Project Investigator: Judy Chan, Sessional Lecturer, Food, Nutrition, and Health
Project Description
Collaborative learning has been a key instructional theme in FNH200-942, a summer intensive session where students explore sciences of foods we eat. Students enrolled in this course came with diverse academic and cultural backgrounds, joined from multiple time zones, and have different personal motivations. A number of teaching activities (pre-course survey, team contract, 2-stage exam, formative and summative peer evaluation, etc) have been used in recent years to help students form effective teams. While the instructor perceived some successes, there is a lack of understanding of how each of the teaching activities helped or hindered learning, especially in a summer intensive course. This project would like to explore how students learn food sciences in a collaborative learning environment.
Project Questions
- How may an instructor create trusting learning communities for teamwork with students with diverse background? • How does teamwork promote belongings in FNH 200?
- How does teamwork lead to meaningful learning in the team and for each individual member?
- What existing strategies being used in class hinder and/or enhance the exploration of learning?
Impact on teaching and learning at UBC
While each of the learning techniques listed above was intentionally designed to enhance students’ sense of belonging and promote open
communication in their representative team, the effectiveness of these techniques has not been well understood as data is only available through the end of the course Student Experience of Instruction. Students might have ended up doing ‘busy’ work as instructed, with limited direct impact on their true learning. Results from this project will inform instructors planning to promote collaborative learning in their classrooms: fine-tune effective practices and eliminate those that hindered learning.