Mark CHONG* and Bina RAI
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Chong, M., & Rai, B. (2023). Methods in madness–Exploring the use of toolkits in project-based learning [Lightning talk]. In Higher Education Campus Conference (HECC) 2023, 7 December, National University of Singapore. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/hecc2023proceedings/methods-in-madness-exploring-the-use-of-toolkits-in-project-based-learning/
SUB-THEME
Interdisciplinarity and Education
KEYWORDS
Project-based learning, interdisciplinary studies, design, instructional aids, training aids
CATEGORY
Lightning Talks
BACKGROUND
Project-based Learning (PBL) is commonly used to engage learners in meaningful projects and developing real-world products. Student-led inquiry is integral towards knowledge construction, with instructors engaged more heavily in coaching, rather than didactic delivery of content. Inherently, this results in an increased workload, both for staff and students (Brown, 2020), and PBL approaches are notorious for being time-consuming. The diverse nature of problem statements used, as well as instructors involved, often result in inconsistent expectations, further limiting efforts to scale-up delivery of instruction (Aldabbus, 2018; Shpeizer, 2019).
Peer instruction may provide part of the solution to these issues. As defined and popularised by Eric Mazur (Crouch & Mazur, 2001), peer instruction benefits from not having the “curse of knowledge”, with recent learners being better placed to explain concepts to each other, particularly in the learning of content knowledge. It follows that PBL can be integrated with peer instruction for improved outcomes, and has been proven effective for skills-based courses (Putri & Sumartini, 2021). As described above, however, design projects tend to be more open-ended and require some prior experience to steer the learning in the right direction; students within the project teams often lack the “big picture”, and require additional guidance in their discovery journey.
In this project, we proposed the use of students who have recently completed the course to return as teaching assistants (TAs) for future teams. To make up for the lack of general real-world experience, the TAs are trained and equipped with teaching aids in the form of toolkits that serve to standardise instruction and also provide a vehicle to report student progress for targeted feedback from the course instructor/faculty. Frameworks and toolkits, as used in innovation and design, serve to focus the users’ attention on immediate topics and to provide a platform for collaborative design (Clemente et al., 2016).
The following are the research questions explored in this project:
- What are the major gaps in PBL that can be effectively addressed with teaching toolkits?
- How effective are teaching toolkits in (a) facilitating teaching, and (b) nurturing confidence in instruction in student guides?
PROJECT AIMS & METHODOLOGY
We hypothesise that instructional toolkits improve teaching effectiveness and efficiency in design innovation courses for TAs. To test this hypothesis, the following aims have been developed:
Aim #1. We will develop toolkits to be used by learners in the course BN3101 “Biomedical Engineering Design”. Additionally, we will develop training guides for TAs to prepare them to transition into teaching roles. We expect these efforts to improve confidence of the teaching aids and enable them to provide focused guidance to the student groups throughout PBL. As a result, students will be steered in the right direction and converge on the course learning outcomes more quickly.
Aim #2. We will measure the effectiveness of the toolkits in facilitating peer instruction through a combination of direct and indirect measures at specified time points throughout the course. Two aspects of effectiveness of the training toolkits will be studied: (i) Ability to improve learning outcomes, and (ii) Ability to facilitate moderate facilitation by the TAs. Evaluation of (i) will be performed through self-reported surveys by learners, and qualitative assessments from instructors as direct measures of learning. Similarly, evaluation of (ii) will take place through surveys on learners and focus group discussions with student assistants at the end of the course.
Aim #3. We will analyse the data collected to reveal distinct material from the course that can be most effectively structured into a general set of toolkits to improve instruction and/or identify portions that can be digitised for online training of the student guides. This can also be useful for onboarding new course instructors, and may result in more consistent expectations of deliverables amongst course instructors.
CENTRAL MESSAGE
This presentation describes the process of developing toolkits for project-based learning courses for effective learning.
REFERENCES
Aldabbus, S. (2018). Project-based learning: Implementation & challenges. International Journal of Education, Learning and Development, 6(3), 71-79. https://eajournals.org/ijeld/vol-6-issue-3-march-2018/project-based-learning-implementation-challenges/
Brown, N. (2020). Practical solutions to manage staff and student workloads in project-based learning courses. Global Journal of Engineering Education, 22(1), 20-25. http://www.wiete.com.au/journals/GJEE/Publish/vol22no1/03-Brown-N.pdf
Clemente, V. Vieira, R. & Tschimmel, K. (2016). A learning toolkit to promote creative and critical thinking in product design and development through Design Thinking. In 2016 2nd International Conference of the Portuguese Society for Engineering Education (CISPEE), Vila Real, Portugal (pp. 1-6). http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CISPEE.2016.7777732
Crouch, C. H., & Mazur, E. (2001). Peer instruction: Ten years of experience and results. American Journal of Physics, 69, 970-77. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.1374249
Putri, S. T., & Sumartini, S. (2021). Integrating peer learning activities and problem-based learning in clinical nursing education. SAGE Open Nurs, 7, 23779608211000262. https://doi.org/10.1177/23779608211000262
Shpeizer, R. (2019). Towards a successful integration of project-based learning in higher education: challenges, technologies and methods of implementation. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 7, 1765-71. http://dx.doi.org/10.13189/ujer.2019.070815
