Writing to Reflect
I have been/ am engaged in a few different projects that focus on writing to reflect. These in-class interventions are meant to give students the opportunity to reflect on what they know and what they do not know.
Projects:
1. "Funds of Knowledge" reflective writing activity
- Conducted with Nicole Gerardo (Emory University) and Tibetan Buddhists monks in India who are studying biology.
- We asked the monastic students to graphically organize their notes into "academic" and "personal/ traditional" funds of knowledge and to then reflect on the dilemmas that arise when these two contradict one another.
- We are still analyzing these data, but our findings suggest that the monks were exploring the similarities and differences in "Western modern science" and Tibetan Buddhists' ways of knowing.
- https://natsci.source.colostate.edu/csu-biology-professor-teaches-biology-monks-india/
- Conducted with Becki Atadero (CSU) and undergraduate engineering students.
- We asked students to write about their perceptions of ideal group members to identify engineering problems and then to construct solutions.
- Our findings suggest that undergraduate engineering students may consider their own classmates in different ways during group work if they participate in this reflective activity early in the course.
- See below for more information
Collaborative and cooperative learning has been identified as a high impact practice by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (https://www.aacu.org/leap/hips; AAAS, 1989). My collaborators and I have indeed found that the integration of cooperative group work in undergraduate engineering courses allows students to develop disciplinary skills (Atadero et al., 2015). While the AAAS report pointed out that students “should gain experience sharing responsibility for learning with each other (p. 148),” it also warned that group tasks should not promote overly competitive behaviors, which may deter women and underrepresented students from feeling included (Seymour & Hewitt, 1997; Springer et al., 1999). If students are unprepared to collaborate and communicate to solve problems as a group, then collaborative learning may not result in the intended learning and retention outcomes.Theoretically diverse groups should produce better results because the team will have more perspectives and heuristics available to them; however, if the group members are unable to communicate with one another, then the team product will suffer (Page, 2007). Yet, the individual learners in a diverse group might not experience the assignment or learning opportunity in the same way.
My collaborators and I then asked:
"how can we promote awareness of the value of diverse teams in undergraduate engineering classes?"
In this study, we explored the role that reflective writing plays in encouraging students to thinking baout diverse teams. Writing makes thinking visible and can increase metacognition—the awareness of what one knows and how one thinks (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987). Writing exercises can be assigned to support different goals, such as helping students to identify their conceptual confusions (Balgopal & Montplaisir, 2011), organize their thoughts to communicate science (Balgopal & Wallace, 2013), increase their self-efficacy (Miyake et al., 2010), and identify their own assumptions about how people work together to solve problems or answer questions in STEM fields (Balgopal & Atadero, unpublished data).
Our findings suggest that two short reflective writing interventions about team work (compared to "control" writing prompts) in introductory Mechanical Engineering (ME) and Chemical/Biological Engineering (CBE) design classes have a positive effect on students' perceptions of the importance of diverse perspectives during teamwork engineering design work. These writing interventions were assigned during randomly assigned laboratory sections during the first two weeks of class. We constructed a Awareness of Diversity in Teams Scale (ADTS) after reading/coding 388 student essays (each 1/2-1 page in length). After administering the MIT Team Effectiveness Survey (Alexander, 1985) and four open-response RW prompts at the end of the semester, we found that:
a) in CBE women scored significantly higher than men in the intervention cohort but not in the control section when writing about why their group was successful
b) both men and women scored significantly higher than their peers in the control cohorts when writing about why their group struggled *
c) in ME women scored significantly higher than men in the intervention and control cohorts when writing about why their group was successful.
The findings are promising! *Women are outnumbered by men in undergraduate engineering programs. If short writing interventions can increase men's perceptions of the importance of a diverse group, it may improve the quality of group work, helping all of the individuals in the group to increase their disciplinary content knowledge, attitudes, and performance in engineering courses.
We are currently preparing our complete findings for a manuscript.
My collaborators and I then asked:
"how can we promote awareness of the value of diverse teams in undergraduate engineering classes?"
In this study, we explored the role that reflective writing plays in encouraging students to thinking baout diverse teams. Writing makes thinking visible and can increase metacognition—the awareness of what one knows and how one thinks (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987). Writing exercises can be assigned to support different goals, such as helping students to identify their conceptual confusions (Balgopal & Montplaisir, 2011), organize their thoughts to communicate science (Balgopal & Wallace, 2013), increase their self-efficacy (Miyake et al., 2010), and identify their own assumptions about how people work together to solve problems or answer questions in STEM fields (Balgopal & Atadero, unpublished data).
Our findings suggest that two short reflective writing interventions about team work (compared to "control" writing prompts) in introductory Mechanical Engineering (ME) and Chemical/Biological Engineering (CBE) design classes have a positive effect on students' perceptions of the importance of diverse perspectives during teamwork engineering design work. These writing interventions were assigned during randomly assigned laboratory sections during the first two weeks of class. We constructed a Awareness of Diversity in Teams Scale (ADTS) after reading/coding 388 student essays (each 1/2-1 page in length). After administering the MIT Team Effectiveness Survey (Alexander, 1985) and four open-response RW prompts at the end of the semester, we found that:
a) in CBE women scored significantly higher than men in the intervention cohort but not in the control section when writing about why their group was successful
b) both men and women scored significantly higher than their peers in the control cohorts when writing about why their group struggled *
c) in ME women scored significantly higher than men in the intervention and control cohorts when writing about why their group was successful.
The findings are promising! *Women are outnumbered by men in undergraduate engineering programs. If short writing interventions can increase men's perceptions of the importance of a diverse group, it may improve the quality of group work, helping all of the individuals in the group to increase their disciplinary content knowledge, attitudes, and performance in engineering courses.
We are currently preparing our complete findings for a manuscript.
This research was conducted with support from CSU College of Engineering awarded to Atadero and Balgopal, 2015.