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Teaching Techniques Used in the TAMU APPEAL Courses

Team Testing
Motivation:
  • Throughout the course we have encouraged peer-lead interactive learning and team work to gain multiple views and higher understanding of a problem which would be difficult to obtain individually. In the PHYS 221 course we introduced a Team Testing component to the midterm and final exam to emphasize this type of interaction.
  • Students learn to work in teams to solve problems that individually would be too challenging to solve alone and begin to experience how collaborative problem solving works at the professional level.

Methodology:
  • Each exam was broken into two parts: 1) an individual exam during class, and 2) an evening group exam.
  • Students are broken in their usual teams of three that they have been having througout the course. The teams are chosen with even strength of the students so no team is much stronger than the others.
  • Two very challenging problems are given to the students and they have a few minutes to look them over and make a choice of which one they will attack. The students have to discuss which one they are better positioned to solve succesfully.
  • The instructor can guide and give hints to the groups and this team testing is viewed much more as an intense learning exercise where high degree of success is encouraged in order to motivate students participation.
  • During the evening exams, since this is typically extra time the students agree to do, coffee and some refreshments where provided.
  • No hard time limit was given. Many teams, once they finished their problem stay around to learn from other teams how to do the other problems.
Effective Use:
  • This is a very energetic testing exercise. Students are initially reluctant to the idea of being graded as a team (30% of their exam grade) but once they started they demanded this format for all the tests. The students had FUN during testing which according to many is a unique experience.
  • The goal of this testing is learning intensive collaborative problem solving and peer-lead learning. Even though a lot of conversation is taking place no teaching was really seen, each team wanted to get things on their own.
  • Our intention was to achieve a succesful outcome of the exercise to emphasize the benefit of collaborative problem solving and the instructors interacted with the groups when they needed a little hint (emphasizing mostly wrong avenues and leaving them to find the correct one). The individual testing part was a regular exam without peer interaction.

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