Online self‐assessment materials: Do these make a difference to student learning?

During the last decade the teaching of students in first‐year biology has changed from a teacher‐centred focus to a student‐centred focus. The change was designed to encourage students to take responsibility for their learning, develop team and communication skills and put in practice those skills required for lifelong learning. Students are introduced to small learning communities (in large classes) that give the students a sense of belonging and a peer support group. Activities have been devised and implemented to support student‐centred learning, which in more recent years has included using computers. All these activities are integrated into the course design so that the students are offered an array of learning opportunities relevant to the course(s) learning outcomes. An important requirement for the development of student‐centred learning is suitable and timely feedback that gives students guidance about their learning outcomes. Giving feedback to very large classes is an expensive commodity and one that is vulnerable in the current climate of reducing resources and increasing student numbers. First‐year biology students receive online feedback from a weekly quiz (with both formative and summative components), from a mid‐semester mock exam (formative only) and from a series of self‐assessment modules (formative only). This paper will examine the use of such online self‐assessment in a large first‐year biology class, discuss current evaluations of the materials and propose further research into how students use these integrated learning opportunities

Virtual Communication for Lab-based Science Teaching: A Case Study

Since the early 1990s, we in First Year Biology at The University of Sydney, along with the rest of the 'innovators'11, have utilised computers in educational settings and this has led to an explosion of material and delivery modes. A discussion of the development and use in First Year Biology of both CAL materials and delivery modes (from stand-alone to Internet-based) can be found in Franklin and Peat4 and Franklin, Peat, Mackay-Wood and Chambers6. Whilst First Year Biology has for 20 years provided a supervised room for students to access teaching and learning resources, it is only since the rapidly increasing use of the Web that these resources have been moved on-line, and mainly in response to a need to keep the resources room 'open' longer. Moving the resources room 'on-line' subsequently led to a new focus on communication, offering both a novel email link from students to staff and a mechanism for student-student interaction. In addition this allows the students a flexibility of use that the supervised resources room could never offer. The web-based communications now available for over 1300 first year students, along with the virtual resources available, can all be accessed via a user-friendly 'Virtual Resources Room'. These resources are helping to enhance the student experience by providing both an asynchronous communciation mechanism for those unable to visit the staff and flexible learning opportunities that help to train students to be independent learners

Why am I evaluating this thingummygig?

Why do I need to evaluate the new technologies? In my undergraduate days I doubt if anyone evaluated their teaching and my learning was inspite of their teaching! The long slow haul to change the teaching and learning culture has put excessive pressure on some forms of learning experiences and new technologies is one of them. This makes sense when you consider the amount of money we have been investing in developing computer based learning materials. Ever since we, in First Year Biology, started to develop teaching and learning materials using information technologies we have endeavoured to understand how these materials are being used and what, if anything, do the students gain from using such materials. Early on we did a lot of usability studies and checks on accuracy of content (formative evaluations) and so improved the materials. We also developed expertise in instructional design. With this in place we concentrated more on the impact of the materials on student perceptions (Did they like using them? Did they help them in their understanding?) Whilst this is also a type of formative evaluation it gave us some ideas on how students were using the materials. The big issue, however, is 'Do the materials have an effect on student learning outcomes?' such that one would argue they are better than other forms of learning material? This is difficult to answer without fairly exhaustive studies on the use of the computer based learning materials by students. By the time the formative evaluation stage is over, there is often little time available to ask these questions; we are too busy; there are too many students to cope with; etc. In a recent CUTSD-funded study, Shirley Alexander reviewed 104 teaching development projects and reported that in approximately 90% of cases the project leaders indicated that they had the intention of improving student learning outcomes, but only a third could report this as an actual outcome as only this third actually evaluated student learning outcomes (Alexander, 1999; Alexander and McKenzie, 1998). Alexander goes on to argue that most of the project evaluations fell within the first level of the four levels of outcome on which evaluation evidence should focus, as described by Kirkpatrick (1994), that is, 'reaction to the innovation' and a minority of evaluations fell within the second level 'achievement of learning objectives'. Only one project fitted the third level 'transfer of new skills to the job or task' and no project evaluated the 'impact on the organisation', (Alexander, 1999). It would seem that we all need to lift our performance in this area and ensure that at least levels one and two are fulfilled

Revisiting associations between student performance outcomes and formative assessment opportunities: is there any impact on student learning?

This project developed as a result of some inconclusive data from an investigation of whether a relationship existed between the use of formative assessment opportunities and performance, as measured by final grade. We were expecting to show our colleagues and students that use of formative assessment resources had the potential to improve performance. This first study, done in semester 1 2002, indicated that there was no apparent relationship even though the students reported how useful they found the resources. This led us to ask if there was a transition effectsuch that students were not yet working in an independent way and making full use of the resources, and/or whether in order to see an effect we needed to persuade non-users of the resources to become users before investigating if use can be correlated with improvement in performance. With the 2002-3 NextEd ASCILITE Research Grant we set out to repeat our project and to look at use and usefulness of resources in both first and second semester, to encourage non-users to become users and to investigate use with performance. Now our story has a different ending.<br /