Jeronimo writes:
I have been using small whiteboards in my research methods class to have the students work in pairs and it has been a huge success.
I asked, “How large are the whiteboards? And why do you use these rather than simply having them work in their notebooks?” and he responded:
The whiteboards are about 8×11. I like the boards because it changes the dynamic of the class. It introduces the sense of doing something different and also they can erase everything and start all over again. And I guess we don’t waste a lot of paper.
I’ll try it for the next course I teach.
P.S. As Seth might say, how come I have no problem with anecdotal evidence in education–the area in which I actually work–but when it comes to medicine and public health I focus on potential selection biases, insist on randomized trials, etc. In my defense, I’d point out that there has been some education research showing the benefits of working in pairs, peer instruction, and so forth–thus the “whiteboard for each pair of students” idea makes sense. But, then again, medical interventions typically make sense, whether or not they work (recall The Doctor’s Dilemma).
I used to use those plastic sleeves with a white sheet of paper inside. Then students can write on those with dry-erase markers – just like a whiteboard but cheaper and easier to have a ton around (so working in pairs is easier). I'm not sure if you can easily get them above a 8 1/2" x 11" size, though.
Regarding the "P.S.", your intuition is better (or, at least, you internally believe so, since you accept it) in the education field than medicine. More colloquially, your horse-puckey detector is more finely tuned (to quote Colonel Sherman Potter). Somewhere there are people who are specialists in other fields asking for you to remove the selection bias from the anecdotes you report in those fields.
I guess the other side is that errors in medical and health arenas tend to have more severe immediate and medium-term consequences than an error in classroom instruction. Personally, I'd like to see the level of severity attached to errors in the latter arena increased, since by the time we notice them, we've failed another generation of students.
Buying whiteboards is ludicrous – I cannot believe how expensive they are. This is a much better alternative (assuming you have access to some kind of power saw, anyway).
I'd actually be very interested in which pieces of education research the readers of this blog find meaningful. I'm a four-month veteran of higher ed research and everything I've seen has been very, very unimpressive.
Having looked at the link for DIY whiteboards, I think students would get even more out of a class in which they started out by making their whiteboards – especially if it included learning how to use a power saw. (Assuming Andrew has access to some kind of power saw…)
Another question:
What does "huge success" mean? On which metrics did he improve how much?
@Malcolm: I don't think that the kind of health examples that Seth writes about have severe negative consequences when they don't provide the benefits that he intends.
Of course I have a power saw. It's a circular saw, though, and can be inconvenient to use. I've been thinking of getting a saber saw.
Matt:
What RCT research is done depends on the cost/feasibility and the community's expectations/tolerance of being wrong.
For instance, in a very candid talk on a meta-analysis of studies in educataion (abstract below), it was reported that there was only one RCT and the author of its report felt oblidged to disclose that she had to work very hard to find something statistically significant to satisfy her thesis examiners …
February 4th~ Harris Cooper, Duke University
"Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement?: A Synthesis of Research,
1987-2003"
Dr. Cooper will describe the methods and results of his team's research
synthesis on homework and achievement. This meta-analysis won the American
Educational Research Association's Award for Outstanding Research Review
published in 2006.
Harris Cooper, Professor and Director of Education and Professor of Psychology
Duke University