Erik Blair

Performance and perception in the flipped classroom

Changes in the conceptualisation of higher education have led to instructional methods that embrace technology as a teaching medium. These changes have led to the flipped classroom phenomenon - where content is delivered outside class, through media such as video and podcast, and engagement with the content, through problem-solving and/or group work, occurs in class. Studies investigating the impact of the flipped classroom have mainly looked at the student experience with little focus on whether exam outcomes are enhanced by flipping. An undergraduate Material Technology course at The University of the West Indies was taught in two formats over two successive years. The course was taught during the 2012/13 academic year in a ‘traditional’ format but, after reflecting on student feedback and personal pedagogy, the lecturer restructured the class and taught it in a flipped format during the 2013/14 academic year. This research examines whether the flipped format improved the learning experience in relation to exam performance and student perception. Data was gathered through analysis of course grades and student evaluation questionnaires. The lecturer’s reflective comments were also reviewed before and after the study. Analysis of the qualitative data shows that the flipped format led to a slight improvement in how students perceived the course and the lecturer’s reflection shows that they are keen to continue with the flipped format as it allowed more time for them to work with students at an individual level. While no significant change in relation to average cohort exam performance was found, fewer students in the flipped classroom achieved marks at the highest level. It is therefore recommended that practitioners who intend to flip their classroom pay as much attention to student performance as they do to student perception.

Improving higher education practice through student evaluation systems: is the student voice being heard?

Many higher education institutions use student evaluation systems as a way of highlighting course and lecturer strengths and areas for improvement. Globally, the student voice has been increasing in volume, and capitalising on student feedback has been proposed as a means to benefit teacher professional development. This paper examines the student evaluations at a university in Trinidad and Tobago in an effort to determine whether the student voice is being heard. The research focused on students’ responses to the question, ‘How do you think this course could be improved?’ Student evaluations were gathered from five purposefully selected courses taught at the university during 2011–2012 and then again one year later, in 2012–2013. This allowed for an analysis of the selected courses. Whilst the literature suggested that student evaluation systems are a valuable aid to lecturer improvement, this research found little evidence that these evaluations actually led to any real significant changes in lecturers’ practice.

The learner-generated podcast: engaging postgraduate engineering students in a mathematics-intensive course

In this paper we discuss perceptions of the benefits of learner-generated podcasts for supporting postgraduate engineering students in a mathematics-intensive course. The course under study had previously been highlighted as one in which students had struggled to attain knowledge that formed an essential underpinning to their degree programme. Podcasts were used as a means of concretising abstract mathematical knowledge so that students could access and share such concepts in a meaningful way. The experiences of three students (in a single cohort) were examined qualitatively at every stage of the exercise: introduction, pre-test, podcast creation, podcast peer evaluation, post-test, and focus-group session. The data suggest that this specific technique led to improvements in mathematical learning through the analysis of podcasts rather than through the creation of them.

Academic development through the contextualization of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: reflections drawn from the recent history of Trinidad and Tobago

Whilst the case for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has been made, there has been little discussion on how such scholarship might lead academic development at the local level. Through analyzing the recent history of Trinidad and Tobago this paper proposes that the conceptualization of SoTL should embrace the nuances of its particular context. It is argued that, since gaining independence, the education system of Trinidad and Tobago has failed to shake off the remnants of its former colonizer and that the Ministry of Education has looked to import educational ‘best practice’ from other countries. This paper suggests that ‘borrowing’ the drivers of development is culturally naïve and, instead, proposes that educational change should be led through a context-specific examination of the relationship between scholars of teaching and learning and the society in which they find themselves.

A holistic approach to fieldwork through balanced reflective practice

Reflective practice is well-established as a tool for practitioner development in areas such as nursing, social work and education. Reflection involves the integration of theoretical constructs and practical action; therefore it seems somewhat ironic that there is little written on reflective practice within the natural sciences – where theory and action are often juxtaposed. This paper attempts to address this gap through examining biological fieldwork in relation to a balanced system of reflection that embraces the cognitive, psychomotor, affective and conative aspects of practice. A model of reflective practice that asks practitioners to log their reflections against these four domains was applied to a biodiversity survey of tropical mountain streams in Trinidad. It was found that there is clear evidence that biological fieldwork can embrace a reflective methodology and that reflective practice can be used in fieldwork as a tool for making explicit that which is already implicit. A holistic vision of fieldwork is sketched out here, where the introduction of a balanced model of reflective practice can support an approach that moves beyond the consideration of the environment and the researcher as two separate entities and, instead, considers the relationship between environment and researcher.

The motivation to study: an analysis of undergraduate engineering students at a Caribbean university

Abstract The link between motivation and success is well documented; however, there is still room to problematise motivation in regards to the individual and contextual levels. This study looks at motivation in relation to students studying undergraduate engineering courses at a Caribbean university and seeks to discover the factors that motivate them to study and the factors that keep them motivated. An online questionnaire was constructed using 19 Likert-type questions and 5 questions that allowed for open-ended qualitative responses. The findings reveal that participants tended to be motivated by the increased possibility of desired future careers and tended to stay motivated by a combination of goal-orientation and family support. It is recommended that departments, faculties and institutions deliberate on shared and contextually constructed understandings of why students choose to enrol in particular university courses.

Single-Sex Schooling in Trinidad and Tobago: a Holistic Exploration.

Single-sex schooling has been proposed as a way of addressing the disengagement of boys; the disproportion of gender in certain subjects; stereotyped gender images, and the labelling of some subjects as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. However, there exists no clear research evidence to support such claims. Despite the lack of empirical data, there is still a call in some quarters for more single-sex schooling. This paper looks at single-sex schooling in Trinidad and Tobago where one-quarter of secondary state schools are single sex. The experiences of children in these single-sex schools are explored—not through narrowly defined descriptors of academic success but through a holistic consideration of children’s learning experiences within such an environment. This exploration finds that it is naïve to segregate children based on their sex and recommends that, in their efforts to improve schooling for all, policy-makers undertake a more thorough examination of the curriculum in relation to the complex needs of all the individuals who make up that society.