by Alex Accinelli, PGY1 Pharmacy Practice Resident,
Sinai Hospital
This past July I had the
opportunity to attend the AACP annual teaching seminar in Nashville, Tennessee.
The main objective of the conference was to define, develop and evaluate active
learning and its utility in pharmacy curricula. Active learning is defined as a
process where students are engaged in learning activities that promote
analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of class content1. Active
learning has become more popular in recent years because it has been shown to improve
long-term memory retention when used in conjunction with traditional didactic
learning activities1. While the potential benefits of active
learning have been well documented, accurate and consistent methods to measure
its efficacy have not been clearly established. One of the more interesting
sessions of the teaching seminar, presented by Dr. Adam Persky (University of
North Carolina) and Dr. Melissa Medina (University of Oklahoma) focused on the
use of formative and summative assessment as a tool to reward student
participation and to evaluate the effectiveness of active learning activities.
How do we grade participation?
Often
times, active learning incorporates participation-based activities that are
difficult to grade because of their subjective nature2. When
describing her thought process about how to grade her first-ever active
learning course, Dr. Medina recalled the difficult decision about how to award
points for these assignments to promote student participation. “Should I just
take attendance and give everyone the points or should I write down all of the
students that responded? What if I don’t know everyone’s name? Also, how do I
grade students when no one participates or if the same person answers all of
the questions? It was gut wrenching. Somehow I made it through the semester but
those participation points haunted me and in the end I gave all of the students
all of the points because I felt it was the only fair thing to do.”3
Dr. Medina learned a lot from that early teaching experience and with each
semester she learned better ways to assess active learning, including when and
how to award points, what to avoid when grading active learning, and when points
aren’t really needed.
Formative or Summative?
The
presentation began by discussing the general differences between formative and
summative assessments, and then went on to explain when to use each type. To
best identify when to award points for active learning, one of the most
important factors to consider is the ultimate goal of the assessment3.
If the goal is to provide ongoing feedback to help students monitor and improve
their learning, then low stake, formative types of assessment should be used
with little to no points for the activity. Formative assessment can be used for
or during the active learning activity because it is diagnostic and helps
students identify their strengths and weaknesses. Often time’s students really want this kind
of formative feedback but they need to be motivated (given a few points) to
participate. In contrast, if the goal is
to evaluate student learning at the end of the content area or course to be
compared against standards or benchmarks and determine achievement of a final
product, then summative assessment is the best choice. Summative assessments are high stakes and are
associated with high points that contribute to a final grade such as on a
midterm, final exam, project, presentation, or report.
The
speakers then focused on sharing examples of types of formative assessment for
active learning. Dr. Medina explained how the majority of active learning
assessments should be formative in nature, with the goal to make student
thinking visible and then give them feedback. Examples of formative assessment
include quizzes, clicker questions, minute papers, concept maps, and
think-pair-share activities. Pre/post quizzes are great for providing students
feedback about how much knowledge they gained during the activity. Clickers are
useful for helping students monitor their learning during instruction. Minute
papers allow students to summarize the most important points of the activity.
And concept maps and think-pair share activities allow students to organize the
material and determine the relationships between all concepts learned. Concept
maps can be graded based on the number of cells and connections created. No
points are typically needed for think-pair share activities.
Training for Instructors
Interspersed
throughout the days presentations were scheduled active learning activities.
The activity for this presentation was to create a minute paper about which
assessment strategy we are most likely to use and why (choices were quizzes,
clickers, minute papers, concept maps, or think pair share). I chose quizzing because
it I think it is a fast and effective way to provide students feedback about
how much knowledge they gained during the activity. Low stakes quizzing also
promotes participation and preparation. I thought the use of active learning to
“teach” active learning was a really cool and effective way to present the
lecture material. The presentation ended with a summary of the pros and cons of
case-based and team-based learning and discussed the use of rubrics that are
clear and explicit to assess case responses in formative or summative
scenarios, giving examples of each.
Overall, I
really enjoyed the teaching seminar and thought that a lot of the active
learning session topic presentations were really interesting. As a student, I
know I was much more engaged with content material when active learning
activities were utilized. As a future educator I think there is still a lot of
room to improve the organization and use of effective active learning activities
in the pharmacy curricula. The utility and theoretical basis of active learning
has been briefly discussed throughout this course. However, recommendations for
how to organize, assess and evaluate these activities have not been as well
defined. This presentation provided important information for future educators
to consider when designing courses that will be utilizing active learning
activities. I believe that the implementation of these strategies will improve
student participation by exhibiting clear rules for how and when to grade
participation in active learning sessions. I recommend that all future pharmacy
educators try to attend AACPs annual conference as it is aimed at improving
pharmacy education and has many unique exhibits that I believe future educators
will find very valuable.
References:
2)
Gibson K. and Shaw C. 2010, Assessment of
Active Learning.
Medina. 2017. Formative
& Summative Assessment of Active Learning. University of Oklahoma Colleg
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