Kathleen A. FitzPatrick

Effect of personal response systems on student perception and academic performance in courses in a health sciences curriculum

To increase student engagement, active participation, and performance, personal response systems (clickers) were incorporated into six lecture-based sections of four required courses within the Health Sciences Department major curriculum: freshman-level Anatomy and Physiology I and II, junior-level Exercise Physiology, and senior-level Human Pathophysiology. Clickers were used to gather anonymous student responses to questions posed within the class period after individual thought and peer discussion. Students (n = 293, 88% of students completing the courses) completed a perceptual survey on clicker effectiveness inserted into the Student Assessment of Learning Gains online instrument. Across courses and years, students uniformly rated several dimensions of clicker use as providing good to great gain in engaging them in active learning, increasing participation and involvement during class, maintaining attention, applying material immediately, providing feedback concerning their understanding, and offering an anonymous format for participation. Within these four sections, quiz grades were compared between clicker and nonclicker years. Significant increases in pre- and posttest scores were seen in Exercise Physiology in clicker years and on some, but not all material, in Anatomy and Physiology I and II based on content quizzes. Human Pathophysiology results were unexpected, with higher quiz scores in the nonclicker year. The results support the hypothesis of increased engagement with clicker use. The hypothesis of increased student performance was not consistently supported. Increased performance was seen in Exercise Physiology. In Anatomy and Physiology I and II, performance improved on some content quizzes. In Human Pathophysiology, performance did not improve with clickers.

A multiyear approach to student-driven investigations in exercise physiology

Many undergraduate institutions offer individual research opportunities for upper-level students in independent study courses and summer undergraduate research programs. These are necessarily limited to a small number of students. Greater numbers of students can benefit from incorporating student-directed investigative experiences into laboratories in standard courses. In human performance investigations, any single course may not offer sufficient numbers of subjects to adequately test hypotheses comparing population groups or to examine longitudinal trends. In this exercise physiology course, exercise testing was conducted in three areas: 1) techniques of body composition analysis, 2) field tests for the estimation of maximal oxygen consumption, and 3) maximal anaerobic and aerobic power. All students enrolled over a 10-yr period participated as subjects and as testers. Working in small research groups, students added their results to those from previous years, generated a variety of hypotheses (correlations between tests, subgroup differences, etc.), and tested them statistically using the complete data set of 217 subjects. They then engaged in collaborative writing and peer review to prepare formal papers on their results. The multiyear approach allowed students to situate their work within and contribute to the accumulation of a large database and to practice essential scientific skills of hypothesis formation, data collection and analysis, collaborative work, and scientific communication. In addition, due to the larger number of subjects available to analyze, students observed statistically significant differences between test groups in the multiyear database that they were unable to demonstrate when conducting analysis on a single course. Finally, the large number of subjects and statistical power offered by the use of the database provides distinct pedagogical advantages.