MOWE Maxine A. D*, WU Jinlu, CHUA Siew Chin, and Nalini Puniamoorthy
Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science (FOS), NUS
Mowe, M. A. D., Wu, J., Chua, S. C., & Puniamoorthy, N. (2024). Does the 3-2-1 Method Improve Student Engagement in Class? Using Generative AI to Analyse University Student Responses in a Large Biology Course [Lightning Talk]. In Higher Education Conference in Singapore (HECS) 2024, 3 December, National University of Singapore. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/hecs/hecs2024-mowe-et-al
SUB-THEME
Opportunities from Generative AI
KEYWORDS
Engagement, Large Classes, Biology, Pedagogy, Writing, Generative AI
CATEGORY
Lightning Talk
EXTENDED ABSTRACT
Engaging large classes (>100 students) at the university level has been a long-standing challenge for educators across academic disciplines (Mulryan-Kyne, 2010) It is often difficult to provide a similar engagement experience to smaller classes (Singer-Freeman & Bastone, 2016). Ways to address the bigger problem would be to bring a learning community into the classroom, transform teaching assistants into mentors, develop a growth mindset, promote grit as well as create engaged learners (Singer-Freeman & Bastone, 2016). Specifically, the 3-2-1 method has been commonly used to facilitate engaged learning in younger students (Deliany et al., 2020). This 3-2-1 method prompts students to write down three key points they learned, two interesting facts about the lesson, and one question they still have. A crucial component of this method is to actively review student responses to assess if what the students learned was aligned with the intended learning outcomes and to consider their feedback in developing future lessons. We decided to adopt the 3-2-1 Method in a large evolutionary biology course LSM2017 at the National University of Singapore, to engage students and enhance their writing ability in a course that would otherwise not have tested this skill. The approach was modified to include three key learning points from the lesson, two interesting applications outside of the classroom, and one question they still have. This activity was carried out for five to ten minutes after one to two lectures using Poll Everywhere (Fig. 1).
Figure 1. Large classroom challenges and 3-2-1 method with student output analysed using Generative AI.
The student responses were then analysed using generative AI to analyse the key learning points/questions that students asked and gather the responses into main themes of topics that they did not understand well so that these topics can be covered in the mid/end of semester review. Generative AI can also be used to focus on weak points in learning to better improve engagement throughout the semester (Fuller et al., 2024). The output can also be used to measure how well the learning outcomes are covered by each topic and thus, provide a direct measure of effectiveness of large class teaching. Using the 3-2-1 method also encourages students to write out responses that they would not normally have practice within this type of large class setting as most assessments are multiple choice or short answer tests. In this talk, the engagement levels (including behavior and cognitive engagement) of the students will be explained and analysed using Generative AI (the number of responses out of the total class size, responses variation over time, the word count of responses over time). Moving forward, this method can be applied to a variety of other biology-based courses with large class sizes and will be tested for its effectiveness at creating engaged learners and making large classes feel small.
REFERENCES
Deliany, Z., Erfan, E., & Bindarti, W. E. (2020). The effect of using 3-2-1 strategy on students’ reading comprehension achievement. SAGA: Journal of English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 137-144. https://doi.org/10.21460/saga.2020.12.39
Fuller, K. A., Morbitzer, K. A., Zeeman, J. M., Persky, A. M., Savage, A. C., & McLaughlin, J. E. (2024). Exploring the use of ChatGPT to analyze student course evaluation comments. BMC Medical Education, 24(1), 423. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05316-2
Mulryan-Kyne, C. (2010). Teaching large classes at college and university level: Challenges and opportunities. Teaching in Higher Education, 15(2), 175-185. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562511003620001
Singer-Freeman, K., & Bastone, L. (2016). Pedagogical choices make large classes feel small (NILOA occasional paper no.27). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois and Indiana University, National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED574481