Category: Effective Teaching Approach

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Educational Administration and Leadership Effective Teaching Approach Higher Education

The benefit of learning-by-teaching method with an imaginary audience

Learning-by-teaching is a generative learning activity in which learners explain the material in a lesson to others after studying it.  Wang and colleagues conducted an experiment with 96 college students from a university in central China to compare three versions of learning-by-teaching, all without audience interaction but with varied levels of social presence, thereby leading to different levels of extraneous processing, which causes learners to engage in cognitive processing irrelevant to the instruction purpose (e.g., distraction). Participants studied a 2-minute video on chemical synaptic transmission for 9 minutes and prepared a brief lesson of less than 5 minutes under a randomly assigned one of three conditions: (1) teach-to-camera – teach to an imaginary audience by creating a video lecture; (2) teach-to-student – teach to an audience face-to-face; (3) teach-to-group – teach to seven people physically present in the room. Audiences in the latter two conditions provided no feedback. Data collecting involved learning outcomes scores, self-reported questionnaires, pulse rate, and teaching process recordings.  Results indicated that:

  • Students in the teach-to-camera condition performed better than those in the other two conditions in terms of generative processing, (more idea units, elaborations, and monitoring statements in their explanation).
  • The teach-to-camera condition participants outperformed those in the teach-to-group condition in the retention test and the transfer test, and they scored better than those in the teach-to-student condition on the retention test.
  • The teach-to-camera condition participants also reported significantly lower social presence and pulse rate than the two other groups, and perceived lower state anxiety, teaching difficulty, and cognitive load in teaching than those in the teach-to-group condition.

The authors suggested that the better performance in learning-by-teaching resulting from teaching to a camera may be due to the absence of an audience which led to less social presence and in turn served to reduce extraneous processing or distraction (anxiety, cognitive load in teaching, pulse rate) and to enhance generative processing.

 

Source: Wang, F., Cheng, M., & Mayer, R. E. (2023, May 25). Improving learning-by-teaching without audience interaction as a generative learning activity by minimizing the social presence of the audience. Journal of Educational Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000801… Read the rest

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Effective Teaching Approach Higher Education

Longhand notetaking is worth using

With the usage of smartphones becoming increasingly pervasive, taking photos to record information in class allows students to store more information with less effort. Many studies have demonstrated that longhand note-taking facilitates the deeper encoding of information and reduces mind-wandering, but little research has investigated the learning outcomes of the photo-taking strategy, so a recent study was conducted to compare their effectiveness.

The sample of this study included 100 college students between the ages of 18-32 who were divided into three subgroups to listen to two lectures in three different conditions: listening with longhand note-taking, with photo-taking, and without note-taking. After they completed both lectures, participants reviewed their hand-written notes, photos they took, and plain printouts, respectively, to prepare for a recall test.

The results revealed that students who took longhand notes outperformed the other two groups. A repetitive experiment was also done to probe participants’ mind-wandering behavior by asking participants to report their mind-wandering behavior. The outcomes demonstrated that longhand note-takers mind-wandered less than the other groups. The authors concluded that significant benefits of longhand note-taking should be acknowledged, and educators have an obligation to impart knowledge on how best to learn — taking longhand notes.

 

Source: Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2023). Take notes, not photos: Mind-wandering mediates the impact of note-taking strategies on video-recorded lecture learning performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 29, 124–135. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000375… Read the rest

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Educational Administration and Leadership Effective Teaching Approach Kindergarten Programme Evaluation

Mediated learning for preschoolers with developmental delay

Think Bright is an early intervention program using mediated learning to enhance the cognitive functioning of children with developmental delay. Keung and colleagues conducted a randomized control trial to investigate the effect of the program on Hong Kong preschoolers with developmental delay. The intervention included training activities that focused on three aspects of thinking skills: analogical thinking, sequential thinking, and logical reasoning. In contrast to teacher-centred direct teaching, mediated learning is a recurring four-step process of “Explore-Try-Mediate-Conclude”. In the process, teachers used mediation skills to facilitate and guide the child to perform the learning task by encouraging the child to think aloud and verbalize his/her approaches and findings. Hence, the researchers hypothesized that mediated learning not only improves thinking skills but also language skills.

A total of 68 preschoolers (48 boys, 20 girls, mean age = 58 months) with cognitive and/or language delay was recruited from 15 rehabilitation service centres in Hong Kong. Participants were randomly allocated to the intervention group (n=34) and the active control group (n=34). The experimental group received twelve 60 min sessions of one-on-one cognitive training (Think Bright) over 6 months, while the control group received 12 individual sessions of regular training during this period. Prior to the intervention, teachers received 6 hours of training on how to administer the Think Bright program. Three aspects of the outcomes were assessed: 1) language ability (e.g., receptive and expressive vocabulary, grammar); 2) general cognition (e.g., basic concepts of colour, shape, quantity, the cognitive abilities of matching, categorization); and 3) thinking skills.

  • The results of MANCOVA indicated that the Think Bright group significantly outperformed the control group in all six outcomes: general cognition (ES=+0.82), language (ES = +0.81), logical reasoning (ES=+0.79), non-verbal analogical thinking (ES = +0.48), verbal analogical thinking (ES= +0.41), and sequential thinking (ES = +0.41).
  • Correlation analysis showed that the more mediated skills employed in the teaching, the greater the gain score in language.

Due to the small sample size, the generalizability of the findings of this study remains uncertain. Moreover, the outcome assessments were conducted by educational psychologists who were not blinded to the experiment conditions. Thus, the results have to be interpreted with caution. In spite of the limitations, the study showed a promising result for the effectiveness of using mediated learning to enhance both the cognitive and language skills of preschoolers with developmental delay. The authors suggested that this training could also be adopted to improve the thinking skills of typically developing children.

 

Source (Open Access): Keung, A. Y., Ho, V. F., & Shum, K. K. (2022). Early cognitive intervention using mediated learning for preschoolers with developmental delay: A randomized controlled trial. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(3), 1109–1132. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12490… Read the rest

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Effective Teaching Approach Primary School Education

Sustaining content through literacy instruction to improve reading comprehension outcomes in the early grades

A recent longitudinal randomized controlled trial (RCT) by Kim and colleagues evaluated the effect of the Model of Reading Engagement (MORE) intervention on the reading comprehension of early elementary students. The MORE intervention consisted of providing students in Grade 1 with 20 thematic content literacy lessons in science, providing related informational texts to read during the summer, and then building on the thematic content literacy with 45 additional lessons in Grade 2. The intervention was developed to expose students to increasingly complex information about a topic over time. Thus, students develop schemas, or ways of storing and retrieving knowledge, to comprehend new topics.

The RCT was conducted over 12 months in 30 elementary schools with a sample of 1,176 students receiving the MORE intervention and 980 students assigned to business-as-usual literacy instruction. Teachers in the treatment condition received professional development and ongoing support from site-based literacy facilitators. Using audio recordings of lessons and teacher surveys, fidelity was found to be high, almost 100% among Grade 1 teachers and between 87% and 94% among Grade 2 teachers.

The study found students who received the MORE intervention outperformed the control group students on a researcher-developed science reading comprehension assessment (ES = +0.18). Findings from this study highlight the importance of using literacy instruction to provide students with thematically-connected content that becomes more complex over time. Elementary schools have become increasingly focused on English and math, limiting student access to science and social studies content. A robust vocabulary is essential to understanding texts that become more complex as students progress through elementary school. Thus, students who gain repeated exposure to related vocabulary terms within the context of science and social studies can apply their background knowledge and comprehend new topics. Teaching thematically content through content literacy instruction and aligning it with resources students can access at home presents a scalable approach to help students develop comprehension skills for reading informational texts.

 

Source: Kim, J. S., Burkhauser, M. A., Relyea, J. E., Gilbert, J. B., Scherer, E., Fitzgerald, J., Mosher, D., & McIntyre, J. (2022). A longitudinal randomized trial of a sustained content literacy intervention from first to second grade: Transfer effects on students’ reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000751… Read the rest

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Effective Teaching Approach Kindergarten Language Development Programme Evaluation

Effects of a multitiered system of language support on kindergarten oral and written language

Petersen and colleagues conducted a large-scale randomized controlled trial, aiming to examine the effects of a multitiered system of language support (MTSLS) on kindergarten children’s oral and written language.

Participants included 686 kindergarten students from 4 school districts in the Upper Midwest region. Researchers randomly assigned 28 full-day kindergarten classrooms to treatment (n=337 students) or control (n=349 students) conditions. The treatment group received 14 weeks of oral narrative language instruction using Story Champs, a contextualized language intervention and a discourse-based oral language curriculum. After 4 weeks of large group (Tier 1) Story Champs intervention, a random sample of students who did not make adequate progress in Tier 1 intervention (n=49 students) received supplemental small group (Tier 2) intervention. Results were showed below.

  • Students in the treatment group had significantly higher scores on all outcome measures (i.e., narrative retell, personal story generation, expository retell, and narrative writing) compared to those in the control group.
  • Analyses of outcomes from the Tier 2 intervention group (n=49 students) also had higher scores when compared with a matching sample of at-risk control students.

However, these outcome measures were developed by the authors of the intervention, so further work is needed using independent measures to confirm that oral and written language outcomes could be improved significantly with MTSLS both for students identified as having typical language learning skills and for students identified as at risk.

 

Source: Petersen, D. B., Staskowski, M., Spencer, T. D., Foster, M. E., & Brough, M. P. (2022). The effects of a multitiered system of language support on kindergarten oral and written language: A large-scale randomized controlled trial. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 53(1), 44–68. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_LSHSS-20-00162… Read the rest

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Effective Teaching Approach Secondary School Education

Graphic organizers help to enhance students’ generative cognitive processing

A recent study published in Journal of Educational Psychology examined the role of graphic organizers in promoting generative processing in learners. Graphic organizers are common ways of structuring texts. These include compare-and-contrast (e.g., matrix), sequence (e.g., flowchart) and hierarchy (e.g., tree diagram). In this study, matrix was the form of graphic organizer used to compare the northern and southern climates in China.

Two approaches were compared to text-only information (NGO). The first approach used filled-in graphic organizers (FGO), in which comparison of the two climates described in the text had already been filled-in in a matrix. In this way, students can learn through a spatial arrangement of the text but may still not engage in deeper processing. The second approach used interactive graphic organizers (IGO). Students were required to create their own matrix through using apps for the comparison. The act of building a matrix graphic organizer requires more generative cognitive processing. A generative learning process occurs when a learner selects important material, organizes it into a coherent structure, and relates it to relevant prior knowledge.

Researchers conducted two experiments. The first experiment examined whether graphic organizers aided generative learning, and the second investigated whether students preferred to use graphical organizers in learning.

In experiment 1, 60 participants (34 male, age: 12-14) were recruited from three 8th grade classes (20 students per class) of a middle school in the northern part of Tianjin, China. Class 1 was given an online lesson by reading a passage with text-only, i.e. no graphic organizer (NGO), class 2 was given the text along with FGO, and class 3 the text with access to IGO. After the lesson, students were required to take a retention test, which measured to what extent the learners remembered information, and comprehension test, which asked learners to apply the knowledge learned in the article to their own living area. The results indicated that:

  • Both IGO (ES = .65) and FGO (ES = .72) outperformed the text-only group (NGO) on retention test scores. There was no difference was found between the IGO group and the FGO group (ES = .09). This suggests that it is helpful to memorize key information through accessing a graphic organizer (either IGO or FGO).
  • IGO group outperformed both FGO group (ES = 1.45) and NGO group (ES = 2.59) in terms of comprehension test scores, and FGO group scored better than NGO group (ES = .93). This pattern suggests that using interactive graphic organizers helped the generative learning process.
  • The results of experiment 2 showed that passages with IGO were the most selected (42.9%), followed by FGO (39.0%), and the least preferred was NGO (18.1%).

Researchers also applied eye-tracking technology to study eye movements of participants during learning. Based on the findings, they believed IGO helped to increase students’ generative cognitive processes as compared to using FGO. Consequently, students accessing IGO scored higher in comprehension tests.

 

Source: Wang, X., Mayer, R. E., Zhou, P., & Lin, L. (2021). Benefits of interactive graphic organizers in online learning: Evidence for generative learning theory. Journal of Educational Psychology, 113(5), 1024–1037. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000606… Read the rest