Elizabeth S. Charles

Just in Time to Flip Your Classroom

With advocates like Sal Khan and Bill Gates,1 flipped classrooms are attracting an increasing amount of media and research attention.2 We had heard Khans TED talk and were aware of the concept of inverted pedagogies in general. Yet it really hit home when we accidentally flipped our classroom. Our objective was to better prepare our students for class. We set out to effectively move some of our course content outside of class and decided to tweak the Just-in-Time Teaching approach (JiTT).3 To our surprise, this tweak—which we like to call the flip-JiTT—ended up completely flipping our classroom. What follows is narrative of our experience and a procedure that any teacher can use to extend JiTT to a flipped classroom.

When Talking Is Better Than Staying Quiet

The effectiveness of Peer Instruction is often associated to the importance of in‐class discussions between peers. Typically, a greater number of students have correct answers after peer discussions. However, other cognitive and metacognitive processes such as reflection or time‐on‐task may also explain this increase because students answering conceptual questions reflect more and spend more time thinking about their understanding. An identical sequence of conceptual questions was given to three groups of students. All groups were polled twice on each question. Between polls, students were asked either to discuss their choice with a peer, or to reflect for a minute (no discussion), or were given a distraction task (sequence of cartoons: no discussion and no reflection). Increases in the rates of correct answers between the first and the second poll were found across all conditions. The ‘Distract’ condition had a small but positive increase (3.4%). The ‘Reflect’ condition had a greater increase (9.7%) while the ‘Discuss’ condition had the greatest (21.0%). All conditions showed gains, possibly because of ‘testing effects’, though peer‐discussions clearly yield greatest increases. Our findings show that learning gains through peer discussions cannot be explained only by additional time‐on‐task or self‐reflection.

Student and Team Agency in VMT

Agency is inherently a central concern for constructivist education. CSCL researchers need to think about the effectiveness of online learning environments in terms of how they encourage student groups to take active control of their learning activities. This chapter draws on the anthropological, psychological and sociological traditions and their concept of agency in order to consider the relationship between individual and group agency and to understand the differing constraints on interaction in classrooms and online. It then investigates agency in sessions of mathematical discourse in the VMT chat environment. Our empirical discourse analysis displays instances of significant agentic behavior and our theoretical review suggests that there are structural features to the VMT online environment that encourage agentic behavior on the part of students, individually and as a group. This has important implications for understanding learning and for designing pedagogic activities.

Effective variations of peer instruction: The effects of peer discussions, committing to an answer, and reaching a consensus

Peer Instruction (PI) is a widely used student-centered pedagogy, but one that is used differently by different instructors. While all PI instructors survey their students with conceptual questions, some do not allow students to discuss with peers. We studied the effect of peer discussion by polling three groups of students (N = 86) twice on the same set of nine conceptual questions. The three groups differed in the tasks assigned between the first and second poll: the first group discussed, the second reflected in silence, and the third was distracted so they could neither reflect nor discuss. Comparing score changes between the first and second poll, we find minimal increases in the distraction condition (3%), sizable increases in the reflection condition (10%), and significantly larger increases in the peer discussion condition (21%). We also examined the effect of committing to an answer before peer discussion and reaching a consensus afterward. We compared a lecture-based control section to three var...

DALITE: Asynchronous Peer Instruction for MOOCs

This demonstration will feature the Distributed Active Learning Integrated Technology Environment (DALITE), a novel LTI compliant application which allows Learning Management Systems to include an asynchronous peer instruction component as a part of their course. It has been successfully used in three different MOOCs on the edX platform (Harvardx, MITx, McGillx). This tool not only enables a novel type of formative assessment based on student self-explanations, but also provides a rich source of peer-assessed natural language data for educational research.