Study finds that student resistance to curriculum innovation decreases over time as it becomes the institutional norm, and that students increasingly link active learning to their learning gains over time.
Faculty buy-in is a common challenge to curricular innovation. But what about students? What hurdles, if any, do they represent when it comes to adopting a more student-centered pedagogy? After all, taking notes during a lecture is arguably less demanding than engaging in more active learning.
That question is at the heart of a new study published in PLOS ONE, called “Knowing Is Half the Battle: Assessments of Both Student Perception and Performance Are Necessary to Successfully Evaluate Curricular Transformation.”
Hypothesizing that student buy-in would increase as the share of students who completed a revised course grew within a given student population — due to a new sense of “community,” and not just teacher efficacy — the authors of the study measured learning gains and attitudes during a course transformation at a small liberal arts college.
Using an original curriculum called Integrating Biology and Inquiry Skills, or IBIS, the authors found that students reported and demonstrated substantial learning gains. And, confirming their original hunch, the authors determined that buy-in did increase with each successive cohort — in part because students increasingly linked certain aspects of the course to their learning gains in surveys.
Suann Yang, an assistant professor of biology at the State University of New York at Geneseo, co-wrote the study with several colleagues. They helped develop the IBIS curriculum, which covers introductory biology in nine modules or scenarios that touch on real-world problems, such as diseases. Then the authors and other faculty members at the small college, which Yang has since left — some 13 in all — taught the courses to 724 students for four years.
Student resistance was highest the first year, based on pre- and post-course surveys. But by the end of the fourth year, it was significantly reduced. While students’ overall course grades did not increase, substantial learning gains were observed across all years.
Students participating in the IBIS curriculum demonstrated learning gains of between 19 and 75 percent in terms of content knowledge and between 30 and 50 percent in terms of skills, based on several different instruments. That’s comparable to or exceeding reported learning gains from other student-centered environments, according to the study, “and help[s] to explain the extensively documented increase in student performance under active learning environments compared to traditional lecturing.”