Remote-friendly student project presentations enable creativity and risk-taking
2021-03-29
(Press-News.org) ANN ARBOR--In a two-year study that could help guide educators developing the post-pandemic new normal, student groups at the University of Michigan assigned to make video presentations showed more creativity and risk-taking than groups making conventional in-person presentations.
"Given the importance of project-based learning, our study provides a way to turn virtual limitations into an advantage," said Fei Wen, U-M associate professor of chemical engineering. "We can enhance the student experience and learning outcomes."
Higher education, along with society at large, anticipates a shift in the balance between in-person and remote activities even after COVID-19 is controlled, say Wen and colleagues. While many might assume hands-on learning is best done entirely in person, the study presents an alternative perspective.
The team began conducting the research in 2017--well before anyone knew COVID-19 was coming--as an effort to examine how different formats improved engaged learning outcomes. They split the students in a mass and heat transfer chemical engineering class into two cohorts: one doing an in-person presentation to high school students, with a poster and a demonstration; and the other making videos posted online. The 248 students who participated self-reported the degree to which their method enabled creativity, risk-taking, teamwork, self-confidence, communication and social responsibility.
"This turned out to be really timely," Wen said. "We did this without realizing the world would be switching to virtual."
At first, the students had some doubts about the video format. But the study revealed its potential. For one, it unlocked a larger range of experiments that the student teams could demonstrate--they were no longer limited to something that would run in a few minutes. Experiments that needed hours or days could be shown with time-lapse approaches.
In an in-person presentation, students have to get the demo right the first time. In contrast, a video can be reshot until the experiment works properly, enabling students to dream up more difficult concepts.
In addition, the video format encouraged a larger range of narrative methods. The "talking head" approach may most closely resemble a conventional presentation, but students also performed skits to explain concepts, added background music to the demonstrations or made the entire presentation into a song. They also used multiple locations, special effects and animation.
"The change in student perception before and after the project was really surprising to us," said Andrew Zak, a Ph.D. student in chemical engineering and first author of the study in the Journal of Chemical Education. "Heading into the project, most students felt the in-person presentation would have a greater impact on four of the six learning outcomes, but after completing the project, only social responsibility was more positively impacted by the in-person format."
Social responsibility means understanding their obligations to act for the common good as engineers. Unlike students assigned to in-person presentations, the video cohort didn't interact with high school students. Their presentations were on the web for anyone to access. Wen believes that this accounts for the lower ratings in social impact.
She has ideas about how to address that, such as arranging a video call with a high school class. However, she recognizes barriers as well, such as the reduced access to technology in low-income schools. It's an area she intends to explore further.
INFORMATION:
This study was supported by the U-M College of Engineering and the Center for Research in Learning and Teaching, as well as Wen's CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation.
Written by Kate McAlpine
Links
Study abstract:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c01033
Fei Wen:
https://che.engin.umich.edu/people/fei-wen/
Course YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBpw-AyX_Sw8EVsKObSiUVw
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-03-29
More physicians and pharmacists are advocating for patients to be made aware of animal byproducts contained in common medications, according to new research in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine. Common medications, including widely used blood thinners and hormones, are often derived from animal byproducts and prescribed without consulting the patient about their beliefs.
"Patients deserve to know what their medications are made of, yet this information is rarely shared," said Sara Reed, student doctor at Lincoln Memorial University (LMU) DeBusk ...
2021-03-29
Climate change is altering the world we share with all living things. But it's surprisingly difficult to single out climate change as an extinction threat for any one particular species protected under the Endangered Species Act.
To date, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has only formally considered impacts from climate change in listing actions for four animal species and one alpine tree.
But the effects of climate change extend to temperate climates as well. A new analysis of population data published in the journal Ecosphere shows that climate change represents a specific extinction threat for an endangered coastal lupine plant.
Biologists including Eleanor Pardini at Washington University in St. Louis have tracked all of the known stands ...
2021-03-29
HOUSTON - (March 29, 2021) - This could be where the rubber truly hits the road.
Rice University scientists have optimized a process to convert waste from rubber tires into graphene that can, in turn, be used to strengthen concrete.
The environmental benefits of adding graphene to concrete are clear, chemist James Tour said.
"Concrete is the most-produced material in the world, and simply making it produces as much as 9% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions," Tour said. "If we can use less concrete in our roads, buildings and bridges, we can eliminate some of the emissions at the very start."
Recycled tire waste is already used as a component of Portland cement, but graphene has been proven to strengthen cementitious materials, ...
2021-03-29
SUVA, Fiji (March 29, 2021) - A new study published in the journal Environmental Science and Policy addresses the impacts of COVID-19 and Cyclone Harold on Indo-Fijians engaged in small scale fisheries.
The paper says that countries, including Fiji, need to address ethical and social justice considerations and the politics of recovery efforts by putting vulnerable and marginalized groups front and center in the aftermath of pandemics and natural disasters.
What countries cannot afford is for economic recovery efforts to put additional burdens and risk on those invested in the SSF sector, and cause further widening of inequities, and increase ...
2021-03-29
A new study out of the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in humans, chimpanzees, rhesus macaques and baboons has found key differences in early gene expression in response to pathogen exposure, highlighting the importance of choosing the right animal model for the right questions. The study was published on March 26 in END ...
2021-03-29
A national survey of parents revealed that most parents who used ride-share services did so with their children, but only half of the respondents reported that children who were 8 years or younger traveled in the recommended child car seats or booster seats when in ride-share vehicles. Among parents of children in this age group, over 40 percent used only a seat belt for their child, while 10 percent allowed their child to travel on a lap or unrestrained. Overall, parents reported lower rates of child car seat use in ride-share compared with how their child usually travels. Findings were published in the journal Academic Pediatrics.
"Our results are concerning, as ...
2021-03-29
Barcelona researchers at the Hospital Clínic-IDIBAPS Research Institute, the University of Barcelona and the SOLTI academic cancer research group have shown that the molecular classification of breast cancer, which divides it into four subtypes (Luminal A, Luminal B, HER2-enriched and Basal-like) is useful for predicting the benefits of treatment in patients with advanced hormone-sensitive breast cancer. This is the largest study to have shown the value of the biomarker, and the first to do so in the context of a CDK4/6 inhibitor like ribociclib.
The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), was coordinated by Professor Aleix Prat, head of the Medical Oncology ...
2021-03-29
CHAPEL HILL, NC - A team led by scientists at the UNC School of Medicine discovered an important vulnerability of the AIDS-causing retrovirus HIV, and has shown in preclinical experiments that a widely used diabetes drug, metformin, seems able to exploit this vulnerability.
The scientists, whose study is published in Nature Immunology, found that HIV, when it infects immune cells called CD4 T cells, helps fuel its own replication by boosting a key process in the cells' production of chemical energy. They also found that the diabetes drug metformin inhibits the same process and thereby suppresses HIV replication in these cells, in both cell-culture and mouse experiments.
"These findings suggest that metformin and other drugs that reduce T cell metabolism ...
2021-03-29
PHOENIX, Ariz. -- March 29, 2021 -- A review of more than 20 studies by researchers at Arizona State University and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, suggests that nonalcoholic fatty-liver disease (NAFLD) is a growing dietary problem for children across the globe.
"The prevalence of fatty-liver disease is escalating not only in adults, but also in children," said Johanna DiStefano, Ph.D., a Professor and head of TGen's Diabetes and Fibrotic Disease Unit, and the review's senior author. "Like type 2 diabetes, NAFLD used to be considered a disease that developed only in adulthood, ...
2021-03-29
Younger trees take up and release less water than mature trees 10 years or older, researchers from North Carolina State University found in a new study that tracked how water moves through wetland pine forests near the North Carolina coast.
Their findings, published in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, suggest managers should time timber harvests to leave older trees alongside new growth to mitigate runoff.
"The water balance, especially in coastal sites, is very important," said the study's lead author Maricar Aguilos, postdoctoral research associate in forestry and environmental resources at NC State. "We have so much water there. We wanted to understand how land-use changes impact water use and drainage in the forests, ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Remote-friendly student project presentations enable creativity and risk-taking
