Use of conceptests in a large lecture course to provide active student involvement and peer teaching

American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, Fall 1998 by Piepmeier, Edward Jr

Use of Conceptests in a Large Lecture Course to Provide Active Student Involvement and Peer Teaching1

Edward Piepmeier Jr.2

The purpose of this project was to evaluate the use of Conceptests. Conceptests are used to activate specific misconceptions and cause students to feel uncomfortable with their previous ideas following a lecture addressing the concept. This discomfort is the driving force behind the student's construction of new knowledge. The Conceptest will evaluate the ability of the student to transfer knowledge rather than memorize methods. Through the use of the Conceptest, not only do the students benefit, but also the instructor learns how to more effectively teach concepts to the students. Two or three Conceptests were presented as a part of each one-hour lecture. The students were given a multiple-choice Conceptest and were asked to choose an answer and evaluate the certainty of their response on a scale of one to five. Following fifteen to twenty minutes of lecture, the students were again asked to answer the question and evaluate their confidence in their answer. Then the students were asked to talk with their classmates for one minute about the question and provide a third answer with a level of confidence in their answer. The student outcomes for this exercise are: () an active role for each student following every fifteen minutes of lecture; and (it) empathic peer instruction to complement the instructor's expertise. The project implications are: (t) immediate feedback is provided to the instructor with regard to how the lecture is being received; and (it) an objective means is provided to determine when principles are not being correctly applied to new situations.

INTRODUCTION

In a large lecture class of 50 or more students it is difficult for all students to become actively involved with the material that is being presented. Multimedia may be incorporated into the lecture so that visual and aural input will be more stimulating, but the student is still passively involved. The instructor's expertise in the field may result in the formulation of a lecture that would be better presented to experts in the field rather than to novices. If the student is overwhelmed by the amount of material, passive involvement in the lecture may lead to no involvement. The use of Conceptests assists in the prevention these problems by providing: (i) an active role for each student following every fifteen minutes of lecture; (ii) empathic peer instruction to complement the instructor's expertise; (iii) immediate feedback to the instructor with regard to how the lecture is being received; (iv) an objective means to determine when principles are not being correctly applied to new situations.

METHODS

The Conceptest questions are provided in Appendix A. The innovation was used in the first half of the first semester of the pharmacy professional program. The course being taught was the first pharmaceutics course. This course is used to help the students learn how to apply their knowledge obtained from the prerequisites for pharmacy school: inorganic and organic chemistry, statistics, physics, microbiology and calculus to: physical pharmacy, drug delivery and drug disposition. After the first midterm, the termination of the strategy was planned so that the students and instructor could evaluate the effectiveness of teaching with and without this learning strategy.

Conceptests are multiple choice questions which test the student's ability to apply a concept that has been presented in lecture to a situation which has not yet been encountered. Two or three Conceptests were presented as a part of each one-hour lecture. The students were given a multiple-choice Conceptest and were asked to choose an answer and evaluate the certainty of their response on a scale of one to five. Following fifteen to twenty minutes of lecture, the students were again asked to answer the question and evaluate their confidence in their answer. Then the students were asked to talk with their classmates for one minute about the question and provided a third answer with a level of confidence in their answer. The instructor then collected the questions at the end of the class for computer analysis of the student's understanding of the material. SAS was used for the analysis.

RESULTS

Table I shows how peer teaching affects student learning. The increased percentage of correct answers after learning from the instructor is 23 25 (mean SD) while the increase in percentage of correct after peer teaching is 6.8 8.4. Student Evaluations

The average 3.6 0.2 of the numerical evaluations for the Pharmaceutics I course was not significantly above the previous year's average 3.4 0.2. The average was still significantly below the average 4.1 0.2 of all of the evaluations for all other courses taught at the College.

Written evaluations by the students focused on two problems. First, testing takes time from the lecture, and explaining concepts takes more time than just presenting facts. Therefore, the students were required to spend additional time reading material outside of class. Second, some students had little experience with becoming actively involved in learning and were not ready to become actively involved in learning at 8:00 AM. The experiment was discontinued after Question 19 when some students strongly requested the immediate return of conventional teaching techniques.