Some Local Educational Research

Student generated content

Examples:

• Best single book:
  Collis, B., & Moonen, J. (2005) An on-going journey: Technology as a learning workbench University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands. Free downloads available: http://www.BettyCollisJefMoonen.nl

• Seminars are the traditional approach, but mostly fail to get real use by students of each others' work.
• Aronson's Jigsaw classroom (see next section).
• Computer Supported Cooperative lecture notes
• See some of my courses, where students create materials on webpages / wikis for the rest of the class:     Positive Psychology     Education
• Wikipedia !!
• PeerWise: software to administer student authoring of MCQs in large classes.

Jigsaw classroom technique

Explaining what a Jigsaw design is

References to Jigsaw implementations

• Aronson,E. (1978) The jigsaw classroom (Beverly Hills: Sage).
• Website, Aronson papers, etc.
• And also this briefing from the APA.

Honeychurch (2012) describes a very successful application of Jigsaw in first year Philosophy tutorials by Sarah Honeychurch. She got an HEA subject centre grant, and gave a talk on this at the internal L&T conference in April 2011.

Ann Brown (e.g. 1992, 1994) has applied it successfully for Biology in US high schools, and with a somewhat different theoretical emphasis. (References to some influential papers by her are here.)

Baxter (2007) "A Case Study of Online Collaborative Work in a Large First Year Psychology Class" Case study Jim Baxter's redesign of a first year psychology course used in part a jigsaw design in a class of 550 mediated by a VLE.

I have used a version of Jigsaw, mediated by a VLE (moodle), in my Positive Psychology course. You can login as a guest to the course's moodle site and inspect the wiki pages produced as startup learning materials by the class for the class. (My talk on this.)

Designs related to but distinct from Jigsaw

0. Jigsaw link
1. Patchwork text link
2. Reflexive / reflective learning diaries; e.g. in Mahara, where a small group reads and comments regularly on each individual's diary. link
3. Sugata Mitra's self-organising education link
4. The snowball technique/pyramid. This is ancient: get each individual to write down their own view/answer; then discuss it in pairs; then in fours; then in plenary. Bowskill's application of it
5. Socratic dialogue (Nelson's sense of this) link
6. Reciprocal peer critiquing link

Beyond jigsaw: Sugata Mitra & self-organising education

Setting the questions (in turn, when a topic is exhausted eventually) is an important Teacher skill here, he says. So teacher direction of the learning goals / objectives is not only a real input, but a crucial one. BUT he qualifies that by many cases where the questions have been wildly harder than any normal person thinks such kids could possibly tackle; and furthermore, he's grasped how people (including his children) set their own expectations, which in different cases can be limiting or very high. Or both: as in when a group of remote-area Indian primary school children who were directed to discover what DNA replication was, reported back that they had understood nothing (long faces, no smiles) ... except that birth defects resulted from faulty replication.

His method is like Jigsaw, to divide the class (large group) into small groups of 4-5, each with one computer screen between them. (Assigns them to groups to start, but makes it clear that moving to another group, and persuading friends to swap into your group are both fine.) But instead of the Jigsaw method of organised cross-teaching between groups studying different sub-topics, Mitra has only one topic for everyone, and plenty of informal circulating round the room to pick up stuff other groups have got that your group hasn't.

Mitra's theoretical statement about this is that "Education is a self-organising system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon"; and that for children, curiosity can work well as the Attractor for the system.

N.B. 1: He says that assessment in older children suppresses the group dynamic and hence the learning. So in his experience, assessment does not drive learning but the exact opposite: it drives the suppression of learning.

N.B. 2: Some of his earliest results turned out to be an important synergy between what they learned in school, and his hole in the wall. (The example was: they got good teaching in school of English in syntax and vocabulary, but the internet hugely improved their accents which in turn were crucial to employment (in call centres).)

Patchwork text (PT)

The recipe / learning design is as follows [verbatim from Scoggins & Winter (1999), 1st and 3rd paragraphs under the subtitle "The Patchwork Text as an Expression of Critical Understanding"]:

In practical terms, students undertake, week by week, a series of short pieces of writing in different forms – e.g. description, a story, a portrait, a poem, a critical incident analysis, a response to a piece of published writing. (This list reflects the professional focus of the course: in an "academic" course the writing could include, for example, book reviews and "responses" to lectures.) Each week the students share their writing in small groups in order to gather the differing responses of three or four readers. At the same time, they keep a reflective diary, as a private collection of notes. About half-way through the course, the students review their previous writing (including their reflective diary) and pose themselves the question: what unifying theme seems to be at work here? This question of the underlying theme is also discussed with their working group, who will be familiar with the sequence of each other's writing. The final assignment (i.e. the Patchwork Text) is a selection of their writing (possibly revised and not necessarily in the order in which it was written) presented within an interpretive reflective framework which brings out and explores the overall theme in relation to the individual pieces of writing.

• The Patchwork Text enables students to bring together personal writing and other forms of writing (including 'academic' writing) and to articulate their sense of the relationship between them.
• It places equal emphasis on an overall thematic framework and on detailed accounts of specifics in all their diversity, and thereby promotes a balance between judgement and the suspension of judgement.
• Its double process of gradual accumulation and retrospective analysis means that it is continually explorative in two directions. (1) Having written this piece, what shall I do next in order to build on/extend it? (2) What are the relationships between these various pieces I have written?
• It is created through a continuous process of discussion, with others and with oneself.
• Since it encourages different forms of writing, it can easily accommodate pieces which embody "emotional intelligence" (Goleman, 1996), and the expression and justification of values, along with the analysis of ideas. In other words, it is a vehicle in which students can represent their understanding as an achievement of their whole being, rather than merely that fragment we term the intellect.

Summary of the chief virtues of Patchwork text, when applied to essays, portfolios, ?programming languages?.

• Scaffolding writing by doing it in small patches, then later synthesising it into a greater whole. (N.B. A complementary type of this is to have students each take the same topic and theory stance, and do a series of assessed products all on the same topic, but in different formats e.g. a talk to the class, a written piece, a debate, ...)
• When writing needs frequent/repeated (peer) feedback.
• Reflection on learning: skills and concepts are expressed via writing, but it is the writing style and skills which are getting the repeated practice.
• The special virtue of RPC (reciprocal peer feedback) here. Face to face not anonymous. What RPC gives in general is feedback from multiple people: letting learners judge what all think vs. what seems to be conflicting advice. Then often RPC benefits from changing critics. But when what is wanted is perceptions that the writer doesn't necessarily have explicitly, then readers who get to know you and your personal material over time can sometimes give insights that strangers cannot. When looking for a theme(s) that is to hold together a portfolio or patchwork text, the personal knowledge is an added value to other uses of RPC.

However unlike Jigsaw it doesn't deal with topics where all students are supposed to grasp the same idea, but on the contrary to deal with reflection and the emergence and description of contrasting ideas. It is the only technique I've seen that explicitly aims to support (scaffold) induction and creativity: that is, to help a student come up with a theme or idea around which to organise their work by collecting the "patches" of that work and reviewing it for unplanned themes.

Key papers are:

• Scoggins,J. & Winter,R. (1999) "The Patchwork Text: a coursework format for education as critical understanding" Teaching in HE vol.4 no.4 pp.485-499 doi:10.1080/1356251990040405
• Fourteen pieces in a special issue of a journal:   Innovations in education and teaching international (2003) vol.40 no.2.
• Maisch (2002) (in the special issue) describes using it to support dissertation writing on a postgraduate course for non-native-English speakers.
• Staff,C. & Farmer,R. (2019) Art, Design & Communication in HE vol.18 no.2 pp.137-151 "Teaching students to write about art: Results of a four-year patchwork text" doi:10.1386/adch_00003_1

• [Richard Winter's personal website is also useful, with all his material on patchwork text, and his publications on other, partly related, topics too.]

Comments on Staff & Farmer
Comparing the "SF" Staff& Farmer (2019) paper to the seminal "SW" Scoggins & Winter (1999) paper is instructive.

• SF reports student evaluation measures for four successive uses of the Patchwork Text design, giving substantial confidence in its success and value.
• Where SW used Patchwork Text on a postgraduate course in social work, SF used it in an undergraduate Art and Design programme. Students for SW were uncertain in their writing because of the required shift from black and white "objective" writing, to reflections on personal experiences. Students for SF were uncertain in their writing because they often felt they were at college to make things, not to write: i.e. they didn't feel writing was relevant or appropriate.
• SF's Patchwork Text was over just one semester, not SW's two semesters.
• SF's required 2,000 or 1,500 word assignments to be submitted, whereas SW's was a longer portfolio.
• SF did NOT use peer discussion and critique, whereas that was an important part of SW's design.
• Both use patchwork text early in their students' careers, as scaffolding for essay writing that may not be as important later on. (Although many writers' workshops for creative writing suggests it can remain productive over a long time.)
• SF argue that patchwork text was good not despite but because students had difficulties with the format. Productive difficulty, not waste-of-time-and-effort difficulty.
• Some of the benefit is from producing more regular student work (Time-on-Task benefit); and so from better (self‑)regulation of work. But it could be argued that it gives them not one but eight occasions for self-evaluation, and so for self-generated feedback.
• In both SF and SW the heart of the effect is shifting learners from a black and white view of knowledge to critical and graduated judgements. This is the educational dimension identified by Perry: see these pages: 1 2 3

Patchwork text's main strengths more generally (not all of these apply in all contexts / implementations) are:

• Productive peer interaction. Although SF did not include this activity, the special value here is that it involves regular reciprocal peer critiquing; but with the same small group of peers throughout the course and programme each week. Because each student is writing about their personal past professional experience, the peers progressively get to know each other's concerns; and can sometimes offer real insights from this progressive knowledge that cannot be offered by anonymous and ever-changing feedback sources.
• Scaffolding in:
  1. Writing at all in English for students with a poor grasp of that language.
  2. Addressing a novel type of assessment or task e.g. the final year project or dissertation in many disciplines OR in a taught Masters.
  3. Practising "voices" or writing styles, which are completely unfamiliar to the students e.g. reflection on one's own experience for science students.
  4. Lack of familiarity with the learning methods required in the discipline, and in particular in the programme. This is a big issue for international students on a one year Masters programme. Scaffolding a large task also in effect scaffolds students on this more general level.
  5. Can be used to scaffold progress beyond black and white learning, to dealing appropriately with subjects that require discussing degrees of certainty (all Social Science, and the parts of science and engineering requiring this).
  6. Creativity; including the induction of an overall theme or conclusion from a heap of cases or points.
  7. Familiarisation of the student with a role for staff as facilitators or advisors or one expert among others, rather than as a dictator who always gives them detailed orders about what to do.
  8. Pacing the academic work by breaking it down; and by requiring regular progress throughout the semester(s).
• Feedback FROM learners TO staff: it is good for the teachers too, as in the groups (if faciliated by staff) and/or in the written work they can see what the problems are in the class, and how it is going as a whole. I.e. providing regular feedback from learners to teachers (instead of only seeing what is wrong by fail marks at exam times).
• Pacing of work throughout the semester(s).
• Regular formative feedback.
• Less anxiety from monolithic high stakes assessments, because students build up chunks of text for re-use.
• It is likely to be enough to use this approach in a single module for it to benefit all the modules in a programme: the general lessons learned will transfer across without (to offer the simplest example) having to provide separate English-language support in each module.

• Overall: if you are teaching a course which is to be assessed by coursework, especially a large piece of academic writing of a kind unfamiliar to the students, then the whole course needs to be modified to bring about the acquisition by the learners of this new skill, as well as acquisition of the content. Patchwork Text's success at this is what makes it important.

  Winter (2003a,b) [ "'Surface Learning': The Patchwork Text as a Remedy for the Academic Essay" (A slightly amended version of an article published in The Guardian, Education Section, Tuesday June 10th, 2003, p.15), and elaborated here] argues that the academic essay is a bad form of assessment. However his argument is actually that in traditional courses it leads to various kinds of bad learning e.g. shallow learning; but that adopting the Patchwork Text as a learning design fixes these problems (as noted above), leading to good final writing portfolios that are assessed.

However Sharon Flynn has another, quite different, approach to this; "Using Turnitin to support student writing".

Reflexive / reflective learning diaries

Socratic dialogue (SD)

This is related in that (structured) peer interaction is at the heart of it. The focus is intermediate between Jigsaw and Patchwork Text in that there is no requirement to reach consensus, but nevertheless that peer discussion helps everyone develop their own ideas at the same time.

Study skills

Student-written MCQs

For a general rationale about why students writing MCQs can be a powerful lever for their learning, see this paper on "catalytic assessment".

Reciprocal peer critiquing (RPC): an exercise for students on applying assessment criteria

• A practical description of the exercise
• Morrow,M.I. (2006) "An Application of Peer Feedback to Undergraduates' Writing of Critical Literature Reviews" Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education" vol.1 no.2 pp.61-72
• A talk on it (abstract, slides, ...)
• A project on a miniaturised exercise for practising critical thinking and writing: [PDF] by Alison Gemmell.
• Document for teachers, representing this micro-CT exercise: Word doc.
• Top ten errors in peer critiquing

  Approaches

  There's now various bits of software to support this: especially useful on a big scale (big classes). However there are (say) 3 ways of doing this:
  • Double blind anonymous review, mediated by software. e.g. Aropa
  • Fully personal (as I do it): reviewers know who wrote it, and deliver the feedback personally (perhaps face to face). This may be best for establishing a collegiate atmosphere, and a personal practice without staff scaffolding for students getting feedback from peers as part of normal working. Myself, I get them to deliver the first batch face to face, with me chairing the meeting.
  • Fully open, just post everything to a wiki: the work and the reviews. John Hamer has done it in a class of about 35. This was a class with an established community feeling; but also the wiki was of course open to reading and policing by the lecturer.

I now have a page on critical thinking as a general mental ability.

Stats for psychology

Towards an online maths self-help project

There are two aspects addressed here:

• Online resources to help students learn aspects of maths. We hope to provide one ourselves for a particular context; but others are pointed to here.
• The basic technical problem that maths raises: how to display maths notation on the web.

Some online maths help resources

Existing, openly available online maths help

GU Online maths skills test

The skills test uses MathML:   MathML test example   What the test example should look like: GIF

Maths dept. self help materials: here (use Find command to search for "Advice").

General online aptitude tests (as used by some employers)

Methods for getting maths notation to display on the web

The surface problem for online maths resources is to get a workaround for maths to work on all the browsers students may use. If they only use it in timetabled labs with university-configured machines, then no problem. But especially for self-help resources, they may use it on old cast-off machines at home. Even worse: if they are just having a look to see if the resource could be helpful, then having to spend time downloading a different browser before they even get a glimpse is unlikely to work (we know for example, that commercial websites that fail to get their customers to a page showing what they want within 2.5 mouse clicks, will often not see that customer visit again for many months).

Another important problem aspect is: if we would like our students to be using online forums to discuss maths, how can they "write" maths notation into these forums?

There seem to be 3 approaches to this:

1. Using a remote server, or possibly local software you downloaded, you get a Latex expression rendered into a bitmap (GIF) image, which is sent back to you and displayed as part of the web page. This does not scale well if you resize your web page; or in fact even if your web page is not set to the general font size it assumes. So it violates the requirement to support people with imperfect vision; and will not be legible if you are projecting the web page to a lecture theatre.
2. jsMath: relies on javascript in your browser. It deals with page resizing, but does rely on java being turned on and working. (For fanatics, it does it even better if you download their fonts, as they prompt).
3. MathML: relies on a wannabe "standard" which however at the time of writing only one version of one browser supports. If you use this extension of HTML and the one browser (Firefox v.3.n.n) then it works great.

jsMath author-side approach to displaying maths

It lets you author very simple math exprs in your HTML (e.g. y = {x^2} ),
and the Latex for that was "y = {x^2}",
the complete in-line HTML for that was "(e.g. <span CLASS="math"> y = {x^2} </span>),"
and the additional once-per-document setup was only:
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">.math {visibility: hidden}</STYLE>
<SCRIPT SRC="../jsmath/easy/load.js"></SCRIPT>

This will display on essentially all browsers, but the author has to install something in their web file space: i.e. install jsMath on your server i.e. near your web page, in your file space. This is tens of MBytes and large numbers of files; but only takes a few minutes, and doesn't require admin. permissions to the server, only write permission for your own web-served file space.

MathML approach to displaying maths

Given that, then the author can write maths directly into their HTML without special downloads or include files. This is probably a good solution for Maths lecturers creating materials for their students.

Moodle approach to displaying maths

The students have to know simple Latex to write such expressions. Normal web users like me don't; but it is now a standard skill requirement in maths and related disciplines, and students there are more or less taught it and required to use it anyway.

Other Latex->server->GIF methods

Or use dreamhost: code: < img src="http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com/mathtex.cgi?c=\sqrt{a^2+b^2}" />   Image:

http://moodle.bath.ac.uk/faq/content/37/32/en/can-i-use-latex-in-moodle.html
http://docs.moodle.org/en/DragMath_equation_editor
www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb27-1/tb86bujdoso-help.pdf

Translator into Latex for authoring equations

Online writing help (Advancing Academic Writing project)

Web site logical path: [www.psy.gla.ac.uk] [~steve] [this page]
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