Paul Bakker, David Carrington, Andrew Goodchild,
Ian Hayes, Helen Purchase, Paul Strooper
Department of Computer Science, The University of Queensland,
St. Lucia 4072, Australia
Although these skills can be taught in separate subject, this is not sufficient. It is important that group work and communication are integrated with core technical material. Otherwise there is a risk that students may not treat these topics seriously and as relevant to their professional careers.
In the Department of Computer Science at The University of Queensland, we have been experimenting for several years with ways to integrate these skills into tutorials. Our traditional tutorials consist of a small group of students supervised by a tutor (teaching assistant). Typically the tutor presents solutions to selected problems, essentially delivering a mini-lecture, or answers individual questions raised by students. This organization offers little opportunity for developing students' communication skills.
In this paper, we present a different style of tutorial and report on experience with, and feedback on, introducing this style of tutorial in several Computer Science subjects. Based on feedback from students and teaching staff, we have developed guidelines and recommendations for such classes. We believe we have improved the quality of the Department's small-group teaching and encouraged students to treat communication skills as valuable. Our results show that small-group teaching can be enhanced by including group work and presentation activities, but that care must be taken to achieve appropriate structure and content for such tutorials. Tutorial attendance has improved dramatically, students enjoy working in groups, and students are more willing to give presentations than was anticipated.
Many science and engineering graduates have poor communication and group-working skills. Recommendations to address the problem are included in the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 1991 [3]. A recent Australian Government review of the Computer Science discipline surveyed employers about professional skills not supported adequately by university training [1, p. 105]. Written and oral communication skills headed the list (45 out of 200 responses) while human relations teamwork was fourth on the list (17 out of 200).
The undergraduate computer science program at the University of Queensland is
taught using a mix of lectures, tutorials and laboratory classes.
Traditionally, tutorials are small-group classes led by a tutor
who either presents solutions to selected problems in a mini-lecture style or who answers individual questions
from students. These traditional tutorials have been poorly attended and
many students who attend tutorials do not actively participate.
In 1994, the authors successfully applied for a grant to investigate ways of improving small-group tutorials. The specific goal was to incorporate opportunities for students to develop group working and communication skills.
This paper describes experiments with small-group teaching to find ways of incorporating group work and presentation activities without compromising content. It describes some initial problems that were observed and subsequent experiments to overcome these. From the experiments, we have generated recommendations for including group work and presentation activities in tutorials.
Prior to the funded project, some of the authors had trialed a scheme for including group work and communication in tutorial classes. Each tutorial class was divided into groups of four students. Each group prepared a solution to one of the tutorial problems and a group member presented that solution to the tutorial class. To make presentations more convenient, each group was supplied with a single overhead projection slide at the first tutorial and this was reused every week.
Each tutorial followed a similar pattern:
To emphasize to students that tutorials are important, 10%of the final mark was based on participation by the group in weekly tutorial activities. Each student accrued their mark for that week by being present at the tutorial. Each student also had to be the group's spokesperson on three occasions to gain the maximum mark. That is, to get the full 10%, a student had to be group spokesperson for three tutorials and attend at least seven other tutorials. So that students would perceive tutorials as non-threatening practice sessions, the marking scheme was not based on the correctness of the answers. The marks were a reward for participating and practicing new skills.
These tutorials were considered to be successful. The students generally accepted the new regime and tutorial participation rose from about 40%in previous years to around 90%. About 90%of the class had a mark of 90%or above for their tutorial participation mark. Feedback from students was mostly positive. However, some problems were evident. The following problems were identified with presentations:
Other problems that were identified include:
Finally, the quality of the tutors plays an important role in the success of tutorial. In the new style of tutorial, there is more interaction between the tutor and small groups of students. Tutors need to have the communication and groups working skills that we want our students to develop. Tutors must assist multiple groups with the technical content and the presentation of the tutorial questions. This requires mastery of the subject matter and the ability to foster the learning process for each group. It is also important to encourage discussion during the presentations. Considerable tact is required when the presented answer is not correct so that the presenter and the group are not publically humiliated.
Because many staff had started experimenting with group-style tutorial, there was a wide range of opinions on how prevalent such problems were, and what adjustments would effectively solve them. It was decided that the best way to study and address these problems would be to establish a working group of teaching staff to reflect on the purpose of such tutorial, experiment with their organization, collect feedback from teaching staff and students, and make recommendations to the Department.
Our strategy involved collecting initial feedback from participants in the new style of tutorial. After identifying common problems, we designed tutorial schemes to suit three subject at different levels in the undergraduate curriculum and to cover different types of technical material. In this way, we hoped to discover ways of managing the problems identified by the initial feedback.
This theoretical subject has only half the contact time of the others and only one tutorial per fortnight. As it was a first year subject, the tutorial scheme concentrated on introducing the mode of operation of the tutorial, and included an introduction to presentation skills. The problem of allocating time in tutorials was addressed by having lots of small questions rather than few large ones, and the size of the tutorials was reduced to a maximum of 12 students. The small questions also meant that a greater variety of content could be covered. A discussion on how to give a good presentation formed part of the first tutorial, and the small tutorial groups meant that there were only three groups per tutorial and there was sufficient time for presentations. As this is a first year subject, marks were given merely for tutorial participation, and the administration was reduced by the tutors only needing to record who was present.
Tutorial scheme for this practical, second year subject focused on the problems of time for presentations and individual student questions, group management, and the quality of solutions. The problem of adequate time for presentations was addressed by only having selected groups present each week. There was a maximum of 20 students per tutorial, with three or four students per group. In addition, students were expected to do ``warm-up'' exercises before they came to the tutorial. The groups were initially allocated by the tutor, who could change them throughout the semester if necessary. Active group management was encouraged by having the groups allocate the roles of discussion co-ordinator and spokesperson each week. The slides were collected and assessed every week, encouraging the students to prepare good solutions. To ensure reasonable quality presentations, marks were allocated for presentation style. To ensure that students had enough time to ask questions about the subject and that the tutorial adequately covered the content, three traditional style tutorials were held with no new questions. After several weeks, a change was made to timetable student presentations at the beginning of the following week's tutorial. This gave students more time to prepare and was well received by students and teaching staff.
This third year subject has little programming or computational work, often there is more than one correct answer to a problem, and it may be difficult to identify what constitutes a perfect solution. The tutorial scheme for this subject emphasized content, and unlike the other schemes, the tutorials took on several different forms during the semester. To address the complaint that presentation style tutorials do not provide enough time for general questions, some tutorials left the second half of the hour for general questions and discussion, while the first half of the hour was spent in groups preparing a solution to an allocated question. To allow time for solutions to be discussed, some tutorials required that groups do two questions, and then discuss their solutions with other groups who had done the same questions. The problem of students not getting solutions to questions they have not answered was addressed by distributing the solutions from all groups from all tutorials, making available more than one solution to each question. Tutorials where a member from each group has to present their solution were also held; as in CS205, marks were given for lucid presentation. In addition, marks were given for the solutions submitted by each group weekly, encouraging better quality solutions.
In each subject, feedback was collected from students twice during the semester and once from teaching staff. All students were also invited to two open meetings held to obtain their perceptions of tutorials and their reactions to our draft recommendations. The results indicated that students like group work, dislike listening to other students presenting, and want feedback on their own presentations. A minority of students dislike the new tutorial arrangements; it appears that these students find their access to tutorial assistance is reduced by the overall increased participation in tutorials.
The most important outcome was the list of recommendations concerning tutorials and tutor training that were submitted to the Department. The recommendations were a distillation of our experience over the semester, and took into account all the experimentation, discussion, reflection and feedback that were part of this project. In the final report [2], the recommendations are subdivided by topic: presentations, group work, assessment, tutor training/support. There are also some general recommendations. The recommendations included:
There were three additional outcomes from the project:
One facet of the project that proved vexing was the issue of long-term evaluation. We struggled over questions of how to measure improvement in nebulous qualities such as `communication skills' and `group working skills'. We finally realized that we could only measure preceptions: how students perceive their own skills and how future employers perceive the skills of our students. Our feedback surveys assessed students' short-term perceptions but we have not investigated longer-term assessment strategies.
The emphasis of our experiments with small-group teaching has been on methods that included group work and student presentations in tutorial classes. The key features of our new tutorials are:
We have trialed our ideas on a variety of subject at different levels within the undergraduate curriculum. We believe that we have been successful in improving the quality of student learning in tutorial classes.
We wish to acknowledge the considerable assistance we have received from colleagues, tutors and students. As well as the authors of this paper, the project team included Kylie Ackers, Andrew Lister as sponsor, and Patrick Palmer as mentor. This work would not have been possible without the participation of tutors and students in classes where these ideas were begin trialed. We thank them for their patience and hope they got something useful in return.
We also wish to acknowledge the Tertiary Education Institute (TEI) at The University of Queensland for funding the project as part of the Action Learning program.