Developing Writing Assignments and Feedback Strategies for Maximum Effectiveness in Large
Classroom Environments
Karl Smith
Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota
ksmith@umn.edu
Constance Kampf
Rhetoric & Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota
kampf001@umn.edu
Abstract
•
How do you teach writing effectively when your
classes have between 40-80 students? This paper will
address the challenges of working in large classroom
environments with engineering students in the CE 4101
and CE 4102 classes. We will demonstrate WebCT peer
review techniques, and feedback techniques for writing
that we have been using in large classroom environments.
We will also discuss the successes and challenges that we
have encountered as we try to engage students in active
learning in large classroom environments.
•
1. Challenges of Large Classroom
Environments
Large classroom environments are common is
colleges and universities across the United States. The US
News and World Report [1] survey indicates that classes
with over 50 students are prevalent and increasing; ditto
for Classes with Over 100 students. An average of 12% of
classes has more than 50 students in the top 100 national
universities. The range was 1-28% for the top 50 and 0.350% for the next 50.
Both students and faculty complain about large
classes, perhaps in part due to the large portion of
instructors who lecture. Gardiner [2] reported that 73-83
percent of college instructors surveyed identified the
lecture method as their usual instructional strategy.
Carbone and Greenberg [3] indicate a general
dissatisfaction with the quality of large-class learning
experiences:
• Lack of interaction with faculty members (in and
out of class)
• Lack of structure in lectures
• Lack of or poor discussion sections
• Inadequate contact with teaching assistants
Inadequacy of classroom facilities and
environment
Lack of frequent testing or graded assignments
Wulff, Nyquist & Abbott [4] report the following,
rather poignant student comments:
 It is easier to do anything you want, sleep, not
attend, or lose attention
 No one knows I’m here
 Rude people come late, leave early, or sit and talk
to their buddies
The research cited above paints a rather grim portrait
of large (lecture) classes; however, our view and our
experience is that it’s not the size that matters; it’s what
happens before, during, and after class. There are several
strategies that faculty can use to help transform the typical
impersonal and passive large-class setting into a more
personal and interactive setting. Our survey of faculty and
extensive interviews with faculty incorporating active and
cooperative learning in their classes indicate that it is
possible, although difficult, to transform large classes [5].
One of the most common approaches, as well as
extensively studied approaches is the use of cooperative
learning. The use of formal teams and discussion groups,
especially in a WebCT environment, is the approach that
we’ve implemented in CE 4101W and CE 4102W.
2. Cooperative Learning Background and
Approach in CE 4101W and CE 4102W
Cooperation is working together to accomplish
shared goals. Within cooperative activities individuals
seek outcomes that are beneficial to themselves and
beneficial to all other group members. Cooperative
learning is the instructional use of small groups so that
students work together to maximize their own and each
others' learning [6, 7, 8, and 9]. Carefully structured
cooperative learning involves people working in teams to
accomplish a common goal, under conditions that involve
both positive interdependence (all members must
cooperate to complete the task) and individual and group
accountability (each member is accountable for the
complete final outcome).
During the past 90 years nearly 600 experimental and
over 100 correlational studies have been conducted
comparing the effectiveness of cooperative, competitive,
and individualistic efforts. These studies have been
conducted by a wide variety of researchers in different
decades with different age subjects, in different subject
areas, and in different settings. More is known about the
efficacy of cooperative learning than about lecturing, the
fifty-minute class period, the use of instructional
technology, or almost any other aspect of education.
From this research you would expect that the more
students work in cooperative learning groups the more
they will learn, the better they will understand what they
are learning, the easier it will be to remember what they
learn, and the better they will feel about themselves, the
class, and their classmates. The multiple outcomes
studied can be classified into three major categories:
achievement/productivity, positive relationships, and
psychological health.
Cooperation among students
typically results in (a) higher achievement and greater
productivity, (b) more caring, supportive, and committed
relationships, and (c) greater psychological health, social
competence, and self-esteem. A summary of the studies
conducted at the higher education level may be found in
Johnson, Johnson, & Smith [6, 7]. Two recent articles
summarize the research [8, 9]. Springer, Stanne and
Donovan, [10] summarized the research for college level
one science mathematics, engineering and technology.
Cooperative learning researchers and practitioners
have shown that positive peer relationships are essential to
success in college. Isolation and alienation are the best
predictors of failure. Two major reasons for dropping out
of college are failure to establish a social network of
friends and classmates, and failure to become
academically involved in classes [11]. Working together
with fellow students, solving problems together, and
talking through material together has other benefits as well
[12]:
Student participation, teacher encouragement, and
student-student interaction positively relate to improved
critical thinking. These three activities confirm other
research and theory stressing the importance of active
practice, motivation, and feedback in thinking skills as
well as other skills. This confirms that discussions. . .are
superior to lectures in improving thinking and problem
solving.
Astin [13] found that two environmental factors were,
by far, most predictive of positive change in college
students' academic development, personal development,
and satisfaction. These two factors--interaction among
students and interaction between faculty and students-carried by far the largest weights and affected more
general education outcomes than any other environmental
variables studied, including the curriculum content
factors.
In short, Astin says it appears that how students
approach their general education and how the faculty
actually deliver the curriculum is far more important that
the formal curricular structure. More specifically, the
findings strongly support a growing body of research
suggesting that one of the crucial factors in the
educational development of the undergraduate is the
degree to which the student is actively engaged or
involved in the undergraduate experience [14, 15]. His
research findings suggest that curricular planning efforts
will reap much greater payoffs in terms of students'
outcomes if we focus less on formal structure and content
and put much more emphasis on pedagogy and other
features of the delivery system, as well as on the broader
interpersonal and institutional context in which learning
takes place.
3. Types of Cooperative Learning Groups
There are many ways to implement cooperative
learning in engineering classrooms. Informal cooperative
learning groups, formal cooperative learning groups, and
cooperative base groups are the most common. Each has
a place in providing opportunities for students to be
intellectually active and personally interactive both in and
outside the classroom. Informal cooperative learning is
commonly used in predominately lecture classes and will
be described only briefly. Formal cooperative learning
can be used in content intensive classes where the mastery
of conceptual or procedural material is essential; however,
many faculty find it easier to start in recitation or
laboratory sections or design project courses. Base
groups are long-term cooperative learning groups whose
principal responsibility is to provide support and
encouragement for all their members; that is, to ensure
that each member gets the help he or she needs to be
successful in the course and in college.
Informal cooperative learning groups are
temporary, ad hoc groups that last from a few minutes to
one class period. They are used to focus students'
attention on the material to be learned, set a mood
conducive to learning, help organize in advance the
material to be covered in a class session, ensure that
students cognitively process the material being taught, and
provide closure to a class session. They are often
organized so that students engage in focused discussions
before and after a lecture and interspersing turn-to-yourpartner discussions throughout a lecture. Informal
cooperative learning groups help counter what is
proclaimed as the main problem of lectures: "The
information passes from the notes of the professor to the
notes of the student without passing through the mind of
either one."
Cooperative
base
groups
are
long-term,
heterogeneous cooperative learning groups with stable
membership whose primary responsibility is to provide
each student the support, encouragement, and assistance
he or she needs to make academic progress. Base groups
personalize the work required and the course learning
experiences. These base groups stay the same during the
entire course and longer if possible. The members of base
groups should exchange phone numbers and information
about schedules as they may wish to meet outside of class.
When students have successes, insights, questions or
concerns they wish to discuss; they can contact other
members of their base group. Base groups typically
manage the daily paperwork of the course through the use
of group folders or web-based discussion groups.
The focus of this article is our use of formal
cooperative learning groups, since they are probably the
most difficult to implement and they have the greatest
potential for supporting teamwork-based learning in a
project management class. Formal cooperative learning
groups are more structured than informal, are given more
complex tasks, and typically stay together longer.
4. Essential Elements: What Makes Formal
Cooperative Learning Work
Problems that commonly occur when using formal
cooperative groups may be minimized by carefully
structuring the basic elements summarized below. Many
faculty who believe that they are using cooperative
learning are, in fact, missing its essence. There is a
crucial difference between simply putting students in
groups to learn and in structuring cooperation among
students. Cooperation is not having students sit side-byside at the same table to talk with each other as they do
their individual assignments.
Cooperation is not
assigning a report to a group of students where one
student does all the work and the others put their names
on the product as well. Cooperation is not having
students do a task individually with instructions that the
ones who finish first are to help the slower students.
Cooperation is much more than being physically near
other students, discussing material with other students,
helping other students, or sharing material among
students, although each of these is important in
cooperative learning.
To be cooperative a group must have clear positive
interdependence, members must promote each other's
learning and success face-to-face, hold each other
personally and individually accountable to do his or her
fair share of the work, appropriately use the interpersonal
and small group skills needed for cooperative efforts to be
successful, and process as a group how effectively
members are working together. These five essential
components must be present for small group learning to
be truly cooperative.
Well-structured formal cooperative learning groups
are differentiated from poorly structured ones on the basis
of five essential elements. These essential elements
should be carefully structured within all levels of
cooperative efforts. The five essential elements and
suggestions for structuring them are as follows:
1. Positive Interdependence.
The heart of cooperative learning is positive
interdependence. Students must believe that they are
linked with others in a way that one cannot succeed unless
the other members of the group succeed (and vice versa).
Students are working together to get the job done. In
other words, students must perceive that they "sink or
swim together." In formal cooperative learning groups,
positive interdependence may by structured by asking
group members to (1) agree on an answer for the group
(group product--goal interdependence), (2) making sure
each member can explain the groups' answer (learning
goal interdependence), and (3) fulfilling assigned role
responsibilities (role interdependence). Other ways of
structuring positive interdependence include having
common rewards such as a shared grade (reward
interdependence),
shared
resources
(resource
interdependence), or a division of labor (task
interdependence).
2. Face-to-Face Promotive Interaction.
Once
a
professor
establishes
positive
interdependence, he or she must ensure that students
interact to help each other accomplish the task and
promote each other's success. Students are expected to
explain orally to each other how to solve problems,
discuss with each other the nature of the concepts and
strategies being learned, teach their knowledge to
classmates, explain to each other the connections between
present and past learning, and help, encourage, and
support each other's efforts to learn. Silent students are
uninvolved students who are not contributing to the
learning of others or themselves.
3. Individual Accountability/Personal Responsibility.
The purpose of cooperative learning groups is to
make each member a stronger individual in his or her own
right.
Students learn together so that they can
subsequently perform better as individuals. To ensure that
each member is strengthened, students are held
individually accountable to do their share of the work.
The performance of each individual student is assessed
and the results given back to the individual and perhaps to
the group. The group needs to know who needs more
assistance in completing the assignment, and group
members need to know they cannot "hitch-hike" on the
work of others. Common ways to structure individual
accountability include giving an individual exam to each
student, randomly calling on individual students to present
their group's answer, and giving an individual oral exam
while monitoring group work. In the example of a formal
cooperative learning lesson that follows, individual
accountability is structured by requiring each person to
learn and teach a small portion of conceptual material to
two or three classmates.
4. Teamwork Skills.
Contributing to the success of a cooperative effort
requires teamwork skills. Students must have and use the
needed leadership, decision-making, trust-building,
communication, and conflict-management skills. These
skills have to be taught just as purposefully and precisely
as academic skills. Many students have never worked
cooperatively in learning situations and, therefore, lack
the needed teamwork skills for doing so effectively.
Faculty often introduce and emphasize teamwork skills
through assigning differentiated roles to each group
member. For example, students learn about the challenge
of documenting group work by serving as the task
recorder, the importance of developing strategy and
talking about how the group is working by serving as
process recorder, providing direction to the group by
serving as coordinator, and the difficulty of ensuring that
everyone in the group understands and can explain by
serving as the checker. Teamwork skills are being
emphasized by employers and the ABET Engineering
Criteria 2000. Resources are becoming available to help
students develop teamwork skills [16,17].
Group Processing.
Professors need to ensure that members of each
cooperative learning group discuss how well they are
achieving their goals and maintaining effective working
relationships. Groups need to describe what member
actions are helpful and unhelpful and make decisions
about what to continue or change. Such processing
enables learning groups to focus on group maintenance,
facilitates the learning of collaborative skills, ensures that
members receive feedback on their participation, and
reminds students to practice collaborative skills
consistently. Some of the keys to successful processing
are allowing sufficient time for it to take place, making it
specific rather than vague, maintaining student
involvement in processing, reminding students to use their
teamwork skills during processing, and ensuring that clear
expectations as to the purpose of processing have been
communicated.
A common procedure for group
processing is to ask each group to list at least three things
the group did well and at least one thing that could be
improved.
5. WebCT Peer Review & Feedback
In order to leverage formal cooperative groups for the
writing piece of the Project Management course, we asked
our students to use the WebCT site for peer review. Due
to the challenges fitting in all the material of an
information intensive survey course like the Project
Management course, we have historically been unable to
dedicate course time to in-class peer review, and simply
asked them to review each other’s work independently.
This past year, we asked our students to post their drafts
and peer reviews to small group areas in the WebCT site.
Each formal cooperative group had access to a space
where they could post their drafts, find their colleagues’
drafts and post peer review comments. We found that online peer review helped us reinforce the writing
assignments as part of a process in the Project
Management course, because the drafts were more public,
and the students had access to all of the drafts produced in
their groups.
In using WebCT for peer review, we gained the
ability combine formal cooperative group instruction with
the model-practice-feedback loop. Cooper and Robinson
[18] surveyed the literature in higher education and found
that “...the model-practice-feedback loop is among the
most powerful instructional strategies available to teachers
at all levels.” They describe this procedure as:
1.
2.
3.
teacher modeling
student practice with multiple
opportunities
descriptive feedback on the quality of
their performance
5.
Cooper and Robinson emphasize timing as being critical
to the model-practice-feedback loop, with small time
intervals between the steps. They also found that
academic achievement in college science and engineering
classes was enhanced by incorporating small group
instruction. By using setting up base groups of students
and giving each group a private message area to post and
review each other’s work, we combined the modelfeedback-practice loop with small group learning. The
students also have the ability to give each peer review in
the time between class meetings, which increases our
ability to shorten the time interval between practice and
feedback.
Using WebCT allowed us to give feedback to both
groups and individual students. Group feedback gave the
students the opportunity to learn from feedback on their
peers’ work as well as on their own. In addition, WebCT
offered the students a virtual space in which to reflect on
their writing outside of class.
We used peer review in two different ways in the
course. First, we have used it to help students reflect on
each other’s work after they have turned in one
assignment, and help prepare each other for the next
assignment. Second, we have used peer review to enable
students to asynchronously comment on each other’s work
in draft form before they rewrite the assignments. We
found that in many cases act of posting publicly appeared
to improve the quality of the students’ writing.
writing and the work they will be doing as apprentice
engineers when they graduate.
We found that incorporating formal cooperative
groups with the peer review process offered the students
access to more examples of writing and access to
comments on both their own papers and those of their
group members. One challenge for the future is to learn
more about how students use these opportunities, and to
what extent they access the comments on their peers
writing as well as their own. As we continue to refine the
courses and the writing assignments, building in more
techniques for persuading the students that writing really
is integral to the course content rather than an add-on that
allows them to fulfill their requirements, we hope to see
students take fuller advantage of the on-going availability
of writing assignments and peer reviews offered by
WebCT to help students personalize the writing process.
6. Successes and Challenges
7. References
Large Engineering classrooms are a challenging
environment for engaging students. As an instructor in
large group courses, it is easy to fall into the “unwritten
contract”1that sets up distance between the students and
instructors with the tacit agreement that each will leave
the other alone. In addition, there is often an unspoken
assumption that many parts of the engineering education
process can only be learned in the workplace, after the
students graduate and become apprentice engineers.
These two constraints, combined with large enrollments,
make it easy to relegate writing tasks to the background,
and minimize feedback on the writing process to include a
few sparse comments about the final product.
Connecting writing with the work that they will be
doing as Civil Engineers in the workplace for the students
is a second challenge that we face in these courses.
Students often complain that the writing intensive aspect
of the course adds too much work.
Convincing
engineering students to accept the notion of writing as a
work process, rather than writing as “what you do to show
you did the work,” is difficult, especially when the writing
is part of the larger focus in the course, Project
Management or Capstone. Students in our classes need
help seeing the connections between their writing and the
course material, as well as connections between their
[1] U.S. News & World Report
<http://www.usnews.com> Accessed 10/16/00.
1
Cooper, James L. & Robinson, Pamela. “The Argument
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Classes Seem Small.” eds. MacGregor, J., Cooper, J.,
Smith, K, and Robinson, P. 2000. Strategies for
energizing large classes: from small groups to learning
communities. New Directions for Teaching and Learning,
81. Jossey-Bass. 17-24.
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[2] Gardiner, Lion F. Redesigning higher education:
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George Washington University, 1994.
[3] Carbone. E., and Greenberg, J. “Teaching large
classes: Unpacking the problem and responding
creatively.” In M. Kaplan (ed.), To Improve the Academy,
17. Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press and Professional
and Organizational Development Network. 1998.
[4] Wulff, Donald H., Nyquist, Jody D. and Abbott,
Robert D. "Students' Perceptions of Large Classes" in
Teaching Large Classes Well edited by Maryellen
Gleason Weimer. New Directions for Teaching and
Learning, No.32.San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 1987.
[5] MacGregor, J., Cooper, J., Smith, K, and Robinson, P.
(Eds.). Strategies for Energizing Large Classes: From Small
Groups to Learning Communities. New Directions for Teaching
and Learning, 81. Jossey-Bass. 2000.
[6] Johnson, David W., Johnson, Roger T., and Smith, Karl A. .
Cooperative learning: Increasing college faculty instructional
productivity.
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[7] Johnson, David W., Johnson, Roger T., and Smith, Karl A.
Active learning: Cooperation in the college classroom (Second
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[8] Johnson, David.W., Johnson, Roger.T., and Smith, Karl.A.
“Cooperative learning returns to college: What evidence is there
that it works?” Change, 30 (4), 26-35. 1998.
[9] Johnson, David. W., Johnson, Roger. T., and Smith, Karl.A.
“Maximizing instruction through cooperative learning.” ASEE
Prism, 7(6), 24-29. 1998.
[10] Springer, Leonard, Stanne Mary Elizabeth, and Donovan,
Samuel S. Effect of small-group learning on undergraduates in
science, mathematics, engineering and technology: A metaanalysis. Review of Educational Research, 69(1), 21-51. 1999.
[11] Tinto, Vincent. Leaving college: Rethinking the causes
and cures of student attrition. Second Edition. Chicago:
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[12] McKeachie, Wilbert; Pintrich, Paul; Yi-Guang, Lin; and
Smith, David. Teaching and learning in the college classroom:
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[13] Astin, A. What matters in college: Four critical years
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[15] Light, Richard J. Making the most of college. Cambridge,
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[16] Wankat, P.C., Felder, R.M., Smith, K.A., and Oreovicz, F.
“The scholarship of teaching and learning in engineering.” In
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About the Authors
Karl Smith is a Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching
Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the
University of Minnesota. He designed the Project
Management Course, CE 4101. Selected publications
include: Strategies for energizing large classes: from
small groups to learning communities, New Directions for
Teaching and Learning, 2000 (with J. MacGregor, J.
Cooper, P. Robinson), and Reinventing civil engineering
education, ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education
Proceedings, 1999 (with R. Sack, R.L. Bras, D.E. Daniel,
C. Hendrickson, H. Levitan).
Constance Kampf is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and
Scientific & Technical Communication, University of
Minnesota. She has taught writing in the Civil Engineering
Department for the past 3 years, and Grant Seeking,
Project Management for Technical Communication
Students, and Technical Communication in the Rhetoric
Department. She recently co-authored Grant Seeking in
an Electronic Age. She worked with Karl Smith on a
funded research grant investigating Project Management
Practices in the Minnesota Department of Transportation.