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HOW WE TEACH
1 Department of Biology; St. Olaf College, Northfield
2 Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota
3 College of Biology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Address for reprint requests and other correspondence: M. Jensen, Dept. of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Development, Univ. of Minnesota, 140 Appleby Hall, 128 Pleasant St. SE, Minneapolis MN 55455 (e-mail: msjensen{at}umn.edu)
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Abstract |
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 TOP Abstract IntroductionBACKGROUND AND METHODSRESULTSDISCUSSIONREFERENCES |
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Key words: cooperative learning; developmental education; multimedia
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Introduction |
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TOPAbstractIntroductionBACKGROUND AND METHODSRESULTSDISCUSSIONREFERENCES |
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BACKGROUND AND METHODS |
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TOPAbstractIntroductionBACKGROUND AND METHODSRESULTSDISCUSSIONREFERENCES |
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The Human Anatomy and Physiology course is a freshman level, four-credit semester science course that involves 2 h of lecture, 2 h of dissection laboratory, and 1 h of computer laboratory each week. The lecture and laboratory components of the course use traditional curriculum and instructional methods. The computer laboratory is where novel assignments, such as computer projects and cooperative quizzes, are implemented. According to the University of Minnesota Institutional Review Board-approved protocol obtained, students in this study were those who enrolled in GC 1135, signed a consent form, and participated in group interview sessions.
Description of the webpage project.
Two instructional goals in the computer laboratory are cooperative learning and familiarity with technology; although not typical goals for anatomy and physiology courses, they are a good fit within a developmental education science course. The disease webpage project was developed over several years to help achieve these goals. Prior to the webpage project, students were placed randomly into groups of three to five students and assigned to complete a short introductory exercise that involved the construction of a webpage that included interests and information about individual group members. The intent of this first exercise was to both introduce group members to each other and to teach basic webpage construction skills (5). Students were taught the basic steps required to build a webpage using Netscape Communicator 4.0 (Netscape Communication, Mountain View, CA), e.g., inserting images, creating links, and using the tools found within an internet browser.
The disease webpage project involved both individual and group work. Each group was assigned a specific disease of historic significance (e.g., smallpox), and each student was assigned a specific aspect of the disease. For example, one student created a page about the symptoms of smallpox, another student created a page concerning the treatments currently available for smallpox, etc. Each individual webpage was required to contain at least one picture (accompanied by a proper reference), one link to an external webpage, appropriate references, five facts that were germane to their aspect, and a three-question quiz pertaining to information on their page.
After 3 wk of working on the individual aspects during laboratory meeting times, groups had to combine their individual pages into a single larger project. Because of negative past experiences with groups submitting completed projects on time, we had students submit copies of the individual components prior to combining them into the group project. The goal here was to ensure that each individual had completed their portion of the projects. [Individual accountability is a key feature of group learning (8).] Groups were given 1 additional week to combine the individual components into a functional webpage. The final project was graded in reference to the requirements (e.g., accuracy and relevance of the content, missing links or links that did not function, presence of the 3-question quiz, etc.), and a grade was returned to the students 1 wk later.
Data collection mechanisms.
After completing the web projects, students were offered nominal bonus points for participating in a group interview. Ninety-six students were interviewed. Interviews began with students writing their names on a piece of paper and then writing answers to the following questions: "What was the specific topic of your personal webpage?" and "List 1 or 2 facts about your topic." Students were then interviewed orally for 
10 min in an informal group discussion. At the end of the oral interviews, students were asked to write down something good and something bad about their group.
The interviews were semistructured in that they started with the same set of leading questions, but most conversations drifted to different topics after a few minutes. Table 1 includes the most common questions asked by the interviewer. Student interviews were tape recorded by consent of the students; no students objected to being taped. Data from the interviews were analyzed in the following ways. First, students' verbal comments from the interviews were collected and categorized by topic. To examine trends across multiple interviews, the numbers of interviews in which students discussed a particular issue were counted. This allowed for the quantification of interview data, as shown in Table 1, despite the fact that not all students contributed during oral interviews, nor did students who spoke volunteer the same amount of information. These responses were also categorized, and common responses were determined by the percentage of students who responded in a particular way. The primary goal of the interview data was to sense trends in students' opinions about the assignment.
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RESULTS |
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Results from the group interviews.
Group interviews are summarized in Table 1. All interview sessions began with a question about whether the students would prefer to do a webpage project or write a term paper. Sixty-nine percent of the responses to this question reported favoring the creation of webpage projects over writing term papers. Reasons for this preference were many but generally focused on the project being fun, novel, and interesting. Students said that the project was more interesting than a term paper because it incorporated pictures, quizzes, and diverse types of information not normally found in a term paper and described it using terms such as "creative," "easy," "colorful," "animated," "artistic," "interactive," "unique," "a change of pace," "kept you doing something" and "you can put your personality in it." Other students, particularly those for whom English was not a first language, suggested that it was easier to express your ideas with a webpage because there were "too many rules" governing the writing of term papers, such as writing in sentences, grammatical rules, and word or page lengths. Students also reported that webpages change the way that you see, manipulate, and convey information, using pictures and "showing" information without the constraints of word lengths and other rules governing term papers. Some students suggested that less revision and more "fluff" and "blabbering" went into the writing of term papers, although others suggested that the same thing can happen in writing a webpage.
When students who said the webpage project was preferable to a term paper were asked why, 73% said that the visual nature of the web page was advantageous. "We're visual learners," one student said. "We have TV, movies, MTV... if something pops up on a screen, we can get it." He described information on webpages as being "right there" and said "we can control it," referring to the navigational aspects of hypertext. Another student said that he "would have learned more from a term paper," but that he "learned better" from the webpage project because it was more "visual." Sixty-four percent responded that they preferred the webpage project because building a webpage forced them to revise and rewrite their pages a number of times and that they learned from going over the key points repeatedly. In contrast, one student said that writing term papers consisted largely of "regurgitating into a term paper and never looking at it again." Forty-five percent added that they did not like to write term papers.
Technology as a barrier to learning.
When students were asked if they felt that learning how to make webpages interfered with learning the biology, 63% responded in the affirmative. Of these interview sessions, 60% cited a lack of technical skills in their groups as a major problem, and 40% said that the technology was frustrating. Thirty-one percent volunteered that there was not enough time to learn both the technical skills and complete the assignment. One student said that in building a webpage, he could see himself getting so carried away with trying to "make the web page look snappy" that he would not allow himself sufficient time to add substantial content. It is interesting to note that no students reported difficulty in using the internet as a source for information. This question was asked in every interview session (Table 1). Rather, the perceived technological barrier was in the production of web-based material.
Collaboration between group members.
Fifty percent of the interview groups said that teamwork was a positive aspect of this project. "It's all about learning to work with other people," one student observed. Although students were instructed to combine their pages with those of their group members,one student commented said, "I never saw what my group member's pages looked like." Apparently, many students did not look at or learn from their fellow group members' pages because of either time constraints or lack of interest.
Written responses to interview questions.
When asked to list one or two facts about their disease that they learned from the webpage assignment, 31% of the students listed one fact, 61% listed two facts, and 8% listed 3 facts. A total of 170 facts were listed by the students. A biology graduate student analyzed the facts for accuracy. Despite having to list only one or two facts, only 76% of the facts listed were correct or relevant to the particular disease the student who listed the fact was studying. A few correct facts included the following: "Encephalitis can be gotten from mosquitoes," "Haven't had an outbreak of small pox in 30+ years," and "There are three types of acid maltose deficiency (infantile, juvenile, and adult)." Examples of incorrect responses include the following: "Humans don't get HIV through blood transfusions" and "Tuberculosis can be caused by smoking."
When asked to write down one thing they liked about their group, 56% of the students responded that their groups worked well together, and 17% said helping each other was a positive aspect of the assignment. Only 5 of 96 students had nothing positive to say about their group experience. When asked to describe one thing they disliked about their group, 25% of the students had no complaint, 24% of the students cited unequal participation among group members, and 16% of the students referred to problems of group member attendance and punctuality. The remainder of students reported complaints such as disagreements between group members, problems with communication, not enough time to complete the project, and a lack or disparity of technical expertise.
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DISCUSSION |
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The curriculum used in GC 1135 attempted to move into the realm of active learning though assignments such as the webpage project. The instructors were fully aware that "webpage design" was not a skill required to learn the biology of historically important diseases but did provide students a forum in which they could cooperate with each other while engaging with a new form of technology, i.e., building a webpage. Data from this study showed that most students reported that learning how to make a webpage was a useful skill, although more than half said that learning the technology interfered with learning the biology. With the increasing utilization of technology in anatomy and physiology, as well as in most all college courses, students who lack basic computer skills are increasingly disadvantaged not only in their ability to learn but also in their ability to contribute to a cooperative group. During our study, students with above-average computer skills could complete their portion of the group webpage project in 1 or 2 h, whereas those with minimal skills never seemed to have enough time. Data collected from the group interviews suggested that cooperative groups are sometimes difficult to maintain when students have a wide gap in computer skills. In the past few years, the average student's computer skills have increased greatly, and thus the gap between students with average skills and those with minimal skills has also widened. Students with poor computer skills are increasingly likely to be considered burdens within cooperative groups.
An alarming trend detected in this study was students' uncritical acceptance of information taken from the internet, which was manifest by the unacceptably high percentage of incorrect facts (24%) reported during interview sessions. Our freshman students trusted the accuracy of the information contained on the internet and rarely, if ever, checked any facts in books or journals. Performing research on the internet is clearly easy for students, but evaluating the results of that research is where they obviously needed help. It cannot be ruled out, however, that some of errors reported in our study were due to students' misinterpretations of accurate information obtained from web-based resources. It is also noteworthy that students in this study were not overtly instructed to cross-check the web-based information for accuracy with another source (e.g., a textbook). Such a requirement would likely increase the amount of biology learned as well as encourage students to evaluate information gathered from the web.
Blindly trusting the accuracy of technical information on the internet is a problem that ranges well beyond the freshmen in our course. Even back in 1997, Wyatt (11) foresaw problems for physicians who wanted to recommend medical information on the internet and also for patients searching for health information on their own. While the web is a convenient means to disseminate medical information, the fact that most anyone can make a webpage means that web-based facts lacks accountability, thus leading to misinformation ranging from unintentional to deliberate, e.g., the concealment of commercial conflicts of interest (10). As our society moves to increased dependence on the internet for all forms of information, lessons stressing the importance of validity and reliability of information may be one of the most important outcomes for a freshman-level, nonmajor, science course.
In the first few years the webpage project was implemented, students encountered many difficulties and frequently struggled to complete the project. Despite the difficulties, students were excited to learn the technology skills and proud of their final products. In the past few years, however, students' computer skills have improved to a point where this assignment was no longer stimulating; in fact, the webpage assignment became "just another assignment." The instructors and teaching assistants spent far less time helping students in the computer laboratory and noticed that a large number of students left the laboratory early and completed it elsewhere without interacting with their group members.
Two of the goals of this project were to provide students with an assignment that would promote student-student interactions and would also be enjoyable, especially for students who had little interest in anatomy and physiology. After much thought and consultation with teaching assistants and students, the group webpage assignment was dropped and replaced with a tradebook reading assignment (4). A webpage research project is still a valid and realistic assignment, but its use as a motivational tool has greatly diminished as computers and the internet have become more commonplace within both academia and all of society.
Received for publication December 7, 2006. Accepted for publication August 5, 2007.
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