The Greatest Learning Return on Your Pedagogical Investment: Alignment, Assessment or In-Class Instruction?
Critical thinking is often considered an essential learning outcome of institutions in higher education. Previous work has proposed three pedagogical strategies to address this goal: more active, student-centered in-class instruction, assessments which contain higher-order cognitive questions, and greater alignment within a classroom (i.e., high agreement of the cognitive level of learning objectives, assessments, and in-class instruction). Our goals were to determine which of these factors, individually or the interactions therein, contributed most to improvements in university students' critical thinking. We assessed students' higher-order cognitive skills in introductory non-majors biology courses the first and last week of instruction. For each of the fifteen sections observed, we also measured the cognitive level of assessments and learning objectives, evaluated the learner-centeredness of each classroom, and calculated an alignment score for each class. The best model to explain improvements in students' high-order cognitive skills contained the measure of learner-centeredness of the class and pre-quiz scores as a covariate. The cognitive level of assessments, learning objectives, nor alignment explained improvements in students' critical thinking. In accordance with much of the current literature, our findings support that more student-centered classes had greater improvements in student learning. However, more research is needed to clarify the role of assessment and alignment in student learning.
Department of Biology, Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah, United States of America.
Emily A
EA
Holt
Department of Biology, Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah, United States of America.
Craig
C
Young
Department of Biology, Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah, United States of America.
Jared
J
Keetch
Department of Biology, Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah, United States of America.
Skylar
S
Larsen
Department of Biology, Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah, United States of America.
Brayden
B
Mollner
D001695:Biology / Q000193:education*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D003479:Curriculum; D004521:Educational Measurement; D004522:Educational Status; D006801:Humans; D018794:Problem-Based Learning / Q000379:methods*; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology*; D013850:Thinking / Q000502:physiology