Rabeya Khatoon, Associate Professor in the School of Economics
BILT: Could you tell us a little bit about what you’re doing in terms of active learning, particularly with group work and presentations for PGT students?
I teach half of the unit (because the unit is joined with Engineering) where I teach econometrics and that is the first term when students come and most of the students are international. This is the time for them to settle in as well.
I have one hour of lecture and one hour of small group lab sessions per week. And what I do is I give them some group work. For the econometrics part, there are different types of things that they need to do. Some of the things are really theoretical. They need to do some proofs and other work; they’re not big, but they’re some of the key things. Students also need to deal with the data, and, at the same time, they need to read research articles.
The way I do it is I give them one assignment where the assignment is full of proofs and a bit of coding and working with data. I give them this in groups.
I sell this to the students by saying that ‘I don’t want you to struggle too much and alone; not everybody has had that much of the mathematical background’. Some of them have done advanced maths while some of them doesn’t have enough maths exposure.
I want them to enjoy together as well as learn together. I set up the groups in a small group lab where there are fewer students. I ask them to form groups between 3 to 5 people. They do it rather than me suggesting anything. Sometimes people get up and get into the groups, or sometimes they just start saying ‘can we be the groups?’ and things like that. They were shy, they didn’t talk, but when I said it, then they have to set up the groups. Then they submit one piece of work per group. Then I mark it, but I give them their feedback in a way that they are all together.
I go through the feedback very briefly with the group. They also submit a document where they include who did what part of the work. That is my first bit, and I have a second bit of work that is more substantial, I would say, that is the most accepted, by the students: a presentation.
That is also the same group that they worked in the first one. I want them to keep the same group, but if somebody wants to change, they can tell me.
Generally, people stay in the same group, and I give each group a paper to read.
And with the presentation I keep it at about 2 hours or so, depending on the number of students. Each of the groups would come and present what they found. There are some key bits, key questions that I give them. I give them the literature, the paper, and some key questions like what you should be looking at when you’re presenting.
One of the questions is ‘what did you find most difficult to understand?’ Another is ‘what do you find most interesting?’ and ‘what is your key takeaway, or one takeaway from the paper?’
It’s something very specific that they need to look at and then engage with. I found during my last three cohorts, this formative group presentation had 100% participation rate. It also didn’t have any marks because it is formative.
After each group presents, I give them five pounds each as a Source cafe voucher and encourage them to go and have a bit of together time as a group. They love it and that helps to build a community as well. It helps them to talk.
One other thing is attached to this formative work. In the first five weeks, some people might find it is basic because people come from different disciplines. So, I need to kind of level them up and then after the reading week, they do the presentation.
The reading week is literally a reading week for them, where they prepare. After the reading week, they present. It’s flipped learning. They present, then I do a bit more in the lecture. That’s how I take them from raising them to a level and then jumping to the core knowledge and things that I build on afterwards. It helps in various differentways, but as I said, one of the key points here is active learning and one other is community building.
It helps me as well. One other thing is that I get to learn the students’ names. Because I’m dealing with them, I know who is in which group. I know how they’re coming and presenting and that helps me to learn their names as well. They start knowing each other and that creates a really nice community of learners.
BILT: Yeah, love it, it sounds brilliant. I think you touched on, in a way, some of the benefits. I suppose the second question is: why have you chosen this approach? Were there any things that influenced your design of it, or that you wanted to make sure you had in the way that your students experience of the programme also benefits you?
Yes, so there is one other benefit I feel is that when I see students enjoying their studying, then I feel more enthusiastic to give them more. At the same time, when students are working in teams, sometimes they come up with some really interesting angles of, like, what they found from reading that paper, say, for example. And that stimulates me as well. When people work in groups, then… It happens, something new, something specific that can come out of it.
The other thing, more like admin-ish thing, is that this helps students to come more to the lectures and attend the labs as well, because they now are more of a community. What happens is that in some of the labs, like 9am Friday morning lab or Monday morning lab, some of the students are not coming yet, but one of their group mates may have arrived and they text them saying ‘Where are you? Are you coming?’
I can see that towards the end of the term, when we are nearing the assessments and things like that, then we sometimes see attendance fall, but I saw a change there by doing this.
One other benefit is that it is less time consuming while marking, as you only need to mark one submission per group.
BILT: Great, thank you. Do you think this approach is applicable to other disciplines?
I strongly believe that reading is something that I think everybody at the university level does. You can just pick some of the articles. It can be newspaper article as well. It doesn’t have to be like a specific academic journal – it can be anything, basically. And giving students the chance to present and do, I mean, doing the group work and presenting, that has some important skills attached as well. So, it should apply to almost every discipline.
BILT: You mentioned a little bit about students and community building; the next question is: how do students respond? Has that had any other benefits in terms of students’ responses, or are there any barriers or things that have been difficult? You mentioned about kind of they form their own groups. Was that something it seems like a potentially high-risk approach?
I would say no, because it is in the first term. I deliberately chose this to let them choose their own group because…especially because of, the diversity that I have. And if I’m forcing them, sometimes it is good that they get to know people from various different parts, which is fun, but sometimes it is too intimidating for many.
When I let them choose, then they have the control and they can just go and choose the way they want. Very interestingly, what I found is I saw in the last three years that students are getting up and finding someone who looks similar to them to go and form the group.
In the programme I did this; there is group work element in the second term, and they do their dissertation as a group. So basically, the dissertation and that starts from the second term and there the grouping is not like this. The grouping is a mixture of students expressing their interest on the topic, as well as academics allocating the group very carefully. There they have this exposure working in a very different way, but the first term one is more like community-building and giving them the confidence, the initial confidence. For any discipline, I think, even if they want to do a random group. I think the first grouping could be like this. So, you might want to create two, three groups in a same term. And you start with the first term, giving them the freedom, like you can choose so that they get that initial confidence boost. And then you go and you can randomly allocate or do some more.
It was also really inclusive because I had that flexibility if someone wanted to work on their own or to submit a video/voice over slides presentation, though everyone decided to work in groups and present. For the presentation, not everyone in the group needs to present as well though they are encouraged to, some groups might decide to divide the work in a different way. Overall, the activity is formative, and therefore low stake.
BILT: Yeah, brilliant. That’s great. The final question is for staff that are trying to develop more active learning: what do you think might be a good first activity or first thing to trial out?
A low-stakes activity is good. Definitely start with formative and start with something that is not too time-consuming for anybody. It has to be really something very simple to explore the benefit and to try it out.
Also, avoid going straight to summative group work, which has some really complex dynamics, I would say, because of the team dynamics and everything that comes into play. I’m an economist and I work with game theory as well. There needs to be some incentive to prevent free riding. I did the formative and that’s what I explained, but I also do summative and there we have a clear incentive which is equity share. Without that, you should not be using any group learning for summative, because some students might just do a lot, others might not, and that creates a lot of conflict. So formative is the key. Do something really simple to start with.
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