Last May in Buenos Aires, we presented our experience in deploying Team-Based Learning in software engineering courses.
Team-Based Learning is an Active Learning Methodology where all classroom activities are carried out among students formed teams. As such, the instructor takes on a secondary role of enabler of the process and facilitator of the discussions.
In our opinion, one key element of TBL is that the course life-cycle is completely described in the methodology. Therefore, those looking to deploy TBL in their courses should study and follow the guidelines. For that purpose, we recommend the book by Michaelsen et al.
In short, each TBL module is composed of the following activities.
- Individual Study: so that students come to class with the contents already studied.
- Individual Readiness Assessment Test (IRAT): so that students can individually evaluate how well they have prepared for the class.
- Group Readiness Assessment Test (GRAT): where students can check their answer within their team, and the team comes up with possibly new answers to the IRAT.
- Written appeals: a venue for students to communicate which questions they found were poorly written.
- Instructor feedback: which comes immediately after the previous steps, is evidence-based, on the results of the IRAT and GRAT.
- Application-oriented activities: this is, in our opinion the key element of the methodology, and one on which we put more attention, and also, the one which we feel we should improve upon.
Application-oriented activities
Application-oriented activities (AOA), are a set of exercises designed to test the group skills and foster discussions. During AOA, students work in teams to solve problems that should jog their understanding of the topic. AOA are the place where most of the learning takes place in TBL. Unfortunately, our results and satisfaction towards AOL have been mixed.
We observed that:
- As only IRAT and RAT are graded in TBL, when faced with pressures from other subjects in the semester, students skip AOA classes.
- Lower attendance also introduces the problem that serious games (with some healthy competition among teams) cannot be implemented without a minimum critical mass of students and teams.
This semester we’ve tried a few variations to get students more engaged in AOA, such as:
- awarding extra points for contributing to new AOA exercises, and
- establishing a minimum attendance for AOA classes.
We are still evaluating the effects of these interventions. For the moment, attendance rate has risen during the last semester.
Do you have any ideas to help us with this problem? We’d love to hear about them. Contact us at:
- Santiago Matalonga – University of the West of Scotland – santiago.matalonga@uws.ac.uk
- Alejandro Bia – Universidad Miguel Hernández – abia@umh.es