University Times

Research in the fields of education, neurobiology and psychology has informed the understanding of how students learn. Yet, educators say, there is a disconnect between what researchers know about learning and what faculty members do about it when they’re teaching.

Two Pitt professors last week discussed their approaches to bridging that gap — the “growing schism between learning and schooling” as one professor put it — at a Summer Instructional Development Institute seminar titled “How Students Learn Directs How We Should Teach,” sponsored by the Provost’s Advisory Council for Instructional Excellence and the Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education.

“Information is not knowledge,” said Sam Donovan, research associate professor of biological sciences who specializes in using web-based collaboration tools. “Technical access to something is not the same as professional access. There’s lots of work to do to create a disciplinary perspective for information, and you need to provide students with some background to get started, but the good news is there are tools and resources available to do it.”

Donovan, who also is director of undergraduate programs for the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium, a 25-year national reform effort in biology education, spoke on “Learning to Learn: Integrating Disciplinary and Media Literacy.”

He credited the educational theories of Allan Collins, author and emeritus professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University, with leading him to “a revelation.”

“With the exponential expansion of technology, how we interact with students is changing. There are changes in the very nature of the discipline and there are differences between students’ learning outside school compared to what they learn inside school,” Donovan said.

“We have the tools and capacity for communities built on common interest to form and sustain themselves, to be focused on specialized topics, and people are taking advantage of these to learn outside the classroom.”

(Collins delivered a lecture on this subject at Pitt last October. See Nov. 12 University Times.)

“One of the hallmarks of the new science of learning is its emphasis on learning with understanding. Deep understanding of subject matter transforms factual information into usable knowledge. It also leads to lifelong learning, which is one of our responsibilities to promote,” Donovan said.

“What is understanding? Understanding involves more than reproducing information or using existing routines. Understanding is the ability to think and act flexibly with what one knows,” he said.

Donovan advocates a performance-based evaluation of understanding. “We [faculty] traffic in knowledge and skills. So a student who performs well in our class generally acquires a certain amount of knowledge. But the integration of that knowledge, the application of that knowledge to problems, for that there are transfer issues. Understanding is not something that is indicated on a test. It’s the act of doing something,” he said.

That’s where the “three Ps” come in: problem posing, problem solving and peer persuasion, Donovan said.

What makes a good scientific problem? “The goal of any problem is to get students to move from being an audience to being participants. To do that, they have to see how research, which can be introduced into the teaching setting, plays out,” he said.

For example, teaching evolutionary biology involves a range of interdisciplinary knowledge, including in biology, genetics, ecology and environmental studies, Donovan said.

“The key is to integrate disciplinary knowledge and information literacy.”

It used to be that the professor and the textbook were the sole sources of information. “Now that is true much less so,” he said. “Think about all the information that’s on the Internet. Students need to gain experience to find the information, which is what faculty have been trained to do,” he said.

In addition to accessing the most current discipline-specific academic literature, students need to learn to use other online tools — RSS feeds (such as Science News and PubMed), Google alerts, imageJ, ManyEyes and Gapminder — in their course assignments, he said. “Students gravitate toward these things. We are visual creatures, we can make sense of complex things,” Donovan said.

“Undergraduates need to understand the process of science, its interdisciplinary nature and how science is closely integrated within society. Students also should be competent in communication and collaboration, as well as have a certain level of quantitative competency, and a basic ability to understand and interpret data.”

Donovan said his main “takeaway messages” are:

• While lectures have a role in courses, an overemphasis on didactic instruction does little to engage students as learners and even less to prepare them for future lifelong learning, “Work settings change, people have to retrain regularly, so we need to rethink our responsibility in terms of training lifelong learners,” he said.

• Online information resources exist to provide students with authentic learning experiences.

• Adopting this new curricular model will involve addressing both disciplinary and information literacy. “We need to think about not just our disciplinary knowledge but how things play out in the real world where students are interacting with all sorts of media,” Donovan said.

Another approach to applying how students learn to teaching is by employing evidence-based practice (EBP) techniques, according to Richard Henker, professor and vice chair in the Department of Acute and Tertiary Care, School of Nursing. He teaches nursing master’s anesthesia students in the human simulation laboratory and as a nurse anesthetist preceptor at UPMC Presbyterian.

Evidence-based practice, Henker said, is defined as an approach to decision-making in which the clinician uses the best evidence available, in consultation with the patient, to decide on the option that suits that patient best.

“Our nursing anesthesia students are high achievers, excellent clinicians and critical care nurses who have a well-developed practice before they enter into our curriculum and they have some exposure to research,” Henker said.

“What we’ve discovered is that their understanding of a clinical concept is driven by their experience on that unit. They get a bachelor’s degree that gives them many of the concepts, then they go out and practice on the unit and it changes a lot of their understanding. So we try to use EBP to guide their understanding from the time they start the program,” he said.

“What we try to emphasize is not only do you look at the literature and look at the evidence, but you also have to look at the patient’s situation and the patient’s preferences. So we try to integrate the clinician’s expertise, moderated by patient circumstances. One of the things that drives me crazy is the model of always referring to the protocol. Not all patients fit the protocol.”

For example, Henker said, a patient with a broken arm that requires surgery should be given the choice of having regional block anesthesia or general anesthesia, instead of the nurse anesthetist making the decision. Nurse anesthetists learn to interview and assess each patient and formulate a plan of care to best meet the individual’s needs.

“We encourage our students to look at all the advantages of regional block and all the advantages of general anesthesia in terms of taking care of the patient, such as post-op complications and pain management,” he pointed out.

One obstacle can be a student’s  pre-existing understanding, which can be faulty. “Students arrive with preconceptions or incomplete understanding about how the world works. We try to fix those things they’ve learned from their clinical experience,” Henker said. “We do give content through lectures, which work well for recognition, but not for understanding. Recognizing a correct answer on a test does not show understanding.”

So faculty in the nurse anesthesia program use the Socratic method to engage students. In addition, the nursing school has decided to de-emphasize multiple choice exams in favor of essay tests, which provide a clearer indication of whether students understand concepts, he said.

“Our goal is a deeper foundation of factual knowledge, but there are obstacles, chiefly the attitude of ‘this is the way we’ve always done this procedure.’ The goal also is we want to teach you a process: Try to look at the literature, and incorporate the literature into patient care. Most important is to develop the habit of reviewing and critiquing the literature in order to relate it to practice. The literature on patient care changes dramatically in a short period,” Henker said.

He then explained how the nursing school incorporates EBP into its nurse anesthesia master’s program curriculum.

“In the first course, Foundations of Anesthesia, there is mostly content but we make sure we have an assignment that starts them identifying clinical questions, going out and doing research and then writing up a summary,” Henker said. Students quickly learn that the answers to these questions aren’t all black and white.

“The textbooks may make it look black and white, but that’s not the case in the real world,” he said.

In the Pharmacology course, students learn to critique the academic literature in small groups of two-three students. “They critique the article and discuss it, and then have someone get up in front of the class and present the critique and then discuss how this will affect their practice,” Henker explained, adding that this process is continued throughout the curriculum.

“In Statistics, evidence-based practice helps them to evaluate the methodology used in articles, and in Evidence-Based Practice I and II, students take some of the results of evidence they’ve found and apply it to a particular patient,” he said.

“In Research Practicum, which I teach, the format is: four short lectures; a review of statistical analysis and the critique process; critiquing seven articles, by having small groups critique different sections of the articles, and on a discussion board post a summary of their critique. We’ll spend two hours discussing the critiques, and then we rotate the small groups,” Henker explained. “This really gives me insight into how well they understand the article. The article selection is important. They should be clinically relevant articles.”

He added that students are graded on classroom and online discussion.

The goal, he said, is to demonstrate the importance of research in supporting practice. “It’s a clinically oriented program, and students are mostly interested in gaining clinical skill, but they often don’t see the connection between research and clinical skill,” Henker said.

He added that the program promotes the critique process as part of lifelong learning; students learn to organize knowledge in a way that facilitates retrieval and to incorporate knowledge into practice, and they develop self-efficacy regarding learning.

—Peter Hart