common obstacles to their academic performance (Hsu & Goldsmith, 2021). Teachers may perceive that the odds are stacked against them when their desires to individually engage with students as people crash against a wall of hundreds of faces and mounting demands on their time (Lin et al., 2023).
The good news is that active learning–based solutions to the teachers’ problems will also help their students establish effective study habits, foster social interaction, and make the learning of new, challenging material an enjoyable experience, which will contribute to lowered feelings of stress and anxiety and improved academic performance (Graham et al., 2023; Hsu & Goldsmith, 2021; Venus & Sharma, 2024). Two birds with one stone. At times, however, that stone may feel like a boulder, especially to research faculty who are used to delivering lectures and to whom the switch to activity-based learning may seem like a daunting and demanding venture into unfamiliar territory.
As promoted by Zakrajsek (2016), all learning is by nature an active process since it requires the learner to actively engage with the act of making available knowledge their own. The distinction between active and passive learning, which is often misidentified as the difference between lectures and activities, is really a difference between engagement, interest, and processing, and the lack thereof. A lecture can in fact be a feat of active learning (indeed, it has been an historically effective learning tool), if the content and the way it is presented engages the students and promotes learning.
This piece will suggest a few simple ideas that teachers of introductory STEM classes may implement in their course design to turn their lectures into active learning experiences for a large student body, without needing to completely revisit and change their whole teaching style. Specifically, the implementation of in-class clickers and out-of-class quizzing within the context of think-pair-share (TPS) will be the fulcrum of this article’s approach to integrating active learning within a lecture framework.
Image courtesy of This Is Engineering, Unsplash.
Why Start With Think-Pair-Share?
Group work is a great tool in a STEM teacher’s arsenal, and one of the most important ways that modern teaching is deviating from the traditional lecture (Freeman et al., 2014). When done right, collaborative work brings diverse students together in unity of purpose, fosters positive social interactions that are task-oriented, and promotes engagement with course content and acquisition of procedural knowledge. Unfortunately, managing group work as a teacher is a honed skill that requires time, practice, and initially involves some risk. Depending on the classroom setup, group work can also be chaotic and auditorily overwhelming. These factors converge to understandably discourage teachers with established routines from shifting away from lecturing and into flipped learning, a change that many scholars of pedagogy and education sciences strongly advocate for.
Well-funded institutions are transitioning to active learning spaces where group work can be more easily managed and directed with help from teaching assistants, but instructors of large STEM classes at institutions where such active learning spaces are not available may still find it challenging to implement group work effectively within a lecture hall. Structured seating formation is not conducive to discussion. Hearing and being heard in a group discussion becomes exponentially more challenging with distance, disproportionately affecting students with quiet voices, poor hearing, or language barriers. The loudness and buzzing of the entire classroom engaging in discussions doesn’t help either. A lecture hall is frequently not seen as an inclusive, conducive space for extensive group work.
However, pairing students two-by-two for discussion does not require specially designed spaces, and the closeness of the chairs in a lecture hall brings neighboring students together in a space where they can more easily communicate and work out problems. This makes even the austere and much-despised lecture hall a fit learning space in which think-pair-share (TPS) can take place. Though there will be more buzzing in the class as more people will be talking in unison, the pairs will hear each other better when right next to each other, and each student will therefore be more easily engaged in productive conversation. TPS is also a lower-stake activity than most group work, since the learning takes place in an environment that the teacher controls, where the students are encouraged to share their communal learning with the whole class under the direct supervision of the instructor. This contributes to make TPS a relatively accessible activity-based learning tool for the novice lecturer who’s trying to “switch it up” and make lecture a more engaging, active process (Mundelsee & Jurkowski, 2021).
Use Student Response Systems To Create Learning and Sharing Spaces
Student response systems (or clickers) have long been touted as the go-to lecturing tool to ensure large numbers of students are “checked-in” and actively participating in the classroom (e.g., Buil et al., 2016). Fortunately, clickers also integrate well into the TPS framework and provide a magnificent tool for the teacher to tackle other challenging aspects of teaching a large class: the difficulty of assessing prior knowledge, of driving the students to call into question misconceptions, and then to assess whether actual learning is taking place.
Imagine, for example, asking your students to answer a multiple-choice prompt that engages their current knowledge structures, and recording their responses with clickers. Showing the students their responses, followed by a demonstration that calls their answers into question, would create a space of learning that prepares them to receive additional information. After a short lecture on the underlying principles tested by the prompt, you could engage the students in TPS: ask them to reflect on how their new understanding changes how they would answer the prompt, and then pair them up to talk about their findings with their neighbor. Finally, another clicker quiz could give you the opportunity to assess whether they took in the new information and restructured their previously held beliefs. This kind of clicker use, integrated with TPS, serves students by promoting constructive learning and the development of mental frameworks. It also serves teachers by providing a formative assessment tool through which they can evaluate both their own teaching and the progress of the classroom.
Clicker usage should be intentional and planned (Bruff, 2019). It won’t be sufficient to ask the students to select answers to questions without using those answers to provide them an opportunity to learn. It also won’t be beneficial to the engagement of the class if there is nothing riding on participating in those activities. Ideally, clicker quizzing would have some low stakes in each student’s final grade in the class, thus providing an incentive for participation. On the other hand, scoring should not necessarily depend on whether the students answer correctly to the prompts: as long as their responses are used to promote learning, a wrong answer could be just as useful for engaging them.
Quizzing for Learning and Assessing
Scholars of cognition and neuroscience have provided an abundance of evidence to support the old adage that “repetition is the mother of learning” (Carvalho & Goldstone, 2014; Janssen et al., 2023; Park et al., 2023). Quizzing with students responding on clickers can become a thermometer that measures the class’s “learning temperature,” indicative of what concepts and information the students are struggling with and suggestive of what the teacher should revisit in their next lecture. The questions (and answers) of the quiz can also become the source of discussion and clicker-based learning at the beginning of the following lecture, integrating once again within the framework of TPS, providing students with a constructive way to make knowledge their own and instructors with another effective teaching tool to achieve that goal.
Conclusions
Many teachers do not realize how seamless it can be to shift their lectures towards a more active learning environment. In this article, we looked at how TPS is a simple activity that can be easily introduced and integrated within a lecture framework. We also explored how clickers and quizzing may fit into course design to provide greater tools of participation for the students and enrich their classroom experience and study patterns. These implementations, which do not involve drastic and daunting changes to lecturing, will improve student engagement and learning, and will allow the instructor to better gauge the state of the class, evaluate and adjust content pacing accordingly, and enrich his own teaching experience, as well as the students’ education.
Discussion Questions:
Reflect on your challenges in teaching a large STEM class. Can you think of a situation where implementing active learning activities would help your students achieve the learning goals you have for them?
Think about experiences you or your colleagues have had with student response systems, think-pair-share, and quizzing. What do you think you could change / do better to integrate these activities in your course design?
How often during your lecture do you think would be appropriate to incorporate active learning ideas? How long should they last?
References
Bouchrika, I. (2023). 50 current student stress statistics: 2023 data, analysis & predictions. research.com. https://research.com/education/student-stress-statistics
Bruff, D. (2019). Intentional tech: Principles to guide the use of educational technology in college teaching. West Virginia University Press.
Carvalho, P. F., & Goldstone, R. L. (2014). The benefits of interleaved and blocked study: Different tasks benefit from different schedules of study. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 22(1), 281–288. https://doi.org/10.3758/S13423-014-0676-4/FIGURES/4
Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(23), 8410–8415. https://doi.org/10.1073/PNAS.1319030111/SUPPL_FILE/PNAS.1319030111.ST04.DOCX
Graham, M. C., Jacobson, K., Husman, J., Prince, M., Finelli, C., Andrews, M. E., & Borrego, M. (2023). The relations between students’ belongingness, self-efficacy, and response to active learning in science, math, and engineering classes. International Journal of Science Education, 45(15), 1241–1261. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2023.2196643
Hsu, J. L., & Goldsmith, G. R. (2021). Instructor strategies to alleviate stress and anxiety among college and university STEM Students. Life Sciences Education, 20(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1187/CBE.20-08-0189
Janssen, E. M., van Gog, T., van de Groep, L., de Lange, A. J., Knopper, R. L., Onan, E., Wiradhany, W., & de Bruin, A. B. H. (2023). The role of mental effort in students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of interleaved and blocked study strategies and their willingness to use them. Educational Psychology Review, 35(3), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/S10648-023-09797-3/TABLES/3
Lin, K. Y., Yeh, Y. F., Hsu, Y. S., Wu, J. Y., Yang, K. L., & Wu, H. K. (2023). STEM education goals in the twenty-first century: Teachers’ perceptions and experiences. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 33(2), 479–496. https://doi.org/10.1007/S10798-022-09737-2/TABLES/5
Mundelsee, L., & Jurkowski, S. (2021). Think and pair before share: Effects of collaboration on students’ in-class participation. Learning and Individual Differences, 88, 102015. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.LINDIF.2021.102015
Park, J., Varma, K., & Varma, S. (2023). The role of executive function abilities in interleaved vs. blocked learning of science concepts. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1199682. https://doi.org/10.3389/FPSYG.2023.1199682/BIBTEX
Venus, & Sharma, R. (2024). Envisaging the impact of academic stress and moderating effect of placement activities on perceived employability and academic performance of engineering students. International Journal of Management in Education, 18(2), 111–127. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJMIE.2024.136927
Zakrajsek, T. (2016). All learning is an active Process: Rethinking active/passive learning debate. The Scholarly Teacher. https://www.scholarlyteacher.com/post/all-learning-is-an-active-process
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