Expanding SOTL problem

Action research in any form has a funny – or not funny – way of running away on you. I’ve been doing a bit of SOTL work on the wargame design task in my Hi2007 class, and next term I thought I would have a research plan to  finish of my Masters in Teaching & Learning using that class. However, next term the Hi2001 tutors and I plan to roll out a new set of tutorials for Hi2001, a class which includes all the Hi2007 students, and which will change how they look on group work. I think I have a solution – read on while I think it aloud

The HI2007 SOTL project is about about how humanities students work in groups and use web tools to facilitate that. The Hi2007 wargame design class is, for most History undergrads, the only group work assignment they do – the first, and for many the only. I have that from last years pilot survey of the class.

We had no money for tutorials in Hi2001 last year, but we got that budget line back. This means that my Hi2007 students this year are having much more small group teaching than previously, and I guess that should impact on the wargame design work.  But next semester, in Hi2001 tutorials, we are going to go for full peer/ critical friend review of every step of the essay writing process. Once we get going, every tutorial they will bring in some piece of work – bibliography, mindmap, essay plan, draft – which will be discussed in the tutorial group.

It is very likely that improving the Hi2001 tutorials will affect how students in Hi2007 feel about group work. I was thinking of using Hi2001 as a control group, with a start and end survey, but now my control group is going to be changing.

There can be no question of holding off the new tutorial work for HI2001 just to faciliate my data collection – that would be completely unethical. If you have something lined up which will improve learning in a course, you need a really good reason not to roll it out to the class. (Although, I have seen research papers where people split classes, and only gave ‘new’ teaching to some of the class to test out the differences. Perfectly scientific and completely unfair to the poor folks who got randomly stuck in the control group.)

The other problem is that while we roll out these new tasks for Hi2001, good SOTL practice would be to document that in some way.  Absolutely the best thing to do would be to involve the Hi2001 students, if they are interested, in gathering some information about how the new task works and what impact they make so we can continue to improve the tutorials. So my little research into group work in Hi2007 is begining to look like the Polish Army in 1939 – outflanked and bypassed on every front.

I think I can get round all this by reworking the before and after survey I have for Hi2007, and opening it to both classes.  Both groups will have a different experience of group engagement this term. Hi2001 will have one layer of it, as it were, and Hi2007 will have two layers of it, and if I can fix the survey so it takes account of that, and roll it out over the whole, large group, I can get info on both sets of groupwork which should be useful. This was not the original plan, but then plans, eh?

Oh and then there is the added wrinkle that part of Hi2001 or Hi2007 might be jointly taught with a similar class in the US, using the interweb. Scheduling may prevent that, but it is a serious possibilty. We’ll deal with that later. Life is fun


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