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What Peer-Assisted Learning Can Teach Us

By Jeffrey White

In my role directing the Learning Commons, I have had the opportunity to connect nationally with practitioners and researchers in the field of peer-led course-based learning assistance (CLA), such as Supplemental Instruction (SI) and its variation Peer-Assisted Learning (PAL). Both SI and PAL focus on difficult courses, especially those in which the rate of students receiving Ds and Fs or withdrawing (the DFW rate) is high. The Learning Commons has been collaborating for the last several months with the School of Nursing to create a PAL program for NRS 325 and, more recently, with the School of Business and the School of Engineering to use PAL to support MTH 141 and PHY 204 students. Peer PAL facilitators provide opportunities for structured practice with course material in weekly hour-long online PAL sessions. Over the summer, I participated in an online SI supervisor training with the International Center for SI to improve my skills and knowledge in this field. Through my research on CLA and my training on supervising such programs, I have come to appreciate how much the practices of these programs can teach us as faculty.

When I train our PAL facilitators on the practices they will use with students in the targeted difficult courses, I develop their skills in developing structured PAL sessions, using tools to shape those group learning experiences, and focusing on assessing student learning. Here are some takeaways related to structure and facilitation techniques that may help us as faculty develop our own teaching and interaction skills in our online environments.

Structure

Both SI and PAL sessions are built on a three-part structure:

  • The opener is a 5-7 minute warm-up with the material that also provides the facilitator with a sense of where the students are in their learning;
  • The workout is an activity in which students engage in collaborative learning and practice with the material. There is usually more than one workout in a session. Workouts can allow for microlearning moments that can be chained together during the whole session;
  • The closer is a short (ca. 5 minute) summative assessment activity in which students demonstrate how much they have advanced with the material.

This structure is obvious (Don’t most things have a beginning middle and end?), but we can often forget this. Following best practices in lesson and course design, we train our PAL facilitators to design their sessions backwards, starting with the closer.

Facilitation techniques

Three facilitation techniques are foundational to our PAL sessions:

  • Redirection
  • Wait time
  • Checking for understanding

Redirection relates to student questions. Our PAL facilitators are trained to redirect questions back to the student’s own self (memory of readings, lectures, other learning experiences, and prior knowledge), resources (notes, books, websites), and other students in the class. PAL facilitators don’t answer questions directly. They avoid explaining and opt to redirect attention toward the collective whole and collaborative learning.

Many of us already use wait time in our classes after we ask questions to students or when student ask questions. This allows time for students to process information for themselves or collaboratively. The SI training this summer also showed me the power of wait time after a student gives an answer. Again, this can allow for processing time that may lead to alternative answers or other questions.

Checking for understanding is essential for us to know if students are developing skills and knowledge related to our course material. PAL facilitators check for understanding during all three stages of a PAL session and can do so at any time they think checking for understanding will help clarify or advance students’ skills and knowledge.

Applying these elements to interaction with students

As faculty, we can structure our asynchronous and synchronous engagement with students with a simple three-part approach. Keeping the end in mind through backward design also helps prevent us from getting lost in activities that go unassessed. Allowing time for an opener helps everyone to warm up and provides us with a sense of the students’ growing skills and knowledge, and a closer highlights both the learning that occurred and learning that still needs to be done.

The facilitation strategies that are shared by SI and PAL are basic to teaching, and yet they are easy to overlook. As we review lesson plans, create asynchronous learning experiences, and teach in synchronous sessions, we can ask ourselves, “Am I redirecting questions? Am I allowing for wait time? Am I checking for understanding?” and move beyond these questions by reflecting on how deeply we are applying these facilitation techniques and assessing the results.

Considering these elements of structure and facilitation can also demystify the processes of planning, leading, and debriefing a course session by breaking down our teaching experiences into manageable parts and providing tools for analysis.

We can learn still more from peer educator communities of practice in higher education. In my next contribution to the TLC blog, I’ll share more on collaborative learning techniques and learning strategies in the virtual PAL session and its application in the virtual college classroom.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons in BC 163 (and online everywhere) and is an instructor in International Languages and Cultures. Currently, Jeffrey is the past president of the Northwest College Reading and Learning Association. He can be reached at white@up.edu or through the University’s MS Teams via chat or video meeting.

 

 

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The Revitalized Core: A Fall 2020 Update

Door and books
Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash

Some of you may remember many eons ago, in those halcyon days pre-pandemic, that UP’s Academic Senate approved a “revitalized University Core Curriculum.” It was approved, to be specific, in November of 2019 after several years of gathering input and information, committee work, and consultation with departments across the UP community. The intention was and is to phase in the revitalized Core for entering students in the Fall of 2021. The purpose of this post is to update the UP community on where the Core revitalization process stands and on plans for moving forward.

First, a number of people have asked whether it even makes sense to proceed with implementation plans given the extraordinary circumstances of our present academic life. This is a reasonable question. UP’s academic leadership is, however, in favor of moving forward for a variety of reasons.

For one, a University Core Curriculum is a very slow moving thing that impacts all student academic experiences and requires years to revise. The UP Core was last substantively revised over 20 years ago, and our recent revitalization process is now in year 4 of a projected 8 year cycle. To stop or delay now would put much important work, and the quality of the Core, at serious risk.

Relatedly, the Core does need to be updated. Our Core is behind the academic times in regard to coverage of key topics such as diversity, equity, inclusion, and racial justice, and our Core often lacks the sense of communal, progressive, and intentional intellectual endeavor that is essential to a quality liberal arts education. The prior Core has served UP well, and offers many excellent classes, but after 20 years it needs revitalization.

At the same time, there is a clear recognition that the Core revitalization cannot proceed as it would in “normal” academic times. As we push forward, we are also actively thinking about ways to keep forward momentum without unrealistic asks of faculty and staff. We want to be in communication about what is realistic, and we are happy to compromise.

As one example, in trade for some advance planning for the start of phased implementation in the Fall of 2021 we are working to minimize (and in most cases eliminate) Core assessment exercises this 2020-2021 academic year. We will still ask people to help lay a foundation for effective assessment of the Core in the future – but given the circumstances it seems unnecessary to assess a Core that is being phased out during such as challenging year. As we push forward with the revitalization process, we’ll continue to actively find such compromises in ways that balance the quality of the future Core with the real human needs of faculty and staff.

So, what is the future of the revitalization process? One feature of the revitalized Core is a series of progressive levels for Core courses.

  • This starts with a new introductory Anchor Seminar (as an introduction to the liberal arts and to UP’s Core);
  • Continues with a “Foundation Level” largely comprised of existing Core courses;
  • Moves to an “Exploration Level” offering new interdisciplinary opportunities for courses that build on Foundation level classes;
  • And culminates with an “Integration Level” that will largely involve completing a portfolio encouraging reflection on Core educational experiences.

For the Fall of 2021, our plan is to only start the Anchor Seminar and the new Foundation Level. Because the Foundation Level is largely comprised of courses in the current Core, the new work should be minimal for most faculty and academic staff – mostly involving new student learning outcomes that can guide course organization towards consistency and coherence with a new set of six “Habits of Heart and Mind” that should be the result of a UP education. We will also be identifying approximately eight regular faculty to teach sections of the new Anchor Seminar. We hope to identify these faculty this Fall of 2020 so that departments have time to plan for the one course a faculty members gives up to teach in the Anchor Seminar. More information about teaching the new Anchor Seminar will be forthcoming.

The next phase of revitalized Core implementation for the 2022-2023 academic year will be the new “Exploration Level” courses. While the Foundation Level courses will come exclusively from CAS as UP’s liberal arts college, Exploration level courses can come from any college or professional school – as long as the courses employ a liberal arts lens. We’ll be sharing much more information about these courses over time, and will have opportunities to intentionally plan course possibilities in the 2021-2022 academic year run-up to implementation.

The final phase of revitalized Core implementation will likely start in 2023-2024 with the new integration assignment (the completion of a portfolio) in collaboration with majors. By the Fall semester of 2024, all students should be taking the revitalized Core and the current Core will be completely phased out.

Core director by a campus window
Dr. Andrew Guest is serving as Core Director as of the Fall of 2020.

We have many practical questions to deal with within this implementation timeline, and will try to provide more regular updates here and elsewhere on the UP website. if you have specific questions please reach out to me in my role as the new Core Curriculum Director – guesta@up.edu. As one near-term update priority, I am putting together a document outlining key differences between the current Core and the revitalized Core in hopes that will facilitate advising and discussions about transfer credits. I hope to post something about that here, and elsewhere, soon.

I also appreciate any follow-up questions; the essence of my job as Core Director is to generate collaborative ideas about how to make sure the revitalized Core fits our shared mission, builds on faculty expertise, and enhances the educational experience of our students!

 

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Connecting your Students to Tutors and Writing Assistance

With Governor Kate Brown’s order that Oregonians all stay at home, we are all now navigating working from off campus as we prepare to enter week three of this unprecedented change due to the Coronavirus. Many of our students are adapting, but others are struggling with living spaces, internet access, multiple online teaching platforms, and financial resources. Increasingly, students are requesting online tutoring from the Learning Commons, but many more could likely use the social peer support that our tutors can provide. Here’s how you can help your students access peer tutoring in our virtual Learning Commons.

Inform your students that requesting appointments with tutors in the virtual Learning Commons hasn’t changed from earlier in the semester.

To access the Writing Center and Math Resource Center, students can make appointments on WCONLINE at https://up.mywconline.net.

All other appointments can be made via the usual email request lines:

Nursing Tutoring: For individual and group peer tutoring in any of the 100–400 level nursing classes, BIO 205, and anatomy and physiology courses students should send an email to nrstutor@up.edu.  For biology and A&P tutoring, they can also contact biotutor@up.edu to make an appointment.

The Language Studio: Students can access language tutor hotlines at chinesetutor@up.edu, frenchtutor@up.edu, germantutor@up.edu, or spanishtutor@up.edu.

Natural Sciences Center: Students can request biology, chemistry, and physics tutoring appointments at biotutor@up.edu, chemtutor@up.edu, or physicstutor@up.edu.

Business Tutoring: Students can request for tutoring in economics (econtutor@up.edu), accounting (accountingtutor@up.edu), finance (financetutor@up.edu), OTM (otmtutor@up.edu), business law (bizlaw@up.edu), and MTH 141/Finite Math (math141@up.edu).

Speech & Presentation Lab: Students can improve your presentation skills online by requesting an appointment at speech@up.edu.

Group Work Lab: Students can meet as a group to develop their project with a Group Work Lab consultant at groupwork@up.edu.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering: Students can access the computer science tutors at StepUP@up.edu.

All peer tutoring is taking place in a Learning Commons Virtual Tutoring Team in Microsoft Teams. We’ve trained most all the tutors on how to use this platform, and they are finding new ways to turn Teams into an excellent tutoring platform.

What happened to drop-in math tutoring?

On March 22, we held our first drop-in math support online for Sunday Afternoon Math (SAM), and then we started offering regular “drop-in” math tutoring on March 29; we will offer this Sundays through Thursdays from 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM for at least the next couple weeks. Sunday Afternoon Math runs each Sunday from 3:00 PM until 5:00 PM. Students can access our drop-in math tutoring Teams page by clicking this link.

During this time of online learning during a pandemic, the Learning Commons offers your students the opportunity to connect, learn, and succeed in reaching their goals. Please encourage them to access our peer tutors by sharing the above information in synchronous meetings and on your Moodle page.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons in BC 163 and is an instructor in International Languages and Cultures. Currently, Jeffrey is the president of the Northwest College Reading and Learning Association. He can be reached at white@up.edu or through MS Teams via chat.

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Teaching and learning resources for these trying times

We’ve all been in a crunch over the past week and a half as the spread and unknown reach of the Coronavirus sent us all on many directions. During this time, our colleagues have been learning new systems like Microsoft Teams and TechSmith Relay, and our students have been trying to adjust to our online teaching and content delivery in environments so different than UP. In the Learning Commons, we been training tutors to do their work online in MS Teams, hosting trainings for faculty, and developing content for students. As I write this first Coronavirus era TLC blog entry, I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s comment: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” But Twain didn’t have the Internet and couldn’t compress is writing by using hyperlinks like I’ve done below.

So, to be brief, here are some basic ideas that I’ve been gathering in these initial days of COVID-19:

Communicate: Be clear with your students about how you will communicate (i.e., which platforms (Moodle, Teams, Zoom, etc.) you will use. Try to use what we have available here at UP for the sake of consistency and keeping FERPA in mind. Communicate goals of task such as listening and watching lectures and doing readings and include formative assessments that help students know they are reaching those goals.

Chunk: Provide your content in chunks (by day, week, topic, goal); break things down. If you are recording lecture videos. Several 10 minute videos will be better than an hour long recording. You can provide assessment opportunities between videos. If you have students spread out in multiple time zones and want to do some synchronous meeting, hold two or three shorter meetings at different times, so that all can participate at a reasonable time.

Community: Keep a narrative of support going. We’ve all be drinking from a fire hose this last week or so. Encourage your students to be kind to themselves, to build community with each other, and to use some of the strategies for adjusting to online learning that the Learning Commons published last week.

Connect: Provide opportunities for your students to connect with each other and you. This can be done through Teams, but also through other means, like social media, chat, texting, etc. Connect your students to the Learning Commons tutoring which is now all online. Connect yourself to opportunities for learning how to use Teams, TechSmith Relay, and other UP platforms by joining the Faculty Training Sandbox in Teams where training is ongoing or checking out the excellent support documentation that our colleagues in Academic Technology Services and Innovations have developed. You can also link to this from the top of your Moodle page under “Moodle Support.” Also, you may want to turn on your notifications in Moodle, Outlook, and Teams during these days of transition and an increased need for connection.

Kindness: Take care of yourself and be a comfort to your students. These days of COVID-19 are trying times. Our students report feeling overwhelmed and stressed. Remind yourself and your students that we are all growing in the face of difficulties. Things may take longer to accomplish in the coming days and weeks, but we are all learning to create meaningful learning that is central to the UP experience.

I invite you to explore the links above as we re-imagine this semester and our roles as faculty and innovate for the future of our students and our great institution.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons in Buckley Center 163 (and now everywhere online). He is a faculty member in International Languages and Cultures. Jeffrey welcomes the opportunity to help faculty practice and become comfortable with UP’s tools for online teaching and learning. He can be reached at white@up.edu or via Teams in the Faculty Training Sandbox.

 

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Welcome to The Study

Students often need modeling of effective study strategies

When students come to the Learning Commons for content tutoring, they often could use more work on how to study in general and in the content area. How one approaches studying in one discipline variesLogo for The Study: Your Peer Connection to Strategic Learning from other disciplines, and how one approaches studying impacts the grade. We see this particularly when comparing studying in the sciences to studying in the humanities. For example, reading a biology text book chapter requires a different approach than reading a qualitative research report or an essay.

To support students in introductory biology and physics courses, the Learning Commons is piloting The Study, a small-scale study strategies tutoring program that will help students better plan for learning in these subjects and support them in reading, note-taking, and test preparation in the sciences.

Our goals are to increase in the use of metacognitive approaches to learning, confidence, and motivations as revealed in survey data and improve student academic performance as shown by mid-term to final grade data, ultimately reducing D and F grades, as well as course withdrawals. Ultimately, we want to support student retention and graduation.

The motivation for our creation of this pilot also stems from our experiences with tutors sharing and modeling study strategies with tutees. For example, one of our biology tutors Caitlyn worked with a nursing student in a biology course who came in this past semester after receiving a D on a test and was concerned about not making at least a B for the semester. Caitlyn is one of our best tutors for supporting study strategies and will always ask students how they are studying. It became clear to her that the nursing student was not distributing her biology learning over time, not using the textbook as a support, taking far too many notes verbatim (in invariably falling behind while not really taking in the lecture), not transforming notes into new formats (both visual and verbal) and study guides, and not doing self-testing. Over the second half of the semester, the student’s test grades climbed, and she received an A on the final.

The Study is based on findings in the neuroscience of learning and sound learning strategies that have been researched in educational psychology. The pilot program will launch during the second and third weeks of the semester. We will start with a tutor in biology (Caitlyn) to support nursing students in biology courses and another tutor in physics to support engineering students in PHYS 204 and PHYS 205. Students will be able to make appointments with tutors in The Study by emailing requests to TheStudy@up.edu. Tutoring sessions will focus on the following study strategies topics:

  1. Planning time for durable learning and the Study Cycle
  2. Goal setting
  3. Notetaking and organizing concepts
  4. Transforming and synthesizing notes into new formats
  5. Active reading strategies
  6. Self-testing
  7. Test preparation
  8. Post-test performance evaluation

Based on our experiences with students in the Learning Commons. “Planning time for durable learning and the Study Cycle” will likely be foundational for most students using The Study. This pilot program differs from content tutoring that we provide in the Learning Commons. While our content tutors are trained in supporting student study strategies, The Study focuses on disciplinary study strategy work in the context of a content area. In the above case of Caitlyn and her student, they did little in terms of pure content tutoring.

What is the Study Cycle?

The Study Cycle was developed several years ago by Dr. Frank Christ who was a pioneer in learning assistance in higher education. The cycle consists of five steps and the integration of intensive study sessions into students’ schedules. In our work in the Learning Commons we refer to the study sessions as “intentional study sessions.” The five steps are:

  1. Preview before attending class to activate your memory and develop questions
  2. Attend class, take notes, and ask your questions.
  3. Review sometime after class to consolidate or annotate notes and develop more questions.
  4. Study during short and interleaved and focused intentional study sessions.
  5. Self-test how well you can explain or apply the material from the day.

Intentional study sessions (ISS) last anywhere from 30 to 70 minutes and involve goals setting for the session, active studying toward the goals, a short break, and a short review to consolidate material and develop questions for the next study session or class. Students then interleave study sessions. For example, a student studies in a period of a few hours biology, then philosophy, followed by a session for another class.

Our objectives for The Study

During our planning process, we developed four program objectives for The Study:

  1. Participants will be able to apply the Study Cycle and principles of distributed learning, varied practice, and interleaving to their weekly study plans.
  2. Participants will be able to apply effective study strategies in one or more of the following areas: notetaking and processing notes, reading strategies, preparing for tests and test-taking, evaluating test performance.
  3. Affectively, participants report feeling more confidence and motivation when engaging in course work and, cognitively, they report increased use metacognitive approaches in terms of planning and strategy selection and application.
  4. Participation in The Study leads to improvements in the participants’ academic performance.

These will be measured and documented through tutor reports, participant surveys, and grade data. Depending on the results of the pilot, we will either expand in the fall or continue refining the program on a small scale.

For more information on The Study or to discuss ways of incorporating study strategies into your courses and office hours, contact Jeffrey White, Learning Commons administrator at white@up.edu.

For further reading

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A., (2014). Make it stick. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K.A., Marsh, E. J., Mitchell, N.J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective techniques: promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58, doi:10.1177/1529100612453266.

Hattie, J. A. & Donoghue, G. M. (2016). Learning strategies: a synthesis and conceptual model. npj Science of Learning (1), 1-13. doi:10.1038/npjscilearn.2016.13.

LSU Center for Academic Success (n.d.). How to Study for Note-Based Courses. Retrieved from https://www.lsu.edu/cas/earnbettergrades/note-based.php.

McGuire, S. Y. & McGuire, S. (2015). Teach students how to learn. Sterling, VA: Stylus.