UBC Mailing Lists 17.0 - TEAMLEARNING-L Archives

I thought I should point out that my decisions about how to organize TBL in my class have been influenced by some practical considerations. One is that introductory statistics texts for graduate students usually have units or chapters that take no more than one week. This suggests a RAT every week that there is no exam. Another is that I started using TBL when my classes were scheduled for three-hour sessions once per week. (I now have two two-hour sessions per week.) As a result, I had a RAT or exam every session.

While I would prefer that students come prepared with long lists of questions about their reading and problems, this rarely happens. On the few occasions that this has happened, because questions and answers took quite a while, eg, 40-60 minutes, I have cancelled the IRAT but never the TRAT. This might not work well for courses where the natural units take more time, eg, two to three weeks apiece, since there is less feedback from the students.

The RATs are quite useful as prologue and practice for exams. I think they relieve stress, particularly before the first exam. With three exams, this becomes less important after the first two.

I use almost the same RAT procedure for exams with an individual and then a team exam. I first picked up the group exam from some of the discussion groups in math, but the TBL approach contributed systematic administration. At the end I give out an answer key to every student and have the team grade the team exam before they leave the room. I take all the exams for subsequent grading. From a behavioristic perspective, they get immediate individual feedback from both the team exam and the shared grading. I do very little exam review in the next class session because it isn't needed-students have already figured out where they stand. I usually say a few things about fairly widely dispersed errors and this takes 5-10 minutes. The teams do extremely well on the team exams, better than on team RATs, less than 100% is rare.

Questions tell me a lot about what students are thinking. The students do not seem to be aware that their questions lead to what I consider a lecture. By this I mean that questions are not answered alone, but are elaborated as to the bigger issues involved. The subject matter is alien to them and I need to hear them use the words and concepts of statistics. (Sometimes I think it might have something in common with teaching English as a foreign language.) I can't know what students have internalized without hearing them say things. For the same reason I use short answer rather than multiple-choice RATs, because I need to see students write down what they think statistics says.

I always lecture just before a new chapter, about once a week. I try to hold it to 25 minutes, but it often creeps up to 40. I think this bothers me more than the students since I know that they won't remember much of the material after the first 20 minutes.

Some of my lectures are integrative, and unconnected to a single topic. They occur after a few weeks and explain how statistics hangs together. They aren't helpful until students have seen several kinds of tests and confidence intervals, but scheduling them also depends on judging whether students are ready to hear that life is easy because all statistical tests are really variations on a theme, similarly for confidence intervals, and confidence intervals are actually quite closely, formally, related to tests. This completely contradicts their views when they start the class, so I think I have to do it carefully.

The students probably don't regard my short, introductory lectures or my question-based lectures as lectures.

David W. Smith, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Associate Professor, Biostatistics
The University of Texas School of Public Health
San Antonio Branch Campus
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