College Lesson Study

2012-13 UW-La Crosse Lesson Study Participants

• Chemistry: Melissa Anderson, Nadia Carmosini, Katherine Friesen
• Economics: James Murray, TJ Brooks, Laurie Strangman, Betsy Knowles, Bryan Kopp
• Educational Studies: KT Willhite, Gary Willhite, Mary Love
• English/Literature: Kelly Sultzbach, Susan Crutchfield, Bryan Kopp
• English/Composition: Bruce Handtke, Jennifer Mohlenhoff-Baggett, Ryan Friesen
• Management/Marketing: Nicole Gullekson, Maggie McDermott
• Modern Languages: Laura Merino, Matthew Field, Amber Hackman
• Philosophy: Sheri Ross, Sam Cocks, Eric Kraemer
• Political Science: Jo Arney, Adam Van Liere, Tim Dale

Political Science & Public Administration Lesson on Ideology

Authors: Jeremy Arney, Jo Arney, Ray Block, Steve McDougal, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

Mid-year Summary: January, 2012

Ideology is not simply a dichotomous concept. There are multiple values that make up an individual’s ideology. Ideology is dependent on these sets of values. Students are asked to agree or disagree with a series of statements and fill in a chart that maps their ideological beliefs.

SLO: Students will be able to describe the key values that contribute to an individual’s ideology and will be able to explain why no two individuals have the exact same ideology.

The lesson we choose to focus on was one the Dr. Steve McDougal has used in class before.  We all cover the concept of ideology in our class but have done so in the past in slightly different ways.  To prepare for the lesson study Steve demonstrated his use of an ideological chart.  On this chart students map their responses to a series of questions.  The purpose of mapping them is to demonstrate the ideology is fluid and not as simple as the liberal/conservative dichotomy so often associated with ideology.  After Steve’s presentation we talk about our initial ideas.

Steve delivered the lecture and worksheet on October 3, 2012.  The rest of us were in the room.  We also videoed a second section with the same exercise to see if additional instructors in the room made a difference.

We had a brief chance to talk about some of the initial conclusions at one meeting but not everyone was in attendance.  We have the notes and some initial suggestions but are unsure about what our next steps should be beyond developing ideas about potential improvements to the lesson.  A few conclusions are:

• If we want students to have an “ah ha” moment we may want more discussion of the grid
• At conclusion give student’s time to evaluate their responses.
• Ask students to share differences with class – ask them to analyze what causes the difference to prepare them for the lecture on values.

Our challenges include measuring student learning of a concept and incorporating this method into the wide variety of classes that we teach.

Environmental Studies Lesson on Group Discussions

Authors: Jan Wellik, Kate Hasenbank, & Wayne Bocher, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

Working Title: Improving Group Discussions

Course Name: Introduction to Environmental Studies

Mid-year Summary: January, 2012

One of our goals as instructors is to engage students in group discussions centered on environmental topics. In doing so, we hope to increase awareness and help them develop critical thinking and reflection skills that extend beyond the classroom. The freshmen we teach carry expectations of a lecture style classroom, and we have found they need help developing the skills for participating fully and openly in discussions. We also hope to improve our own teaching practices for facilitating discussions and improving the depth of knowledge our students take away from our course.

The lesson study plan focused on population issues as the topic of discussion. We assigned a reading in preparation for the discussion, opened the topic with a turtle game activity, and transitioned from game results focusing on turtles to the broader discussion about the population issues. We utilized a prepared list of nine general population statements (e.g. “In a real crunch, jobs are more important than environmental quality”) to discern student agreement/disagreement on related topics, and then focused on the three statements that elicited the most diverse responses in order to promote an engaged discussion. We used a mix of individual writing, small group and large group discussion prior to whole class discussion to examine which style promoted more student participation. At the end of the class period, students were asked to complete an anonymous evaluation to help us gauge lesson success from the students’ perspective.

Economics Lesson on Statistical Tests

Authors: Elizabeth Knowles and James Murray, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

Course Name: Undergraduate Business Research Methods   

Mid-year Summary: January, 2012 

Often in introductory statistics classes, students are drilled on the procedures to implement a number of statistical tests.  While some students perform well in such classes, the same students can often struggle in a subsequent research methods course when they must select an appropriate statistical test to answer a research question.  This task requires an advanced organization of knowledge on statistical tests - an understanding of how statistical methods are related to one another.  Moreover, as with learning anything new, success in selecting appropriate statistical methods requires practice.  Typically there is not time for this practice in an introductory statistics course.

We conducted a lesson study in three sections of our undergraduate business research methods course (BUS 230) to understand and help develop students' thought processes in selecting appropriate statistical tests for given research questions.  The lesson study was conducted at a point in the term when we had already reviewed a number of statistical methods, but before we helped students organize this knowledge.  We gave students exercises in which they were given a research question, asked to choose an appropriate statistical test, and explain the reasoning behind their answer.  The students discussed these exercises in groups while two instructors quietly sat in on these discussions and recorded observations concerning students' thought processes.   Then we exposed students to our treatment: a thought process map for selecting a statistical test.  Following the treatment, we gave students a similar set of exercises as before the treatment, and again instructors observed the students.

This paper makes two significant contributions which can help instructors of research methods courses improve student learning.  First, we share the thought process map for selecting a statistical test and report on the impact it had for our students.  Secondly, we describe the thought processes students go through, both before and after being exposed to the thought process map, and we describe students' sources of difficulty and confusion revealed through the lesson study process.  We found it was common for students to use a process of elimination to choose a statistical test (not a method we suggested).  Points of confusion included when to apply an independent-samples test versus a paired-samples test, the question of scale of measurement sometimes led students to choose the wrong statistical method, sometimes students had difficulty recognizing what constituted a variable, and sometimes specific words in a research question misled students, even though research questions phrased in plain English, not using statistical terms with deep or very specific meanings.

English Lesson on the Value of Literary Study

Authors: Susan Crutchfield, Natalie Eschenbaum, Bryan Kopp, Kelly Sultzbach, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

Working Title: The Value of Literary Study 

Course Name: Literature and the Human Experience

Mid-year Summary: January, 2012

Students frequently think about general education literature courses simply as requirements to fulfill. Our broader goal was to help students think about the purpose, value and necessity of literary study. We focused on three more specific goals: 1) to help students understand that both a “right answer” approach to interpretation and an “anything goes” approach are problematic; 2) to help students appreciate the positive value of ambiguity as something that invites multiple persuasive interpretations; and 3) to help them recognize that literary modes of thinking can be applicable to non-literary texts as well.

Our lesson was divided into three parts: 1) discussion of students’ prior knowledge about reading literature, the tools used to read it and how preconceptions shape the expectation that literary analysis yields multiple valid interpretations; 2) discussion of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish” prompted by three questions--what stood out in the poem, how you do you interpret the ending, and what approaches did you use to arrive at your interpretation?; and 3) discussion of three non-literary texts prompted by two questions--what makes them different from a literary text, what makes them similar to a literary text?

We had hoped students would understand the rich potential and excitement of studying literature, ultimately becoming adept at exploring ambiguity and multiple meanings, finding a new vision of relationship and value between themselves and the subjects of the literary work, and making emotional and personal connections with the world.

Our observations revealed that some teams arrived quickly at single, closed interpretations whereas others generated new, persuasive readings of the poem. During the large group conversation, individuals generally were good at providing valid textual support for their interpretations. In subsequent classes students seemed more willing to entertain multiple interpretations and to challenge one another. Students seemed to have made progress with our first and second goals. We saw evidence for our third goal when students at the end of class started asking the question, what makes a text “literature” or not?

Psychology Lesson on Motivation for Learning

Authors: Tesia Marshik, Katy Kortenkamp, Rob Dixon, & Bill Cerbin, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

Title: Students' Understanding of How Beliefs and Context Influence Motivation for Learning 

Course Name: Educational Psychology

Mid-year Summary: January, 2012

Our overarching goal for this lesson study was for students to understand and perceive the relevance of motivation theories and to be able to apply these theories to their lives (as students and as future teachers). From a specific lesson standpoint, our goals were for students to correctly identify different achievement goal orientations (i.e., mastery, performance-approach, and performance-avoid goals), to experience how such orientations affect students’ behaviors and performance in the classroom, and to understand how personal and contextual factors shape individuals’ goal orientations.  To meet these ends, we developed a 2x2 between-participants experiment in which we attempted to manipulate students’ goal orientations and performance on an anagram task. Each student received one of two different sets of anagrams to solve: the last word for each group was the same (“cinerama”), but the preceding words were either solvable (“melon” and “baker”) or unsolvable (“whirl” and “slapstick”). Furthermore, students were given two different sets of instructions: one set promoted performance goals while the other set promoted mastery goals. As a class, students completed the anagrams one-at-a-time and publicly indicated when they solved each anagram. Afterwards, students answered a series of questions about the task regarding their personal enjoyment, persistence, efforts, etc.  Students were then debriefed and we had small-group and full-class discussions about the relevant motivation theories. Through observations and analyses of students’ responses in-class and via the questionnaires, we found that the lesson was overall successful in terms of increasing students’ understanding of the effects of different achievement goals. The lesson appeared to be especially salient/powerful for students in the “performance goal and unsolvable task” condition (who likely experienced learned helplessness during the activity). On the other hand, students in the “mastery goal and easy task” condition appeared to be the least engaged.

International Journal for Lesson and Learning Studies

Publishing lesson study work is somewhat challenging. Because it is an unfamiliar form of inquiry, some discipline-based journals may not be receptive to lesson studies. Now there is a new journal dedicated to publishing lesson study work, the International Journal for Lesson and Learning Studies. 

See the following information from the publisher.

To celebrate the official publication of the inaugural issue of International Journal for Lesson and Learning Studies (IJLLS), Emerald is very pleased to offer 30 days’ free online access to the papers.

IJLLS rests on the conviction that there is a need for a journal that will promote an evidence-based and rigorous pedagogical discourse in the field of education about how to improve the quality of young people’s experiences as learners in educational settings. Read an interview with the editors, Professors John Elliott and Lo Mun Ling at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/authors/interviews/ijlls.htm

To access the papers, go to www.emeraldinsight.com/2046-8253.htm and enter the following login details:

Username: IJLLS11

 Password: emerald

The full table of contents of this first issue is:

John Elliot and Lo Mun Ling--Towards a Science of the Art of Teaching: Using Variation Theory as a Guiding Principle of Pedagogical Design

Mun Ling Lo and Ference Marton--Using Learning Study to improve the teaching and learning of accounting in a school in Brunei Darussalam

Vincent Andrew--How Crucial Incidents Analysis Support Chinese Lesson Study

Yudong Yang and Thomas Ricks--Critical conditions for pre-service teachers' learning through inquiry - the Learning Study Approach in Hong Kong

Po Yuk Ko--Developing Curriculum and Pedagogical Resources for Teacher Learning - A Lesson Study Video Case of Division with Remainder from Singapore

Yanping Fang, Christine K.E. Lee and Yudong Yang--Lesson Study development in England: from school networks to national policy 

If you would like to be notified about future issues, you can register to the journal table of contents alerts at www.emeraldinsight.com/2046-8253.htm. For more information on how to submit manuscripts please consult the journal’s author guidelines.

Please do not hesitate to forward details of the online access to any of your peers, colleagues and students that may be interested in the content. We would also encourage you to share this announcement with any of your social networks.

Students' Peer Review of Writing: A Lesson Study Project Documenting a Better Practice

Students' Peer Review of Writing:  A Lesson Study Project Documenting a Better Practice by Katie Kalish (English, UW-Marshfield), Jen Heinert (English, UW-Washington), and Valerie Murrenus Pilmaier (English, UW-Sheboygan) 

These three faculty members know a lot about student writing and how students can help each other with their drafts, but they would never admit this fact so boldly. Supported with a UW Colleges Lesson Study Grant, they designed a research study to develop and measure an effective way of helping students revise their papers with their peers' help--a practice that is relevant and useful across the curriculum, so they provided the following materials for the VTLC's first UWC Showcase (hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Colleges)

Read more about their lesson study work on student peer review of writing

2011-12 UW-La Crosse Lesson Study Participants

• Health Professions - Melissa Weege and Aileen Staffaroni
• Economics - James Murray and Betsy Knowles
• Political Science & Public Administration - Jo Arney, Ray Block, Jeremy Arney, and Steve McDougal
• English - Kelly Sultzbach, Natalie Eschenbaum, Susan Crutchfield and Bryan Kopp
• Psychology - Tesia Marshik, Bill Cerbin, Katherine Kortenkamp and Rob Dixon
• Environmental Studies - Jan Wellik, Kate Hasenbank, and Wayne Bocher

A Lesson in Information Literacy

Each year librarians at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse teach a "one-shot" lesson in information literacy to 2000 students enrolled in an introductory communication studies course. Students attend the lesson in groups of about 25 in the library. Concerned about the quality of the experience, the librarians decided to make the lesson the subject of a lesson study. They wanted to better understand what students get out of the lesson and how to improve the experience so that students achieve proficiency in research skills and learn how to use libarary resources and services.

They presented their work, Lesson Study: An Experience in Collaborative Inquiry, at the Wisconsin Association of Academic Librarians in April 2007. They also published their lesson study, Teaching Library Information Literacy Skills to Students Enrolled in an Introductory Communication Course: A Collaborative Study in the UW System Teaching Forum.