In the midst of putting together the syllabus and readings for my origin-of-life class, I started to wonder if I was asking too much of the students – given we’re still in the season of Covid, and we might still be all-remote when the fall semester begins. Our class will essentially be reading and discussing primary literature. Some of the older ‘classic’ papers are not too difficult to read because they’re usually shorter and not as densely-packed with content and jargon. Unfortunately that’s not true of more recent articles. Even I have trouble reading them if I’m not steeped in the subtopic at hand; and origin-of-life papers cover many areas not in my wheelhouse.
The students will struggle with some of the papers, but that’s not intrinsically a bad thing.
I’m building in guides that include some pre-reading questions that encourage students to look up relevant information before they dive into the papers. I’m including a mixture of easier-to-read review articles coupled with the key research papers. I’m also encouraging students to write reflections on their work that may include things that puzzle them, and to build a glossary for new terminology they encounter. And I’m encouraging them to work together on answering questions in the reading guides. Final projects will also be collaborative.
Will the collaborative aspects help the students
not feel as overwhelmed when they encounter the seemingly obtuse literature? I’m
not sure, so I turned to see what the literature has to say about this. Over
the years I’ve read a number of pedagogical papers and articles about “group
work” and “peer learning”; I can tell you that the results are mixed, at least
in what I think are the best studies. It looks like a muddle. But there might
be some theoretical underpinnings for the messy observations, and this comes
from an area I’ve followed for a while: Cognitive Load Theory.
I’m not sure how I missed the 2018 paper (which I
discovered last week) that I’ll be discussing today, perhaps because it was
published in a journal I have never heard of (citation shown in the picture
below). I’ve read quite a bit from two of the co-authors, Paul Kirschner and
John Sweller, and have generally found their arguments persuasive in the past.
Of particular interest, the present paper covers both in-person collaboration
but also addresses computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), which
seems especially important in a time of Covid.
The paper begins with a short overview of cognitive load theory before diving into issues related to collaborative learning. The authors summarize the (possibly elusive) goal as follows: “Although in the short run, collaborative learning results in group members trying to successfully perform a certain learning task or solve a specific problem together, in the long run, as an instructional method, it is very important that all members of the group develop effective experience working together (i.e. domain-generalized group knowledge) that facilitates every member in acquiring domain-specific knowledge from this combined effort.” [emphasis mine]
Note that solving the specific problem is not the main goal, at least pedagogically. As to the long-term goal, pundits often tout the first part to be of pedagogical importance (teaching ‘soft skills’ as something employers want) but they neglect the second part that I think is much more important. I emphasized the word ‘every’ because to me, that’s the trickiest part in designing effective assignments for group work. I mostly don’t have to teach the first part (domain-generalized group knowledge) because learning these skills is (mostly) biologically primary. But I might have to help grease the wheels – and that’s where useful tips one often reads about how to structure group work can prove effective.
The second part (domain-specific knowledge) is my main concern. That’s primarily why I’m there as an instructor with domain-specific knowledge that, being biologically secondary, is difficult to acquire without being explicitly taught. Different settings (e.g. fully remote, hybrid, face-to-face) and/or different types of problems (e.g. mathematical, philosophical, scientific, historical) require designing the activities differently. Hence, as the authors caution: “It is possible that under certain circumstances, collaboration facilitates the learning of biologically secondary information while under certain circumstances it interferes with that learning.” I think this is why we’ve seen mixed results.
From cognitive load theory’s point of view, whether or not collaboration will be effective depends on the extraneous cognitive load imposed due to “task related transactive activities” on the one hand, and pooling resources to mutually overcome the limits of individual working memory stores on the other hand. Thus, one needs to pay careful attention to the prior content knowledge of the students (both quantity and asymmetry), the complexity of the task at hand, prior collaborative experience of the students, and what domain-specific guided teaching is needed to both reduce extraneous cognitive load and help manage intrinsic cognitive load. Table 2 in the paper summarizes the key factors.
In assigning previous group work, I’ve taken some of these principles into account to varying degrees: task complexity, task guidance and support, team size, team roles, team composition. I have not done this systematically, nor have I coalesced on a set of best practices. I’ve had my students fill out a short questionnaire early in the semester to learn what background domain knowledge they have and something nebulous about their ‘personality’. To be frightfully honest, I don’t think I know what I’m doing for the most part.
I’ve paid less attention to the “transactive” parts – the mechanics of collaboration as students interact with each other – mostly out of ignorance. I only step in to head off what might be egregious problems, but I mostly just let them work things out. However, reading this paper made me think more carefully about the transactive parts given the ever-more-likely looming possibility that we will be all remote this semester. With virtual interactions, where it’s much harder to read body language or tone, and with increased asynchronous interactions, more scaffolding needs to be built in. The authors put it this way: “The more the channel of collaboration mimics a face-to-face interaction, the less of a load collaboration will place on working memory because it relies on biologically primary knowledge we have…”
Needless to say, I’m finding all this overwhelming. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing, and it helps me empathize with my students who are likely to feel overwhelmed at different points in the semester. My origin-of-life class is composed of juniors and seniors, many of whom already know each other, and may have worked together on prior tasks. On the other hand, in my first-year general chemistry course, students do not know each other, and may meet for the first time online. While I have some group project work in mind, I have to do much more work thinking about how to structure or scaffold those interactions so that students can work effectively without wasting precious cognitive resources. Never a dull moment as a teacher, I suppose.
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