ASSESSMENT OF AN INNOVATIVE GROUP-BASED LEARNING TECHNOLOGY TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE
Izhar ul Haq1, Masood Ahmed2* and Rubina Haq3
1Prof. Dr., Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University, Saudi Arabia, ihaq@pmu.edu.sa
2Assist. Prof. Mr., SZABIST, Karachi, Pakistan, masood@szabist.edu.pk
3Mrs. International Islamic University, Pakistan, rubinahaq54@gmail.com
*Corresponding Author
Abstract
Group-Based Learning (GBL) is a well-established and widely-used collaborative student-centric pedagogy in education. It provides improved learning, better classroom participation and enjoyable learning experience for students. Through GBL, students interact and learn from each other under the supervision of a teacher. Students are usually given a task to work on whilst the teacher goes around supporting and assessing them. Unfortunately, there exist several drawbacks of GBL: tracking individual student learning progress is extremely difficult; student grouping is usually done in an arbitrary manner; typically, group assessment marks are noted manually by the instructor; this results untimely and delayed feedback to students about their performance. Currently, all software applications are unable to solve these issues. Here we report on an innovative technology-based app (Group Based Learning or GBL) that greatly improves student learning and reduces teachers’ workload by eliminating hours of work on analyzing student data, reporting and providing timely feedback to students. The GBL app is based on a recently introduced ROFSET (Real-time Objective Feedback System for Effective Teaching) Framework. This App allows both the teacher and students to capture key data on all important 21st century skills within group learning. The analysis of the data is done automatically in real-time and is available for students and teachers. Our results show that using the GBL app, the students became much more responsive to learning. Also it allows the teacher to identify and support students who need more help (differentiated learning). In this work we present our findings on tracking students’ skills in the following areas: Social, Communication, Analytics, Leadership and Effort (SCALE) for an introductory Physics class.
Keywords: Pedagogy, Group Based Learning, Technology, Software, ROFSET
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