Teaching Problem-Solving Through a Cooperative Learning Environment

The Biology Sleuth was developed to provide a testbed in which the distribution of critical resources could be varied and the consequent effects on group dynamics and individual learning could be studied. The primary teaching goal of The Biology Sleuth is to teach important problem-solving skills (specifically, diagnostic reasoning) to high school students. In order to meet this goal a cooperative learning [3] environment has been developed in which students work in groups, aided by each other, software, and the classroom teacher.

Keywords:

Multimedia; Hypermedia; Educational Applications; Design Rationale.

Introduction

The Biology Sleuth has been developed to study how access to critical resources affects group dynamics and how, in turn, these new group dynamics affect individual performance or learning. The Biology Sleuth focuses on one type of problem-solving, diagnostic reasoning, to high school students.

The system is centered around the following four teaching goals:

1. 1.Help students form hypotheses to explain data.
2. 2.Teach students that several alternative hypotheses may explain the same pattern of data.
3. 3.Teach students that further testing may allow the refinement of a set of hypotheses.
4. 4.Help students to identify pieces of data which may be more diagnostic than others, and that this diagnosticity depends on the set of hypotheses being considered.

Designed for use in a classroom setting, The Biology Sleuth provides students with opportunities to increase their understanding of diagnostic reasoning, to reinforce and extend their knowledge of concepts relevant to the biological and health sciences, and to support incidental learning of skills (computer literacy, social and communication skills, algebra, reading graphs, and interpreting data) and knowledge (geography and history).

The Biology Sleuth Software.

There are two main components in the software. The first allows access to factual information about ten different diseases. The types of information provided include common questions about the illnesses, a bibliography of materials about the diseases which have been judged appropriate for secondary students, and a variety of quicktime movies or text files developed to make particular points about those diseases.

The second component is a problem-based learning environment [1] with a series of problem-solving exercises in which students must determine which, if any, diseases could account for a patient's symptoms. The nine exercises include a history, a set of symptoms, and clinical results for a hypothetical patient. The student's task is to identify which, if any, of the given diseases could be causing that patient's symptoms. This learning environment incorporates students' interactions with the computer, with other artifacts, with other students working at the same computer, with other groups of students working in the same classroom, and with the teacher as teaching resources.

Role of the Teacher.

The classroom teacher is meant to play a very active role when using The Biology Sleuth. He or she provides students with a preliminary description and brief demonstration of the system's functionality at the beginning of the class session. Once the problem-solving activity begins, this teacher circulates throughout the classroom answering students' questions. These questions may be about system vocabulary or the manner in which information should be entered in the computer system, about biology or health science concepts, or about problem-solving strategies. The teacher may also ask probing questions of students to help them make stronger connections between knowledge they have obtained elsewhere and their experience with the Biology Sleuth. To assist the teacher in this role, the system beeps loudly when an incorrect answer has been entered. This sound alerts the teacher that a group may need his or her assistance to understand the problem-solving task. (It also provides positive feedback that the teacher and the rest of the class can hear when a group is successful.)

Role of Other Students.

Students work together in groups of three. While three students sit together at a single computer, each individual in the group has access to his own chart. This chart is a two-dimensional table which lists the different diseases the students might entertain as hypotheses for that problem-solving case and indicates the test results typical for those ailments.

The use of this table (a copy of which is given to each student) is intended to encourage students to first form their own individual hypotheses when presented with the data for a particular patient. Once those hypotheses have been formed, the group must, however, enter a single answer into the computer, thus encouraging the students to discuss the hypotheses that they have formed and the methods by which they were generated. These conversations are expected to increase the likelihood that students will detect and correct each other's errors. Once errors are detected, students may attempt to remediate those errors for themselves or talk with the teacher.

Such a cooperative learning strategy encourages acts of peer teaching which are valuable learning experiences for both the speaker and the student listening to his explanation [4]. The student who describes how to reach some solution is generating an explanation for the actions he has taken to arrive at it, often deepening and reinforcing his understanding of the solution [2]. The student who listens to this explanation may gain understanding from both hearing the explanation itself or from realizing that his knowledge is faulty or incomplete. The latter realization is important if he is to improve his performance.

System Evaluation.

The Biology Sleuth has been evaluated at 11 schools, including rural, suburban and inner city schools. Formative evaluations were performed at the first 10 sites.

Pre/Post-Test comparisons were made to assess the effect of The Biology Sleuth on specific problem-solving skills (using a between-subjects design) in a summative evaluation at the 11th site, which was a rural public school. Of the 40 students who participated, twenty-six were African-American, twelve were Anglo-American, and two were Hispanic-American. Seventeen were male and twenty-three were female. All were of low socio-economic status.

Question #1: Ability to identify a plausible hypothesis for a pattern of data: Pre-test: 58%; Post-test: 89%; Improvement: 31%.

Question #2: Ability to identify the most diagnostic test to narrow a given set of hypotheses. Pre-test: 17%; Post-test: 63%; Improvement: 46%.

The students' improvement on the first question is statistically significant with p < .05 and the second question is significant with p < .01. These results are especially exciting as they were achieved in a single 45 minute class period.

SUMMARY

Rigorous (but small scale studies) suggest that the cooperative learning approach and the problem-based learning strategies implemented in The Biology Sleuth provide a very powerful tool for teaching problem-solving skills to populations that are at risk of academic failure and are typically underrepresented as professionals in science. Now that this system has been established, it is being used as a testbed to study how access to resources affects group dynamics and, consequently, individual performance and learning.

1. 1. Barrows, H. S. A taxonomy of problem-based learning. Medical Education. Vol. 20. (1988). 481-488.
2. 2. Chi, M.T.H., Bassok, M., Lewis, M.W., Reimann, P., Glaser, R. Self-Explanations: How Students Study and Use Examples in Learning to Solve Problems. Cognitive Science, 13, (1989).145-182
3. 3. Slavin, R. E. When Does Cooperative Learning Increase Student Achievement? Psychological Bulletin. 94. (1983). 429-445.
4. 4. Smith, K. A. Educational Engineering: Heuristics for Improving Learning Effectiveness and Efficiency. Engineering Education. Feb. 1987. 274-279.