Class meeting 1: taking risks to improve student engagement and mindset

Introduction

In years past, this was the scene: a graduate journal club course with first-year Masters students. They have read a primary (peer-reviewed, journal-published) research article in biology, and now the students must lead a discussion in the interpretation and critical analysis of the data and its interpretation. They have little experience reading six to ten pages of dense scientific prose with five to eight data-laden figures and tables.

This is daunting even to the best-prepared. When I was a first-year grad student, this type of class gave me hours of pre-class sweats. I read each paper over and over, making detailed notes, so that if I happened to be called on by the professor to present one of the figures from the manuscript, I would be able to give a thorough description of the motivation of the experiment, the methods used to collect the data, how those data were analyzed, and how the authors interpreted the relevance of the outcome to their overall hypothesis. God forbid I would then be asked a more critical question, like to evaluate the choice of method the authors used (what would have been alternative approaches? why did they choose this approach?), whether I thought that all appropriate control experiments had been performed, whether the replication of the experiment was rigorous… and I was being judged, live, in real time, in front of my peers. This was high stakes.

Motivation

While there may be value in such a "sink or swim" approach, I've lately become familiar with the idea that it can be beneficial to help students, especially those from the latest generations, develop a growth mindset. We do them (and society) a great service by helping them realize that it takes diligence and practice to become proficient at valuable skills, like being a critical thinker.

At the same time, I do spend more time than I probably should preparing class materials. Much has been written over how not to overprepare for class. There are several reasons for this, including:

• making the best use of faculty time https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/01/15/how-save-yourself-overpreparing-your-classes-opinion
• holding off on perfecting class materials so that students can participate in developing perfection https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/pedagogy-of-imperfection/63435
• creating in-class opportunities for students to engage in the material https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-to-Prepare-for-Class/244015

In other words,

• effective pedagogy does not necessarily demand a greater time investment
• it is beneficial to student mindset to see that perfection takes work, and that faculty members do struggle to learn and to prepare to help their students learn
• "underpreparing" can be an impactful technique

Separately, I've also written about the benefits of less-linear and more spontaneous class preparation, which leads to an implementation I call "lecture improv." http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2017/01/digital-classroom-and-lecture-improv.html Positive outcomes of this approach include:

• reduced nonattendance from students who already have my lecture slides (because they're created and elaborated upon during class)
• more flexibility to follow student interests during class (likewise, feeling less rigid about following a pre-prepared class outline, which also leads to…)
• the ability to entertain student questions skyrockets. Without prepared lecture notes, they don't know where the class period is meant to go (in their vernacular: "what content we're supposed to cover"). In my hands, at least, lecture improv has led to vast increases in student question-asking and thus to student engagement.

Objectives

While preparing my journal club class for the new semester, a thought struck me. What if I could accomplish these three things on the first day of class?

• to humanize myself, "The Professor," to my students by demonstrating how I cope with unfamiliar content in my discipline
• to simultaneously support student growth mindset
• (incidentally) to reduce the amount of time I spend preparing for class

Methods

Here's how I decided to try achieving these aims, and how it all turned out.

I thought it could be an effective practice for me to perform some scientific improv on the first day of class.

What's scientific improv? Aren't those mutually exclusive terms? Yes, until recently…

I asked each student to bring with them, to the first day of class, a PDF file of a manuscript related to their Masters thesis research. After I had introduced myself and performed my duty of talking about the class syllabus, we took a brief bathroom break (this is a three-hour-long class). Just before the break, I asked each student to e-mail me their article; I then asked the class to pick a number (the first respondent chose "1"). So, I told them, while they were having a five-minute break, I was going to load the figures from the 1st manuscript that had arrived in my inbox into my presentation software. When they returned, I would present, to the best of my totally unprepared ability, one of the figures from that manuscript. Scientific improv.

During my five minutes of break time, I imported the PDF of the manuscript into my class presentation. When the students returned, I then spent about 45 minutes demonstrating, in real time, how I read and analyzed this example of primary research literature. This process included my looking up unfamiliar acronyms and techniques using web search engines and seeking out details about experimental replication by referring to the Materials and Methods section of the manuscript.

In other words, I gave a very long and very explicit, totally unprepared, presentation of one figure from the manuscript. To reiterate, my main goal in doing this was to show students a step-by-step example of how an experienced scientist might go about learning new scientific information. I was hoping that this would help improve student growth mindset and also would be an engaging student experience for the first day of class.

Results

At the end of class, I (as usual) anonymously polled the students to solicit feedback. Among other questions, I asked them:

• to rate, using a Likert scale, the utility of observing "the process of somebody else reading, analyzing and presenting a figure from a manuscript," and then (if responding positively),
• to "explain why it was useful"

Of 15 students, 12 responded. Of respondents, 8 (66%) indicated strong agreement with the utility of scientific improv, 3 (25%) indicated agreement, and 1 responded "neutral." None responded with "disagree" or "strongly disagree." A skeptic, as scientists should be, might conclude that the 3 students who did not respond might have done so because they strongly disagreed and did not want even an anonymous response recorded as such. Even in such a circumstance, I feel buoyed by the number of students responding positively. The sole "neutral" respondent indicated that the amount of time I spent on this exercise diminished their evaluation of the exercise. As you might be able to tell by now, I do like to talk (and write…)

The students' qualitative responses to the prompt can be categorized into three general explanations for the utility of the "scientific improv" approach. It:

1. exposed students to a different perspective on how to go about evaluating scientific data

2. emphasized the need for skepticism in the critical analysis of data and its interpretation

3. improved student feelings of self-efficacy: the ability for novices to learn new content on their own

Conclusion

In sum, I'm happy about the initial outcomes of this exploration of faculty risk-taking during class by performing on-the-spot interpretation of a manuscript that I had never seen before. Initial student responses suggest that I'm advancing my intended goals, and this is a potentially powerful technique that I'll continue to refine and adapt in future!