Case study: Small group interactions: where LEGO, ecology and Mentimeter collide

Department of Biology
Pen Holland

Pen Holland outlines how she uses Mentimeter to support small group interactions within workshops in the stage two Organisms in their Environment module. The module involves a blended learning approach with online video resources and activities combined with active learning within workshops and fieldwork. The workshops are student-led with groups of students engaging in sampling and analysis activities in consistent teams using LEGO to simulate real world sampling and taxonomy development. Mentimeter is used to facilitate student reflection on their progress towards learning outcomes through the workshops and to encourage them to consider their learning and provide ongoing feedback on the module as it progresses. Pen found that Mentimeter provided an effective way of opening up conversations about challenges and successes, providing a framework for ongoing feedback and informing approaches to student support through the module.

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Transcript

Okay. So I'm going to talk a little bit about small group interactions. And this is in a module which has a number of things going on. And I've highlighted the key ones there, which are Lego, ecology, and Mentimeter. So it's basically the module where we have all the fun. So I'll quickly go through what the shape of the module is and where it came from in terms of its history and the key aims of this module. I'm going to talk a bit about how we wanted to really shore up the interactive side of this module and how we've used Mentimeter to think about both learning, in terms of the learning outcomes, but also getting students to think about how they're learning and reflect on that as well.

So the module is called Organisms in their Environment, and it's a 20 credit stage 2 practical ecology module. And what we cover in this module is both the theory and the practice of sampling stuff, outside, in the environment. So we have a couple of topics on how to sample plants, how to sample animals, and then how to analyse those data to understand populations and communities and why they are where they are in the real world. And it's a module of two halves in a way, because there's the taught bit which runs across a set of workshops and learning materials. And then there's a field course component where we actually go properly outside and do a little project with some experimental design, data collection and analysis.

So the taught bit is quite blended. We have videos, we have challenges for students to work on. We have active learning in workshops where they're applying all of that and problem solving, and then they do the fieldwork at the end. They do a little bit of practical work in the taught part of the course. But the problem with ecology in the north of England is that it's cold and it's wet and most things are dead for most of the year, most of the academic year, and that's where the Lego comes in. Because we use Lego as a simulator of the real world, so we have communities made up of bricks of different shapes and sizes and colours, and some of them are common and some of them are rare, and they come with a big brown envelope. And we spend a lot of time sampling the Lego and coming up with a taxonomy. So here's a large brick, is it an older one or is it a different species? Is a red one different to a blue one, and why? So there's lots of kind of physical interaction with stuff.

What the students see is animals, plants, Lego, and fieldwork. What the module is about in large part is actually group work and data collection and analysis. And so we kind of hide those in, in the course of the module. And the key aims of the module are to set students up to transition from answering the questions that we give them in the first year or through their school career to being the ones who are able to ask a good question. So why do they want to ask that question? And therefore, how can they design the experiment to collect the right data to be able to come up with some kind of answer to that question? And, so that independence of learning and confidence to be able to come up with the questions is really important.

Of course, to do that, they need lots of subject knowledge and skills in terms of how they do the sampling, how they might do the analysis and things like that. But one of the things about ecology is that it's incredibly teamwork oriented. And if you go out into the field, you should never be working alone. So we want to start this module right from the get go saying that it's about teamwork. It's about working with people to reach a common aim, which you can justify with your evidence. And so, we're working through this process of never answering a question in full because we want students to think about is it a good question in the first place and how might we build evidence to be able to support that? And so we want them to talk to each other. We want them to talk to us.

But this is sometimes quite a large module and sometimes less so. The last few years it's been around the 40 student mark, so it's more students than you can easily have 1 to 1 conversations with as a single academic in the room. But it's not so many students that you can't get small groups working together really well. So what we do is at the beginning of the year, we put the students into groups and the groups are about six students and they work in the same groups for the whole series of taught workshops, which covers six topics across a term. And so they can build those relationships within the group and work out how to talk to each other. They act as each other's kind of professional support team. They don't have to be friends, but they're professional friends, if you like.

And we've gone through a series of ways of putting them into groups. At the beginning, a few years ago, we used to just assign them. Then we went through a process of having them do some kind of experimental design to assign themselves in the first workshop. And this year I think we got it right, which is that we let people assign themselves into groups if they wanted to, and then we put the other people in around them. And that formed quite nice units of people who felt comfortable with each other. And to build that group work and teamwork ethos, in every workshop, we asked the group to talk to each other about what's going well, what's been challenging, and crucially what's helped with those challenges. So we're not asking them to moan. We're asking them to come up with constructive solutions. And we wanted to capture all of that, to be able to discuss at the class scale, as well as within the groups, so that the groups know that they're not alone.

We also wanted to think about knowledge. And so now we come to the Mentimeter. When we first started running this module, we used to get a lot of Post-it notes and we would put them on the tables and we'd ask the group to talk to each other about what they'd learned that week or how confident they were feeling about certain things and jot it down on Post-it notes, and then they'd all come up, stick on a whiteboard, and we could have fun with that. I still have a lot of Post-it notes and I never look at them because it's really time consuming to turn all those handwritten notes into data that I can actually see in one place. So we start the workshops by saying, how are you feeling about this week's learning outcomes? And so we use the range scale on Mentimeter for that, and we do it at the beginning of a workshop and then at the beginning of the next workshop we say, how are you feeling about the last workshop? So we've got some kind of picture of how much students are engaging with the learning outcomes through the workshop and in the week or two that happens between those workshops as well. And so you can see here, this is an example from one of our workshops about ecological diversity indices. There are three learning outcomes for that session. And in the workshop where we did the activities relating to those learning outcomes, we've got a range of confidence where, what was interesting is they were nearly always in that shape of well, I've done the things pertaining to the first learning outcome, I've done some of the stuff for the second one, and I haven't quite got through the third one yet. Maybe they haven't watched the videos for that yet and they're going to catch up with that later. And then when we polled them again the following week, there was always some learning gain for all of those learning outcomes. Sometimes it was not very much, so we've got like 3.1 to 3.3 here. But you can see from the distribution of those that there aren't that many people who are still flailing around in the wilderness for learning outcome one on this workshop, they have pushed it up a little bit and usually the last learning outcome which they maybe hadn't got around to thinking about before the workshop, they have now actually engaged with that and that's improved. So it was giving us information about whether students were taking anything on in the workshops and between the workshops, but also giving us information about which learning outcomes were particularly challenging. Not necessarily why, but a good conversation opener to discuss where we might need more support.

But the other thing we did was that we asked groups to have a conversation on their table and then submit answers to quite open questions using the text responses. And so a question we used in every workshop was, what's going well? And every week we got some really interesting responses and the students were really great at being positive and also explaining really well, so I've drawn out the key responses from workshops which was generally that the workload was manageable, the workshops were helpful and they were finding the content engaging. And so you can see some of the key things, they're thinking about the practical work that they're doing alongside the workshops, they're thinking about what they're doing in the workshops. But there were lots and lots of references to workload, which I think tells us not only something about this module, in that they understood what they were doing and they found it interesting, but also how they were feeling about other modules, which is quite an interesting insight as well.

Alongside what's going well, we asked, what have you learned? So this is separate to the learning outcomes specifically, but again, a really interesting way of finding out what's sticking in their minds. So we've taught them an awful lot of things, the things that they really remember from this course are that they did some sampling methods, they did some practical work. We made them do a lot of analysis. We made them use Google CoLab, which is an interactive programming tool. They are interested to know how much maths and analysis there is underlying a lot of ecology work. But the way they were saying it was also quite useful. So we've got someone who is just saying, oh well actually I'm thinking about the way that I'm learning here and I'm worried that I'm missing things. So we were able to respond to that again and say, okay, what is it that you're worried about? Here's a checklist of things you need to be covering, and support people in that way.

I think one of the most interesting things that we did was to ask what was challenging and what has helped get over those challenges. And so these were two separate questions, which I've summarised in one here for you. So, what have they found challenging? And what came up constantly was the maths and the programming, okay? And that doesn't tell us anything very new about students in the Biology department. They tend to come into ecology and biology because they can see the world and they want to do all the practical work and then they realise quite how much stats and analysis there is to interpret that scientifically, to write a report. What was really interesting about being able to poll them across the class about what's helped with that is the group work was a common theme that they said was really useful and we all know that students can find group work stressful and it's quite a diverse set of feelings that people have about group work.

And I think one of the crucial things about this module is that the group work is how they do the learning, but it's not how they do the assessment. So all the assessment on this module is as an individual submission, but nearly all of the work is a group activity. And so they're able to separate out the stresses of working with people who maybe aren't doing what they expect and see all of the supportive side of working collaboratively and being able to talk to people and find support. We also discover that the course materials are actually helpful for learning, which is quite reassuring. The workshops are helpful and they do think that maths and coding is something that they can get over with the aid of those things. So that's really good.

So last slide here, this is a module that will continue running in the new semesterised scheme, but it will be within one semester instead of across two. And so we're very much going to keep the embedded group work and the use of Mentimeter to gain feedback from those groups so they can choose to submit their ideas as a group, or they can all do it individually. But it's stimulating that conversation first, rather than only doing the Mentimeter. It's really helped us gauging where students are in terms of the learning outcomes and where the challenges are. And I think it's really, it's helped us then to come back and support the students. And so we finished the course with a quick poll on, this is just before Christmas. They've done the teaching. They're about to do an assessment that's half the course. And then they get a pause until they do the field course in the summer. And so, again, we're able to see that they were looking forward to having an opportunity to do some formative work. They're mostly pretty positive about the summative assessment, they were nearly all looking forward to the holidays, which was nice to see. But the best comment I think on what have you learnt for this whole course for me was that Lego is a valid way of learning. So that's me. Great.