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Ideas in Practice: Science Courses in Developmental Education

Posted on: Friday, 7 October 2005, 03:00 CDT

By Hsu, Leonardo; Jensen, Murray; Moore, Randy; Hatch, Jay

ABSTRACT:

One of the goals of developmental education is to help students to be able to succeed in mainstream college courses. However, courses in developmental education traditionally have focused exclusively on reading, writing, and basic mathematics. In this article, we discuss the role that science courses can play in developmental education. Drawing upon examples from our own courses, we illustrate how science courses can be used both as vehicles for the application of best practices in teaching and as contexts within which to conduct research on how to help developmental students acquire the skills they need to succeed.

If asked to name some components of a developmental education program, educators might mention "reading/writing courses,""mathematics courses,""Supplemental Instruction,""tutoring,""academic advising,""career counseling," or any number of other programs and services designed to help underprepared and at-risk students succeed in postsecondary education (Maxwell, 1994,1997). However, the words "science courses" probably would not come to mind. None of the sessions offered at developmental education conferences such as the meetings of the National Association for Development Education (NADE) and the College Reading and Learning Association (CRLA) are concerned with science courses or student achievement in science. Furthermore, through our professional associations, we are not aware of a single developmental education program in the United States that includes a science course as part of its curriculum. Some university science departments do offer preparatory science courses to be taken by students prior to the standard introductory science course. However, these are all designed specifically to help students succeed in a particular subsequent science course, as opposed to university courses in general.

Presumably, the absence of science courses from developmental education comes from the view that students must have a firm grounding in reading, writing, and mathematics skills before they can succeed in a science course. We believe that this is not the case. In our view, science courses can be an important component of a developmental education program when they are structured in such a way as to help students develop the skills and attitudes necessary for success in postsecondary education, including skills in reading, writing, and mathematics. Over the past several years, we have been teaching such science classes at a college designed to help underprepared students succeed at a large, urban research university in the upper Midwest (Jensen & Rush, 2000; Johnson, 2001; Miller, Brothen, Hatch, & Moen, 1988). These classes span a wide range of science disciplines, including biology, chemistry, environmental science, geology, human anatomy and physiology, physics, and meteorology.

The General College (GC) at the University of Minnesota accepts students who would otherwise have been denied admission to the university based on low test scores. These students are approximately 50% male and 50% female, with 46% of them students of color. Their mean composite ACT score is 19.8, and their mean high school percentile rank is 53 (General College, 2004). The GC mission is to provide these students with an academically rigorous curriculum including courses that teach both disciplinary content and academic study skills and to transfer them to regular university degree programs prepared to tackle those programs' challenging requirements.

In this paper, we discuss how the science courses at the General College perform double duty: both contributing to the preparation of students for further university work and serving as laboratories in which ideas on how to help prepare at-risk students can be tested and refined.

Why Teach Developmental Science Courses?

If both developmental reading, writing, and mathematics courses and our developmental science courses are designed to prepare students for future coursework, why add science to the traditional curriculum? Although reading, writing, and mathematics courses provide a level of instruction in those basic skills that cannot be matched by a science course, developmental science courses help prepare students in other ways that cannot be duplicated by a reading, writing, or mathematics course. We describe several of these methods in the following paragraphs.

Skills Practice within a Disciplinary Context

The goal of traditional reading, writing, and mathematics courses is to give students a solid foundation in those skills that they can then apply in future courses to help them succeed. However, much research from cognitive psychology has demonstrated that learning is highly context-dependent and that knowledge and skills learned in the abstract (or in one particular context) are often applied incorrectly or not at all to new situations (Anderson, Reder, & Simon, 1996; Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Cobb & Bowers, 1999). Furthermore, learners usually need to practice a skill in several different contexts before being able to transfer that skill to a new context (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Perkins & Salomon, 1989). In a typical science class, students must be able to extract information from a science textbook by reading it, write lab reports that clearly summarize investigations they have carried out, and use mathematics to manipulate and analyze quantitative data that they collect from experiments. Science courses provide a concrete context in which students can practice all three of those basic skills in the service of learning disciplinary content.

In our developmental science courses, rather than assume that students are already proficient at these skills, we structure assignments and provide supports in such a way that students who are not yet proficient at such tasks can learn to perform them competently and those students who can perform those tasks can improve their performance while applying them in a disciplinary context. For example, student writing in our introductory biology course is assessed by examining the lab reports that students write throughout the semester. The design and grading of the lab reports is intended to help students improve not only their ability to analyze data but also to express their conclusions and data-based arguments clearly in writing.

The write-up of the very first lab is not a report at all but a worksheet that students fill out. The sections of the worksheet correspond to the sections of the lab reports that they will be writing beginning with the second lab. Near the beginning of the semester, each of the sections of the lab reports, including the introduction (summarizing the purpose of the experiment and background information), the methods (detailing the experimental set- up and procedures), the results (presenting the measurements which were made), and the discussion (explaining the interpretation and implications of the data and possible sources of error), are equally weighted and the grading is relatively lenient. As the course progresses, not only does the grading become more strict in terms of the expected sophistication of writing and analysis but the grade- weight of the introduction and methods sections (which require little critical thinking) is decreased and that of the results and discussion sections (which require more higher-order thinking skills such as evaluation and synthesis) is increased. Along the way, students receive feedback on each lab report in terms of both quality of writing and correctness of science. A comparison of student grades from the Fall 2003 course shows that the average grade students achieve on these reports remains constant, even though the grading standards increase, suggesting that the students' ability to write good reports is improving.

Practice with Higher-Order Thinking Skills

Students come to science classes with many ideas about how the world works based on their everyday experiences. Some of these ideas are consistent with the way scientists think about the world and some are not (Caramezza, McCloskey, & Green, 1981; Clement, 1982; McDermott, 2001). The purpose of science is to discover the rules by which nature works and to use those rules to predict and explain a wide variety of phenomena. Thus, science classes offer an ideal opportunity for students to practice higher-order thinking skills (e.g., Bloom's educational objectives of synthesis, application, and evaluation) by synthesizing the results of their experiments to develop theories of how things work, applying those theories to new situations, and then evaluating the results to determine the usefulness of their theory (Bloom, 1956).

For example, in our physical science class, the students work through a curriculum called Physics by Inquiry (McDermott, Shaffer, Rosenquist, & University of Washington Physics Education Group, 1996). In the module entitled Electric Circuits, students first learn by trial and error how to light a bulb using a battery and a wire. The textbook then guides them to construct increasingly complicated circuits using multiple bulbs, switches, and batteries and to develop for themselves a set of rules for how electric circuits work. Students then are directed \to create new circuits, which they have not seen before, and must then use their newly created rules to predict the behavior of these new circuits. If their predictions are incorrect, the students must decide how to modify their rules. Exam problems also ask students to predict the behavior of novel circuits and to explain their predictions on the basis of their rules. Thus, to do well in this class, students must go beyond merely memorizing formulas and facts and answering simple recall questions.

Encourage Attitudes for Success

In addition to developing in students the skills needed for success in university courses, another important component is to develop attitudes for success. Many developmental students do not place much importance on attending class if no direct credit is given for attendance and are reluctant to seek help if they are struggling in a class. Such attitudes can make it difficult for students to earn high grades in university courses. Science courses are an appropriate context to develop such attitudes, especially those related to attendance and help-seeking, because the concepts introduced often build on those presented earlier in the course, making it critical for students to keep up and get help as soon as possible if they have difficulties.

Many studies have been performed to study the relationship between attendance and success in class (as measured by grades). However, those studies, based on widely varying types of classes and student populations, have led to conflicting results. Some studies show a positive correlation between attendance and grades (Brocato, 1989; Jones, 1984; Launius, 1997; Thomas & Higbee, 2000; Vidler, 1980), whereas others show no correlation (Berenson, Carter, & Norwood, 1992; Hammen & Kelland, 1994; Thompson & Plummer, 1979). In our own classes, we found a strong correlation between attendance at lectures and grades, even when no credit was awarded for attendance (Moore, 2003). Similar results have been found in the environmental science, physical science, and anatomy and physiology courses.

We compared results from two sections of an introductory biology class (Moore, 2003). The two sections were equivalent in terms of students' academic preparation, demographics, and attitudes towards the class, as measured by a written survey. In both sections, the correlation of attendance with achieving a good grade in the course was discussed on the first day of the semester. Subsequently, one section received no further encouragement to attend class. In the second section, a graph showing the correlation between attendance and final grade in the course was distributed to students, used in a lab activity on the analysis of graphs, and shown at least once per week before the beginning of lecture.

By the end of the semester, the students in the second section had significantly higher average rates of attendance and had almost a full letter grade higher average final grade. Many students may simply be unaware that attending class can improve their grade; further simply mentioning this fact in the course syllabus and on the first day of class is insufficient to help them develop good learning habits. Repeated reminders to students can help them to develop better habits and to improve their academic performance.

Goals and Practices in Developmental Science Courses

As with any science course, two of the major goals of our developmental science courses are to help students learn the concepts of a particular field of science as well as the methods of inquiry and ways of knowing used in science. However, courses are also designed to help students acquire the attitudes and learning skills necessary to be successful in their future college courses, both science and nonscience. A few of the teaching practices used in our courses to support this third goal are outlined in the following section.

Helping Students Learn From Lectures

At large universities, it is almost inevitable that students will take at least a few large lecture classes held in vast auditoriums. Although lectures allow an instructor to reach hundreds of students at the same time, many students have difficulty learning in this environment (Halloun & Hestenes, 1985). In a traditional lecture, students are exposed to large amounts of information at a fast rate for an extended period of time. In such a situation, it is easy for students to become mentally disengaged and merely to copy whatever the instructor writes on the board (McKeachie, 1999; Tobias, 1992). Such notes, usually written in the absence of active mental engagement, often have little meaning to students later.

Many of the introductory science courses we teach include a lecture component. In classes such as Introductory Biology or Anatomy and Physiology, there are nearly 200 students in a single room during the lectures. In other classes, such as Environmental Science and one of the Physical Science courses, there are only 20 to 50 students in the lecture sessions. We have explored two different techniques to help students get the most from our lecture classes.

Peer instruction (Goldschmid & Goldschmid, 1976; Mazur, 1997) is a well-researched technique in which the instructor breaks up the lecture into manageable segments lasting 10 to 15 minutes each. After a short lecture on a particular topic, the instructor presents the class with a question, often in multiple choice format. Students are given a brief amount of time in which to answer the question on their own and record an initial answer on a piece of paper. Next, students discuss the question with a neighbor and revise their own answer if appropriate. Finally, the instructor polls the class to see what fraction of the students has the right answer and discusses the problem if necessary. An example of a question used in the physical science class after a short lecture on Newton's laws of motion would be to select the correct path of a rolling ball after it emerges from a curved tube. PI helps break the monotony of a long lecture, enables students to check their understanding of material just covered, and allows students to interact with their peers. During those interactions, strong students can solidify their knowledge by explaining concepts to other students, and weaker students, who may have a variety of questions, can get them answered more efficiently and with less pressure than asking the professor.

Road maps are a second way we have tried to help students learn in a lecture setting. Road maps are handouts that outline the important concepts to be discussed during the lectures, useful auxiliary readings, and guiding questions on which the students should focus. The road maps also include structured spaces to guide note taking, along with questions to be answered and short activities to be performed in class. For example, a road map on cell cycles and cell division begins with a short list of important concepts, lists the relevant pages in the text along with two web sites for further information, then lists eight guiding questions such as "How do mitosis and cytokinesis differ between a plant cell and an animal cell?" These questions are then broken down into smaller parts or supporting activities to help the students answer them. Using the previous example, one activity is for students to fill out a table as a before-class homework assignment in which they list features of mitosis and cytokinesis in both plant and animal cells. Students later revise their table after discussing the question with peers during a short in-class activity. A second purpose of the road maps is to help students extract information from a science textbook. In the cited example, students are expected to complete the before-class homework assignment by reading the appropriate section in the text to find the answer.

Thus far, we have only assessed whether or not students find road maps useful as study tools and as a guide to help them focus on the most important concepts to be learned in the course. On both questions, students typically rate the road maps a little higher than a 5 out of 7 (where 7 represents "very useful"). In the near future, we intend to explore ways in which we can help students transfer the use of road maps to their future classes, by reducing the amount of detail on the maps as the semester progresses.

Helping Students Use Feedback

In many writing courses, students are expected to use feedback from the instructor to revise and improve the work that they have submitted and become better writers by revising (and, in the process, rethinking) their ideas. The same approach has also been applied to tests in noncomposition courses (Davidson, House, & Boyd, 1984; Juhler, Rech, From, & Brogan, 1998; Murray, 1990).

We are using the same approach in our science courses. Students have the option to regain a substantial fraction (usually between one-fourth and one-half) of the points they lose on exams either by writing a short summary of the information relevant to the question they missed or by reworking a problem which was done incorrectly, pointing out the errors in the original solution. Students are encouraged to seek help during this process by consulting the instructor or a teaching assistant. On an end-of-semester survey in one class, out of 50 respondents, 38 said that they took advantage of such an opportunity at least once. Of these 38, 25 mentioned that they felt it helped them learn the material and 36 wrote that they did it to boost their grade. Of the 12 who wrote that they did not use this opportunity, 8 said that they were satisfied with their grade and 3 mentioned that they did not have enough time to do it. We have recently begun to evaluate the educational impact of allowing students to correct errors on their exams by looking at the students' performance on subsequent tests and the final exam. Preliminary results show that in some classes, studentswho re-work their mid-semester exams earned higher final exam scores than students with equivalent mid-semester exam scores who did not.

Encouraging Students to seek Help

Many of the students in our courses struggle to master content. However, the ones who struggle the most are often those who we most wish would seek help. There are a variety of reasons given in the literature for this reluctance to seek help (Karabenick & Knapp, 1988; Nadler, 1983; Perrine, Lisle, & Tucker, 1995; Ryan, Pintrich, & Midgley, 2001) but few suggestions on what can be done to address this problem.

We have been investigating a possible solution to this problem by offering students an alternative to office hours called a "course center." Course centers are times during which the instructor is available for help in a location outside his or her office (usually a classroom); functionally, course centers are just like office hours that are not held in the instructor's office. There are two important reasons for holding these hours elsewhere. First, since the course center hours are not held in a professor's office, there is no chance that the instructor will be seen as doing "important work" that the student is interrupting. second, the rooms in which the course centers are held are large enough so that multiple students can come at the same time. Students can use the centers as a study area where they and their friends work on homework together and can get help if they need it (but will not feel as if they must have a question to ask immediately). We hope that course centers will help students feel that their college professors are approachable and make them more likely to seek help from them if it is needed in future courses. In some cases, course centers are run by undergraduate teaching assistants, who also run the labs and are often freshmen or sophomores who have recently completed our courses. Utilizing teaching assistants who are close in age and experience to the students can help students feel more comfortable in seeking help (Fingerson & Culley, 2001; Jacobs, 2002).

On an end-of-semester survey in a physical science class, students were asked to rank several options they had for getting help with the course material, including office hours and the course center. About 40% of students ranked the course center as their first choice in terms of ways to get help. When asked for reasons why they preferred to use the course center, many students wrote that they could work in groups with their friends and get help on the homework assignments from the instructor or the TAs without feeling any pressure. Some students also mentioned that the atmosphere of the course center was helpful to getting their work done. In addition, nearly 80% of the students surveyed said that just having a course center option available made them more likely to get help in the class. The most common reason cited for this was that the course center seemed to be set up solely for the purpose of helping students, which made them feel more comfortable about asking for help. In contrast, many students said that they felt as though they were inconveniencing the professor by asking for help during office hours.

Teaching Students to Work in Cooperative Groups

There is an enormous body of research showing that having students work in carefully structured cooperative groups can increase their learning and persistence in college (Johnson & Johnson, 1989, 1999; Slavin, 1991). Because of the lab requirement in most science courses, there are many natural opportunities for students to work in cooperative groups and to form friendships with and find study partners among their classmates. Forming such relationships and learning how to work effectively with other students can be critical to the success of developmental students (Fullilove & Treisman, 1990).

One activity involving groups, which we have implemented and evaluated, is the use of cooperative quizzes, in which a quiz is given to a group of students and every student in the group receives the same grade. Because such quizzes do not measure an individual student's knowledge, we do not use them as an assessment tool but instead as a learning tool. Cooperative quizzes are given at the end of the weekly lab periods, and the questions on the quiz are matched to the learning objectives provided to students at the beginning of the lab. A study performed in our anatomy and physiology course compared the students' class exam scores and "anatomy gain" scores in two different sections. The "anatomy gain" score was derived from a pre/posttest and designed to measure the amount of information a student learned during the course while controlling for any previous anatomy and physiology courses a student may have had.

In one section, students took the end-of-lab quiz cooperatively, with each student in the group randomly assigned to answer a given question of the quiz and with some questions to be answered by the group as a whole. In this format, every student in the group received the same quiz score. In the other section, all students took the quizzes individually. The students taking the cooperative quizzes outperformed the students taking individual quizzes both on the regular exams and in terms of the "anatomy gain" score. In addition, students taking the cooperative quizzes rated them a 3.87 out of 5 in terms of effectiveness in helping them prepare for exams (with a 5 being highly effective), whereas students taking individual quizzes rated those only a 3.48 out of 5. Finally, students taking cooperative quizzes reported a slightly higher satisfaction with their experience in the lab compared to students taking the individual quizzes (Jensen, 1996; Jensen, Moore, & Hatch, 2002).

Helping Students Overcome Science Anxiety

In today's increasingly technological society it is important for the average citizen to feel comfortable with science, or at least not to fear it. One of the goals of our developmental science courses is to help students regard science as something which they personally could learn. Many of our students have had prior negative experiences with science or a science course and are thus somewhat intimidated by the idea of taking a science class. One characteristic of many university science courses that can be intimidating to students is the large lecture class. Many of our developmental science courses are also taught in a lecture format because we want to help students learn how to benefit from such classes and maximize the amount they learn from a lecture. However, we also offer smaller classes taught in nontraditional formats to try to appeal to students who might be a little afraid of taking a large lecture science course and to help them overcome their science anxiety.

Our physical science course is taught in sections of 45 students each and involves virtually no lectures at all. As mentioned previously, the curriculum used in this class is known as Physics by Inquiry. Students spend the vast majority of class time working in groups of two or three to perform short experiments, make observations, develop their own theories as to how things work, and use those theories to try to predict the outcome of further experiments. The text provides needed background information and guides the students' attention to the important features of each experiment. One goal of the class is to help students learn some important scientific thinking skills such as logical and systematic thinking and proportional reasoning. A second goal is to give the students a taste of the process of real science, in which investigators look for patterns in nature and try to develop theories to explain those patterns and relate them to other known phenomena.

The groups in which the students work are kept stable for several weeks at a time, providing students with a support group and allowing them to learn how to work effectively in groups. Many of the standard mechanisms necessary for the formation of efficient cooperative groups (such as positive interdependence, individual accountability, attention to how each group works and how the group interactions can be improved, etc.) are incorporated in the class structure. The idea is that students who are intimidated by traditional science courses and have convinced themselves that they are "bad" at science will have fewer preconceptions about their abilities in this processoriented science course and feel more comfortable with the subject matter.

On an end-of-semester survey, students were asked to compare their attitude towards physics before and after taking this class. Out of 59 responses, 32 reported having a better attitude, 11 reported no change and 16 did not respond to this particular question. Some responses typical of the students who reported an improved attitude were:

Before I took this class I was deathly afraid of physics. I had heard so many horror stories about how hard the material was and how the tests were so difficult. Now that I have experienced this course my attitude has changed. Sure it was difficult for me at times to understand the material, but it is all a part of learning. I am glad that I had the opportunity to take the course in the style it was presented in.

I think I'm less afraid of the term physics. I would not have taken this course if it had been titled intro to physics because just the term frightened me. I realize now that it's not as scary.

I didn't take physics in high school because I was told it was really hard by everyone, which scared me away since I'm terrible at science. Now I know that physics isn't all about math, it's about learning the way things work. To me, that is much more interesting.

In the future, we intend to expand our investigation of the effects of our courses on various student attitudes and compare them with students' improvements in their quantitative reasoning skills.

Conclusion

Scienc\e courses can play an important role in a developmental education program by providing a disciplinary context in which students can synthesize their skills in reading, writing, and mathematics and a testing ground for conducting research on developmental students and developing best practices for classroom instruction. In addition, such courses give students opportunities to practice higher-order thinking skills such as application, evaluation, and synthesis; achieve success in a science course and overcome science anxiety; and develop academically productive attitudes such as placing importance on attending class and seeking help when necessary. As a further benefit, our science courses are worth college credit and fulfill science core distribution requirements. This avoids the stigma often associated with "remedial" courses and keeps students on track to graduate in the shortest possible time.

Despite the benefits and opportunities for the science course we have discussed, it appears that, at present, there is little interest in science courses in the developmental education community. We hope that the preceding discussion will encourage developmental educators to take a closer look at the science courses offered at their institutions and perhaps form partnerships with science departments to expand the courses and learning opportunities available to all students.

Developmental science courses help prepare students in ways that cannot be duplicated by a reading, writing, or mathematics course.

Science classes offer an ideal opportunity for students to practice higher-order thinking skills.

Peer Instruction helps break the monotony of a long lecture, enables students to check their understanding of material just covered, and allows students to interact with their peers.

The course center seemed to be set up solely for the purpose of helping students, which made them feel more comfortable about asking for help.

Students who have convinced themselves that they are "bad" at science will have fewer preconceptions about their abilities in this process-oriented science course.

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Leonardo Hsu

Assistant Professor

lhsu@umn.edu

Murray Jensen

Associate Professor

Randy Moore

Professor

Jay Hatch

Associate Professor

General College

128 Pleasant Street, SE

University of Minnesota

Minneapolis, MN 55455

Copyright National Center for Developmental Education Fall 2005

Source: Journal of Developmental Education

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