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From: Dan Berrett
Subject: What One Professor Learned From an Informal Teaching Experiment
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You’re reading the latest issue of Teaching, a weekly newsletter from a team of Chronicle journalists. Sign up here to get it in your inbox on Thursdays.
This week:
Dom Caristi has always tweaked his courses. Usually, that’s meant tinkering here and there, perhaps by adding a few low-stakes quizzes or reducing the number of exams.
In the spring, he was presented with an opportunity through what he called “an aberration of scheduling.” He was assigned to teach two sections of the same course, Media Ethics and Social Responsibility, during the same semester. So he decided to set up a quasi-experiment to analyze two approaches to teaching the senior-level course in the telecommunications department at Ball State University.
Caristi was coming off of a sabbatical during which he attended Lilly teaching conferences, reflected on books like Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, and thought extensively about what he wanted to do differently in his courses. But he also knew that there was much he still didn’t know, even though he was in his 37th year of teaching. “Despite all my years in academe,” he said, “I’m still an amateur at studying pedagogy.”
One thing he wanted to explore was giving students more control of their course. He taught the 9:30 a.m. section in a traditional manner, while students in the 8 a.m. class could choose how the course would be taught and assessed.
Some things, like the subject matter, were nonnegotiable: Students would have to learn six ethical frameworks articulated by thinkers like Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill. But his students could choose how it would be taught and how their and their peers’ work would be evaluated — and whether they even wanted to have so much control in the first place.
After a week of discussion, the 28 students in the section put it to a vote, with about half choosing the nontraditional route and another nine choosing “no preference.” The remaining four wanted to stick with a traditional format.
They settled on a format: In one class, the professor would present an ethical framework and pose hypothetical scenarios for the students to discuss in small groups, which were followed by three periods of group work to apply the concepts.
And what did he find? That’s where things get less clear. His main question — which approach led to more learning — couldn’t be answered; for starters, each section had different assessments, so there was no simple way to compare them. But he did glean lots of smaller insights, about class participation and peer evaluations, for example.
Caristi also administered a survey that he designed for the two sections to better understand his students’ impressions of various aspects of the course. One question asked whether they thought it offered too much, the right amount of, or too little “freedom for students to choose what to do.” All of the students in the traditional course selected “the right amount.” So did most of those in the 8 a.m. slot, though seven said the nontraditional version offered “too much” freedom.
To Caristi, the results are intriguing but come from far too small a sample to draw conclusions. While his efforts to analyze the two sections of the course were more methodical than his typical tweaking, he says it fell far short of being a proper experiment; it wasn’t conducted in a controlled environment, and the assignment to sections wasn’t randomized, for example. In a draft essay about the experience that he’s submitted for publication, Caristi described it as something closer to a case study.
But he knows what he’d do differently the next time. He’d probably teach the course using a hybrid of the two approaches. And if he were to study them side by side again, he’d focus more closely on which version of the course resulted in greater learning or produced higher levels of motivation. Caristi’s experience reflects some of the challenges that can come when experimenting with teaching. Sometimes, as we’ve described in previous newsletters, you get clear results. And sometimes, as Caristi found, the findings don’t quite offer blazing insights.
Still, he thinks the experience was useful. “It caused me to make changes in the class I probably wouldn’t have made,” he said. He was also upfront with his students that they were part of an experiment, and he didn’t see much of an effect in his course evaluations. “Students,” he said, “are very forgiving if they know you’re trying stuff.”
Have you tried to measure learning in your courses and compare it with other courses you’ve taught? What kind of instruments have you used? What assessments have helped you draw comparisons between different classes and groups of students? If you email me at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, I may use it in a future newsletter.
Thanks to everyone who answered our recent request to tell us about your ongoing or upcoming classroom experiments. We received more than 100 submissions from readers representing a host of disciplines and institutions.
We’re sorting through them now, and plan to choose a few to follow along with during the semester. Stay tuned to hear more in the coming weeks!
Even if your experiment isn’t part of that group, we may still write about it in a future story or newsletter. Thanks, as always, for sharing your expertise.
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— Dan and Beckie
