A Teaching Innovation Grant was awarded to Dr Chris Kent and Dr Jess Fielding for the academic year 2017/18 – you can find a summary of the project they undertook with their grant below. If you would like to read the full report, please contact bilt-info@bristol.ac.uk.
As part of the 2018 Festival of Learning and Teaching (FOLAT) Chris presented their project, view the presentation below or download the presentation PowerPoint.
Project Summary
This project was designed to assist the redevelopment of our research methods provision at Year 1.
The newly developed course will focus on active learning in small groups and continuous, low-risk, assessment. Specifically, it will address four main aims in our Year 1 teaching:
1. Enable students to programme and conduct their own experiments within TB1
2. Provide weekly continuous formative feedback on knowledge and understanding
3. Enable effective small group peer support via ‘homework clubs’
4. Embed a culture of student participation in lectures via interactive smart-phone response systems (SRS).
The BILT grant facilitated the redesign and comprised two main work packages
(WP). WP1: development and evaluation of a self-contained series of lab sessions designed to deliver design, programming and analysis skills to Y1 psychology students (meeting aims 1 and 3). WP2: developed a set of home and class activities for summative and formative assessment (meeting aims 2 and 4).
Conclusions
We feel the grant was extremely helpful to us. We have meet our aims and are in a much better place to implement our redesigned research method training courses.
Students, who undertook the pilot, showed a keen interest and disposition to research methods once they were exposed to a hands-on approach to building experiments and understanding why programming and statistics were important (via problem-based learning and active participation in work shops). The students left with a positive disposition towards further exploring research methods and we highly positive towards the way in which the material was delivered. All students managed to develop their own independent research question, programme an experiment to test it, collect and analysis the data; this is quite impressive given the short six week time scale!
The research skills we developed by actively engaging students in research from the get-go, by showing them they could develop their own simple experiments and analysis with a few simple tools. The problem-based approach to introducing new software was successful and students felt confident in exploring the software.
