Abstract
Undergraduate students are increasingly working with academic staff to evaluate and design teaching materials in Higher Education, thereby moving from being passive consumers of knowledge to genuine partners in their education. Here we describe a student partnership project run at the University of Cambridge, which aimed to improve undergraduate biology practical class teaching. Student interns were recruited to act as researchers, pedagogical consultants and producers of teaching resources. Research by the interns revealed that students with limited practical experience at high-school level tended to have lower confidence and more negative responses to first-year university practical classes than peers with more experience. Interns and academics therefore redesigned the workflow for practicals to include online pre- and post-practical tutorials to support understanding and consolidation of laboratory-based material, which included student-produced quizzes and videos. We reflect on the process of building the partnership, and explore the value of partnership approaches in Higher Education.
Highlights
Student engagement has become a key theme in Higher Education, with institutions increasingly focusing on the need for students to be actively involved in their own learning
We describe the implementation and our experiences of an academic-student partnership project to develop pre- and post-practical resources for first-year practical classes taught by the Department of Plant Sciences and Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience
The impact of pre-practical and online resources on student understanding and confidence has been considered extensively by many others (Cann, 2014; Jones & Edwards, 2010; Voelkel, 2013; Whittle & Bickerdike, 2014), so we will not attempt systemically to evaluate the pedagogical benefits of the video and quiz resources here
Summary
Student engagement has become a key theme in Higher Education, with institutions increasingly focusing on the need for students to be actively involved in their own learning. One model of partnership is that of ‘student as producer’, where students go from consuming teaching resources to creating them, working alongside staff to design and deliver aspects of the course (Neary & Winn, 2009) This approach recognises that undergraduates are experts in their own student experience, and can provide a valuable perspective on both the content and presentation of teaching materials (Cook-Sather, 2010; Healey et al, 2014; Neary & Winn, 2009). We describe the implementation and our experiences of an academic-student partnership project to develop pre- and post-practical resources for first-year practical classes taught by the Department of Plant Sciences and Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. During your A levels or equivalent, Once or Once or how frequently did you do the twice in the twice a Every
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