Designing Interactive Learning Experiences that Improve Student Outcomes
Understanding the unmet needs of students on the margins
When I taught Intro to Sociology at Tennessee Tech for the first time in Fall 2017, I quickly realized my biggest challenge was to keep students engaged throughout the entire fifteen-week course. Approximately 25% of students displayed a troubling pattern of behavior. They frequently skipped class, failed to submit low-value assignments, and rarely connected with me one-on-one, such as during office hours or through email correspondence.
When I took a closer look at their grades, I realized there were actually two different types of students involved: low-achieving students, who earned D’s and F’s, and high-achieving students, who earned A’s.
To better understand their experiences, I conducted one-on-one interviews with five low- and five high-achieving students. I used thematic analysis and affinity diagramming to synthesize this qualitative data alongside quantitative measures of academic performance. Finally, I created personas and journey maps to guide my student-centered redesign of the course.
This research revealed that low-achieving students tended to be freshmen with modest high school GPA’s and ACT scores, indicators that college-level work might be daunting for them. Many were first-generation college students who didn’t know what to expect from the course. They explained that when course content proved challenging early in the semester, they felt isolated and too embarrassed to ask for help. Continuing to attend class caused anxiety, so they unplugged from the course and fell further and further behind.
High-achieving students tended to be upperclassmen who were already succeeding in their major fields of study. Many benefited from the support of college-educated parents and had conquered college-prep courses in high school with relative ease. They viewed the course as neither challenging nor important and were confident in their ability to earn A’s without investing much effort. Skipping class and failing to submit low-value assignments were calculated choices, and they were able to score well on exams by quickly skimming textbook chapters on their own.
I used these insights to frame my design problem as involving two types of extreme users, each with their own unique needs. Low-achieving students needed more social support to voice their concerns and get help when they needed it. High-achieving students needed more meaningful connections to the course other than simply earning “easy A’s.”
Testing a possible solution for increasing student engagement
My goal was to structure class time around activities that would increase engagement, so I organized students into diverse groups of five and required them to work together on completing formative assessments and preparing for summative assessments.
Qualitative evidence collected through classroom observation showed that low-achieving students were more comfortable reaching out for help and high-achieving students were more invested in collaborating with their peers. Quantitative measures of class attendance and missing assignments both improved as well, and perhaps most importantly, low-achieving students were much more likely to earn a C or better in the course.
This new emphasis on group work also increased participation in class discussion more broadly, but unfortunately students were too often discussing unsubstantiated claims related to their own personal opinions. They were distracted by political ideology and began to lose sight of sociology as a science. Over time, I realized that my solution to the problem of keeping certain students engaged had created the new problem of keeping the entire class focused.
Iterating on the solution with a lab science approach
So, my next goal was to place more emphasis on how social scientific claims are supported by the careful collection and systematic analysis of evidence. Students needed to experience the research process themselves in order to better understand how sociologists arrive at their conclusions. They needed to learn about sociology by doing sociology.
In Spring 2019 I determined I would try teaching the course like a lab science. Just as natural science courses like chemistry and biology provide students with laboratory settings to develop familiarity with the scientific method, I would create lab assignments that give students the chance to work with real data. My idea was awarded a competitive curriculum grant through Tennessee Tech’s Quality Enhancement Plan, which involved an intensive two-day design sprint with other grant recipients.
On the first day, faculty each established criteria and constraints for our respective courses and then cycled through rounds of divergent and convergent thinking to brainstorm and subsequently edit our ideas. The following day, we used backward design to sketch out course objectives, assessments, and learning experiences for an iterative series of prototypes that were shared during group critiques. My final design included a series of ten lab assignments for students to complete with their group members during class.
Evaluating the positive impacts of innovative curriculum
These lab assignments were implemented in Fall 2019 and effectively oriented class time around the collection and analysis of empirical evidence, which ultimately kept students focused on the methods and theories that distinguish sociology as a social scientific discipline. Students rated me 4.9 out of 5.0 as an “excellent teacher,” and the course 4.6 out of 5.0 as an “excellent course.”
Later, a comparison of pre- and post-test data from a departmental general education assessment showed that students in my sections of the course were making the most significant gains. Based on these outcomes, my department chair nominated me for the university’s General Education Award for Outstanding Teaching.
After sharing these results with a colleague who specializes in the scholarship of teaching and learning, we decided to collaborate on a journal article illustrating how design thinking and user experience research can be used to improve course instruction. Our co-authored reflective essay was published in Transformative Dialogues: Teaching and Learning Journal.