Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

Dr. Armbruster uses technology to ensure students are learning in his larger classes. (Photo: Roland Dimaya)

By Theodora Danylevich

Teaching is central to Dr. Peter Armbruster’s work at Georgetown. Along with teaching an upper-division seminar in Conservation Biology in the fall and serving as a mentor for senior theses each spring, Dr. Armbruster teaches a new batch of freshmen in Introductory Biology II, commonly with a headcount upward of 170 students. Each spring the class comes with its unique set of challenges and new learning experiences, for Dr. Armbruster as well as for his students. Inspired by his participation in the National Academies Summer Institutes on Undergraduate Education in Biology, Dr. Armbruster began to transform the way that the course is taught this past spring, stimulating greater student participation and interaction and more effective learning.

The standard way of teaching intro science courses is known as a “stand-and-deliver” format, where a professor talks at the students for 45 minutes to an hour straight, assisted by the use of PowerPoint slides, what Dr. Armbruster calls a “teacher-centered approach.” He and others, both at Georgetown and around the nation, are pioneering a more pedagogically sound “student-centered learning environment.”

“Many educators have recognized that the teacher-centered model is not ideal, but this is the way that science classes are usually taught at the introductory level,” says Dr. Armbruster. But with more than 100 students in an enormous lecture hall, it’s been a challenge to find truly effective ways of engaging the students and personalizing the learning process.

This year, Dr. Armbruster introduced an individual student response system called the “I-clicker” into his classroom, which each student in the lecture hall uses during the course.

With this device, students are able to click in with their responses to multiple-choice questions that Dr. Armbruster poses to the class periodically throughout the lecture, in order to evaluate how well students are following and understanding the material. Results from these clicked-in responses appear immediately on the screen in the lecture hall, and the class is able to see a breakdown of the popularity of answers. If there is a variety of conflicting answers that show up on the screen, Dr. Armbruster asks his students to take a minute to defend their answers to each other. After that, he takes another poll of answers.

“Almost invariably” explains Dr. Armbruster, “the answers shift to the correct one.” The beauty of this process is that it is the students actually teaching each other, thereby engaging more deeply with the materials.

“The practice of explaining it to each other is a really valuable learning experience, and it really forces students to think through the material in a more thorough way,” says Dr. Armbruster.

The I-clicker also helps Dr. Armbruster to learn how to improve the efficacy of his lectures.

“The students are more aware of their misconceptions than I am—I’ve been thinking about or working on the concepts presented in this course for many years and often it is difficult for me to see the material from the perspective of an Introductory Biology student.” The tool of the I-clicker makes it much easier for Dr. Armbruster to pinpoint what he needs to spend more time explaining: “It made me aware of areas that I had thought weren’t problem areas, helped me identify topics that we need to cover in more detail. It also helps to have a little break throughout the lecture—it gives me a chance to recollect my thoughts."

This pause in turn helps students’ attention spans, because it breaks up the lecturing. Studies have shown, reports Dr. Armbruster, that student pulse rate in a big lecture hall drops after about 15 minutes of lecturing, and students frequently stop paying attention. This I-clicker tool and technique helps to reset their attention span.

Reflecting on this past spring, he says, “It just completely changed the dynamics of the class.” The I-clicker now holds an important place in all of his lectures.

Beyond adding a technological device to facilitate learning and teaching, Dr. Armbruster feels very strongly about the benefits of working in small groups. He breaks his students up into groups of four once each lecture and gives them a problem to work on as a group for five minutes. Each group then reports back to the class as a whole.

He is looking forward to further developing more involved approaches in getting students engaged and actively participating.

“It’s very important to engage in back and forth discussion with students, even in the setting of the large lecture hall,” says Dr. Armbruster.

After attending the workshop on creating student-centered learning environments at National Academies Summer Institutes on Undergraduate Education in Biology, Dr. Armbruster and his colleagues in the Department of Biology ran a workshop on Georgetown’s campus in conjunction with the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), called the Symposium on Teaching for Understanding.

“In general, this is where science education is going,” says Dr. Armbruster, happy to be a part of the leading edge.

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