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The "Lit Masters" concept is inspired by and adapted from one of my colleagues, Jenn Manak, in our education department. Students who are novices to reading the literature often are overwhelmed when assigned a paper to read and may struggle in group discussions. The strategy is to assign students to a semester-long group with designated roles for each paper that require them to produce a low-stakes artifact prior to class. During class time groups discuss the paper and it is followed with a debrief.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| LD_Discussion Group Roles_2023_Handout.docx | 21.43 KB |
After completing this activity students should be able to
- Summarize the relevance and findings of an article using either written notes or a graphic.
- Connect content and theories from this course and other STEM courses to the article.
- Create discussion questions that are open-ended and invite conversations that clarify content in the article as well as foster curiosity about the research and its relevance.
- Articulate in a reflection how this approach has impacted, hopefully positively, their ability to learn from the literature.
I used this for the first time in my bioinorganic elective course which included 14 students of differing majors (chemistry, biochemistry/molecular biology, biology, and marine biology), juniors and seniors, and a pre-requisite of second semester organic chemistry. Given the experiential diversity of the cohort I was trying to develop a strategy so that everyone would feel comfortable to contribute and at the end believe that their ability to read the literature had improved in some form. After the groups are formed and I passed out the handout, I explained to the class the first three learning goals as well as the opportunity to use new software that might be useful in other courses or a business setting. There was no formal PowerPoint used as our classrooms lend themselves for more roundtable discussion.
A total of five papers were used over the course of the semester with students submitting the artifact for their role prior to the start of class. The roles rotated so each student was in each role one time and the fifth time the groups decided amongst themselves. With each iteration the artifacts improved and the discussion director and digital researcher & connector started to incorporate suggestions from other members of the group as the students became more comfortable with approaching the papers. The content organizers were encouraged to use Microsoft Visio for creating the one page graphic as a way of introducing them to a tool they could use in other classes or in later professional endeavors. For those unfamiliar it is software for creation of flowcharts and diagrams and is available to our students as part of their campus Microsoft Office package. Another option is piktochart (piktochart.com) which offers a free version. The students had 40 of the 50 minutes of class time to discuss then I led a 10 minute debrief based on what I had been hearing in the different groups as visited for about 10 minutes each. In my course instructor evaluations and an optional written reflection they really liked the approach and by the end believed they were much more comfortable with reading the literature. The most important take away to many students was that they didn't have to know or understand everything because that is what they internalize as a faculty expectation.
Evaluation
The assignments accounted for 25% of their overall grade in a 300 level course. I holistically graded out of 10 points, half points were included, and the low for me was 8/10. Each role was generally scored lower in the early iterations.
Lower scores reflected students' struggle with the balance of specificity versus the bigger picture. Examples include the following. The summarizer would write over a page so in class it took much longer than the target of two minutes. The discussion director had questions that could be answered by reading lines in the text or were so specific that not everyone could contribute to the conversation. The content organizer had so much content it was challenging to read or the flow of ideas was not logical. The digital research & connector would note classes rather than topics/concepts in classes or include links to other papers/tangents without context or curation.