Reflection on giving and receiving feedback

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I have just been listening to my lecturer’s feedback on my blog stage 1 again and have remembered how important it is to give and receive feedback.

She mentioned how my fonts and formatting are all over the place in some of my posts and it reminded me of the hours of angst I’ve had the past couple of days copying and pasting content from Word to my blog. For anyone listening out there...this is NOT the way to do it! If anything is guaranteed to mess up formatting and fonts it’s doing everything on Word first and then expecting to copy and paste all that beautifully formatted and illustrated work, as is, to your blog. So now I’m afraid it may have happened again and I will have to check all my posts all over again because I’ve left things too late to ask anyone else to do it.

My lecturer also mentioned the poor quality of the very first video I did. She’s right and I meant to fix it and post another one to demonstrate my “learning experience” and growth before I submitted Blog Stage 1...but forgot! So anyway, I’ve done a repeat of that video as a comparison with the old one and to showcase the “learning experience”.

I felt quite pleased to know that my annotated bibliography provided my lecturer with a new source of material about Inquiry learning. I have found Coffman's book very interesting and informative. I was mortified, however to hear about the number of typos and spelling mistakes in that post and fear it may be a problem with blog stage 2 as well as I do not have time to ask anyone to proofread it for me.

The advice she gave about topic sentences and starting with the idea first before mentioning the author has reminded me of all the valuable writing advice I received during the first course I did as part of this Master’s degree. It has also made me resolve to go over those notes again!

Apparently my lecturer enjoyed reading about the ISP.  I was quite delighted to hear that, as I had really had fun creating that post, it is one of my favourites too.

As much as I enjoy receiving feedback - part of the feedback that I received from my lecturer was to inquire about feedback I had provided to my peers, and what I had thought of the experience.  So the rest of this post will describe what it felt like to critique someone else’s blog.

I suggested to Kerrie that she make more use of hyperlinks in her posts. For instance, instead of saying  “refer to figure 12”, perhaps just turn the words “figure 12” into a link to that spot.  I suggested it as I think it often makes text easier to follow. I picked up a couple of typo’s and sentence structure “glitches” as well. I find that it’s very hard to pick up places where I have not expressed myself very clearly and I am grateful for someone else’s “fresh eyes” to pick up any logic errors I may have made.

It was good to read her blog and see that she had had similar dilemmas to mine as she was also a spectator to an ILA rather than a creator of one. I let her know that I enjoyed her screenshots of students’ comments to help the ILA “come to life”.

I agreed with her on many of her observations about student learning and wrote,  

Good points about intervention and massive amounts of explanation being required at most points of the ILA. I think that often we, as teachers, and as adults tend to take for granted that students understand a lot of things that they don’t really understand. For instance, I was quite surprised that the students I was observing really didn’t understand the concept or meaning of primary data and secondary data (Year 9), even though it was explained (in writing) within the ILA documentation. I think we often underestimate students’ need for concrete, hands-on experiences before verbal or written explanations.

Giving and receiving feedback is very powerful as it forces one to think more closely about one’s own efforts, thus increasing metacognitive abilities. 

Questionnaire 3

1. Take some time to think about your topic. Now write down what you know about it.

Inquiry learning is all about asking the right questions! It is a constructivist pedagogy designed to assist students to build information literacies. Inquiry learning can be seen on a continuum from structured or highly teacher led inquiry to open or highly student directed inquiry at the other end of the continuum. All inquiry learning has the same basic tenets; it starts with a question, then moves into information seeking and ends with a way to “spread the word”. There are a number of different Inquiry learning models but not all models allow equivalent levels of student learning.

2. How interested are you in this topic?  Check (ü) one box that best matches your interest.

Not at all ☐    not much ☐    quite a bit ☐    a great deal ☐

3. How much do you know about this topic?  Check (ü) one box that best matches how much you know.

Nothing ☐     not much ☐    quite a bit ☐    a great deal ☐

4. Thinking back on your research project, what did you find easiest to do? Please mention as many things as you like.

I found it easy to locate information once I’d learnt about search strings and different databases. Eventually everything became easy to do (with practise). Blogging, posting video to YouTube, graphing, sentence structure/phrasing etc.

5. Thinking back on your research project, what did you find most difficult to do? Please mention as many things as you like.

It was hard to get the formatting on the blog page right when I copied and pasted from Word. In fact it was impossible, so that is something I’ll never do again! Deciding which category the students’ statements belonged in was also pretty difficult. The first time I tried doing anything it was hard, but everything became easier with practise. I suppose the hardest thing for me was making sure I got the work in on time!

6. What did you learn in doing this research project?

How to obtain information quickly and efficiently, from books and various internet sources. How to create graphs on Excel. How to use Snagit and PowerPoint. How to narrate to a Point Point presentation. How to upload videos to You Tube. How to determine whether information is accurate and valid. How to identify the appropriate parts of the masses of information at hand and phrase it sensibly in my blog posts. How to organise information so that it flowed sensibly and logically. How to create a fairly interesting blog site. That producing a large body of work is a good idea....but that I need to do it early enough to review the work later because mistakes can only be picked up by “fresh” eyes, preferably someone else’s!

7.  How do you now feel about your research? Check (ü) one box that best matches how you feel.

Unhappy  – I don’t feel confident with how it turned out ☐  

Confused – I don’t really know what I was looking for ☐

Confident – I think it turned out OK ☐

Happy – I’m really happy with how it turned out ☐

Presentation of recommendations and results

This is a PowerPoint video describing my recommendations and the results of my ILA. It can also be found here.

Action taken with students/teacher after Questionnaire 1

In retrospect I should have explained the requirements of this research and the purpose behind my research in far more depth with the teacher before embarking on this project. Boundaries should have been discussed and all parties should have been made aware of exactly where those boundaries were.

After looking at the results from Questionnaire 1,  I made a note of the difficulties that students mentioned regarding their research and sent an email to the librarian and the teacher. I also had a quick chat to the students at the start of the next lesson to let them know what had come up as a result of the questionnaire. Apart from this I looked up some sites to get website ideas for the best places for the girls to find information and passed this information on to the librarian. Here is a copy of the email I sent.

Hi A & B

After examining the comments from the first questionnaire that I gave the Yr 9 students on 9 October the following "difficulties with research" themes came up. 

1. Finding pertinent information within lengthy paragraphs

2. Presenting information.

3. Choosing websites, books, newspapers and encyclopedias with relevant, accurate, current information.

4. Understanding some words.

5. Writing bibliographies.

6. Source and research sheets.

7. Note taking.

8. Trying to understand what I'm searching for.

9. Knowing the key words to put into Google search.

10. Putting information into my own words (summarising & rephrasing)

11. Trying to understand the basics of the task and what to do.

12. Avoiding unnecessary or irrelevant information.

13. Staying on task/ avoiding being distracted by the computer (internet?)

I thought you may find them interesting. I tried reassuring the girls that everyone has most of these problems when they first start researching a topic.

Thanks

J.

My main purpose in chatting to the students was to reassure the them that many of the things that they had written down as difficulties are experienced by most researchers initially (as mentioned in Kuhlthau’s ISP). Their experiences and frustrations were normal and to be expected.  In retrospect I should have discussed this in more detail with the teacher first.  I should have collated and graphed the student’s responses to the questionnaires immediately. Finally, I should have discussed my findings with the teacher and given my recommendations with explanations and backup explaining my reasons for thinking and suggesting various courses of action.

Recommendations for future practice

Inquiry learning is all about asking good questions and learning how to learn and on the whole I would have to say that the ILA was a very effective Guided Inquiry learning task. Inquiry learning as a pedagogy is effective because students are required to “answer their own questions”. It is accepted that certain content is prescribed by any curriculum, but it is essential to provide a “hook” to get students attention; this can then followed by an invitation to explore a part of the content that they find particularly exciting or attention grabbing. The ILA definitely achieved that objective when the survey completed by the students graphically illustrated to them that we have only one earth and quite a few more “earths” would be required to support us if everyone lived the typically wasteful first world lifestyle that we do. 

Inviting students to explore ways to alleviate a part of their “ecological footprint” in order to “save the world” gave them a feeling of power and control; not only because they could do something about a major world problem, but also because they could choose a part of the problem that interested them in particular. This achieves the objective of making students feel like “masters of their own destiny” and in so doing makes the learner feel more responsible for their own learning.

Another aspect of the ILA that I felt worked well was the fact that the students were given ample time to explore and produce the product. An entire term was allocated to the task (with various deadlines along the way so that students were not tempted to leave things until the last minute). However, when the teacher found towards the end of term that the students had really not had enough time to complete things to her satisfaction she negotiated with leadership to organise an extension on the project. Kuhlthau has cited “lack of time” as being a problem when doing inquiry based learning in her book Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21^st century so it was very gratifying to observe the teacher appreciating the importance of sufficient time. Time is also important for the instructional team to get together and do their planning. This does not appear to be a problem in this school as great importance is placed on the involvement of the teacher-librarian and collaborative teaching in general. Sufficient time is always allocated for “instructional team” meetings.

A potential problem for inquiry learning tasks identified by Kulthau’s studies at Rutgers University was the confusion of roles. Fortunately this has not emerged as a problem at this school as the members of the instructional team have a mutually accepted philosophical base of the importance and relevance of constructivist learning.  They share a commitment to the development of students’ information literacy and understand that good collegial collaboration is essential for successful inquiry learning support.

Clearly identified roles and collaboration had enabled the librarian to anticipated the need for printed matter on the subject before the task was administered. She had ordered relevant and up to date books beforehand. These were ready and waiting as the students started their project. The librarian also demonstrated effective internet search strategies and the identification of valid and reliable internet information.  In addition to this she modelled effective ways of keeping a record of references in order to build up a Bibliography.

A further potential problem could have been a poorly designed assignment, but once again this was not the case here. The assignment had been specially designed for the course and the entire term was used for the assignment. This meant that information literacy was acquired during the course of the assignment. Skills were not taught in isolated lessons on a once off basis, with no relevance to “real life” situations. There was no “teaching to the test” and indeed the students were expected and encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning.

As this is a private school, there were not as many issues with “blocked sites” as tends to happen with EQ, plus there were ICT specialists on hand at the school to quickly remedy any problems as soon as they arose. This prevented the technical frustrations that often go hand-in-hand with the use of technology. Teenagers can become quite easily “put off” and distracted by technical “glitches”. Fortunately these were not an issue.

ACARA has not specifically mentioned the development of literacy skills. This places the responsibility of IL development into the hands of TLs who will “need to examine the dimensions of the Curriculum to find the elements of information literacy that are present, and make links between these elements”.  (Lupton 2012). Students conducted their own research and produced meaning from that experience. Primary data in the form of graphs, interviews, surveys and photographs were required as part of the task. The data obtained then needed to be analysed and reported. Students received demonstrations on how to analyse graphs and write logical and meaningful sentences about their data thus helping to build excellent information literacy skills.

In Step 4 of the task, emphasis of the iterative nature of inquiry emerged in the instruction, “It is also expected that as you proceed with your research you will develop and/or refine your research focus by developing new inquiry questions and research strategies”. Although not explicitly stated in Kuhlthau’s ISP, this circular or spiral pattern of inquiry learning is part of many inquiry learning models (eg Brunner's Inquiry Process). The circular nature of learning was certainly illustrated in this ILA.

Students are usually unprepared for the feelings of anxiety and frustration experienced during the early stages of an inquiry process. This is illustrated in some of the student comments from the second questionnaire, when the students would have been experiencing the doubt, confusion and frustration of the exploration stage of Kuhlthau’s ISP.

“I’m very confused about what I’m supposed to be doing and what information I am supposed to be looking for”, and, 

“I find it difficult when the teacher is trying to teach us things but I’m still not sure of the basics so I can’t learn more about something I don’t know” as well as 

“I didn’t really receive much help from my teacher therefore I didn’t understand (to the full extent) what I am researching”

Kuhlthau points out that “a large part of the instructional team’s work is assisting students through those troubling times of uncertainty”. (Kuhlthau, 2007). When students are going through this phase and these emotions they tend to think that they are the only ones experiencing increased uncertainty. They are usually relieved to discover that these feelings are common and to be expected.  The instructional team can support students during these emotional upheavals by scaffolding, reassuring and generally tailoring interventions in an enabling and enriching way. This gradually builds up their confidence and tenacity and helps students to develop the emotional maturity of knowing that the uncertain, frustrated feelings are normal; will happen again, and can be overcome again!

Part of the inquiry process is to flounder and struggle a little. But most teachers of young adolescents will attest the fact that teenagers are notoriously impatient! Therefore I would suggest a Blogsite or Facebook page that can be used as a student collaborative problem solving resource (or brains trust!) to support each other when the “storms” arise.  The teacher would need access to the page as well and it would exist with the understanding that it is not for gossip or “general whinging” but as a place to go to when timely assistance can be obtained, mainly from peers. It would also be a place where students would be gently and constantly reminded that they are responsible for their own learning because learning is not ‘something the teacher can give you’. It often helps to hear an instruction rephrased in terminology that you are used to hearing and this is something that could be accomplished on a shared site. One of the comments written on the questionnaire reflected this fact.

“Although I was confused at the beginning, with help from a few of my peers I was able to finally get on track and complete my assignment to what I think was of satisfactory standards.”

This type of problem solving ‘cyberspace’ place would also be useful for instructors to become aware of any problems that would need intervention from the instructional team, rather than just a nudge in the right direction from a peer.

One of the things I would change if I were to conduct research like this again would be to reword the questionnaires.  As mentioned previously the wording in questions 1 and 6 of the last questionnaire could be seen to be referring to the same thing. I would also provide examples of the types of responses to put into the questions enquiring about “what was easy” and “what was difficult” when doing research. Ensuring that the students had sufficient time to think and provide detailed answers for the first two questionnaires would also be a priority.

Although the task did possess aspects of information literacy that moved it into the Transformative window of the GeST model (Lupton 2002), namely “Identify a strategy that could be implemented (either by you or your family or more widely in the community) to reduce their ‘footprint factor’, I think this could have been emphasised more. Perhaps students could have shared it more widely in the community and indeed the world by creating a class blog. Perhaps inviting other classes that are doing similar projects in Australia and around the world could be invited to join in or comment. Maybe even a letter to a journal or newspaper or Member of Parliament? This would have moved the inquiry task further into the Situational and Transformative windows of the GeST model (Lupton 2002).

 In conclusion, I have thoroughly enjoyed my exploratory journey into Inquiry Learning. Now that I have experienced it, I cannot think of a better way to inspire students to learn. I hope to create an inquiry task of my own for students under my care one day, and I will certainly make good use of the learning experiences that I have gained watching others learn via Guided Inquiry instruction!

Critical Evaluation of the ILA against Information Literacy and Inquiry Models

In this post I evaluate the ILA against frameworks that deal with information literacy, internet searching and questioning.

The Six Frames for Information Literacy Education

This framework was designed by Bruce, Edwards and Lupton in 2006 to be used as a tool to analyse, interpret and understand challenges presented by different educators’ views on instruction and curriculum design.

The means of facilitating learning that was used in the ILA was contained within the “Learning to learn” frame. This frame uses the constructivist orientation and helps learners to build their knowledge and develop ways of learning that enable them to grow sophisticated thinking patterns (Bruce, Edwards & Lupton, 2006). As the students worked on their topic within this ILA they continuously developed and honed their new information literacy (IL) skills. Proof of the development of IL skills for the ILA was presented during the production of the AVD and subsequent presentation evening when they discussed their findings with relatives and friends. Reflection played a large part throughout the ILA and although the task was completed individually, students were encouraged to participate in group discussions with peers and instructors during class. I believe that this assisted significantly with the quality of research and their AVD.

Action Research Model for Reflective Internet Searching

This model describes a conceptual framework to use for effective internet searching (Edwards & Bruce, 2002). The authors developed it in order to assist students with the “challenges of working with an environment that is subject to continuous change”. The power to retrieve, assess and use information is vital for success in learning and the basis for the development of lifelong learners. (Edwards & Bruce, 2002).

The Action Research Model shown below consists of four steps that are intended to be performed repetitively rather than consecutively.  This circular or repetitive nature of the framework helps students develop their information literacy skills. Reflection on their successes and failures equips them with the tenacity required to develop the skills needed in inquiry learning. (Edwards & Bruce, 2002).

The Action Research Model for Reflective Internet Searching

Questioning frameworks

Questioning is arguably the most vital part of all inquiry tasks.  As mentioned in the post entitled “The type of inquiry method that was used”, all inquiry methods are fairly similar; having questioning, seeking and concluding components. But teaching students how to ask good questions helps them to take ownership of their learning. It is an essential lifelong learning skill. There are a number of questioning frameworks that can be used to ‘train’ students in the important art of questioning.

The Inquiry Process (Brunner, 2002) is an inquiry model that uses 4 cyclical phases to explore posing real questions, finding resources, interpreting information and reporting findings.This is an excellent questioning framework to use for most inquiry based tasks and is very relevant to “my” ILA. As the ILA is a guided inquiry task levelled at Year 9 students who are still developing their information literacy skills, the questions suggested in the framework help with more highly scaffolded inquiry projects (such as mine). The Inquiry Model can also lead the students carefully through what could become quite a frustrating experience for less experienced IBL students if they did not have a framework to  guide them.

Brunner's Inquiry Process

GeST windows

Bruce & Lupton envisage Information literacy as a set of three “windows” that are nested within each other. 

GeST windows

The inner and most basic “Generic” window is described by Lupton as “a set of discrete, neutral generic skills related to reading writing and the use of technology” (Bruce & Lupton 2010). “My” ILA remains largely within this window as classes included topic analysis, search terms (synonyms and related terms, Boolean operators, computer skills, constructing search strings and rules for citing and referencing.

Many aspects of the ILA can be said to regard IL within the “situated” window. Here IL is seen as “Social Practices involving personal, work, family and community problems” (Lupton & Bruce 2010). The primary data obtained by the students, in the forms of photographs, interviews, surveys and the collecting and analysis of statistics are all forms of socially based “encountering information” (Lupton  & Bruce 2010).

The all encompassing “transformative window” is where social change is effected through an “emancipatory process”( Lupton & Bruce 2010). The skills and processes of the Generic perspective as well as the social practices and personal meaning of the Situational perspective are both contained within the Transformative window. Here IL is seen as a “range of information practices used to transform oneself and society”. IL is taught by empowering learners to critique information in order to challenge the status quo. This was a requirement of the ILA as students were encouraged to “identify a strategy that could be implemented(either by you or your family or more widely in the community) to reduce that‘footprint factor’. In other words students were being encouraged to transform themselves and society with their research discoveries. This transformative information literacy was rigorously tested when the students were required to defend their position and research when speaking to family and friends as part of their culminating activities.

Bloom’s revised taxonomy

The original Bloom’s taxonomy was developed by Benjamin Bloom, a cognitive psychologist, in the 1950’s. His purpose was to categorise and order thinking skills. The thinking skills start from the lower order thinking skills LOTS of knowledge, comprehension and application to the higher order thinking skills HOTS of analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Each word used was in the form of a noun. 

The Original Bloom's taxonomy

Bloom’s taxonomy was then revised by a former student of his, Lorin Anderson, in the 1990’s to fit in with 21st century learning. This is called Bloom’s revised taxonomy. She saw the need to reflect the modern technological and digital processes required of the 21^st century student. The revision entailed changing the words used to describe each category into verbs rather than nouns and the highest categories were swapped and changed into “Evaluating” and “Creating”. Each category is associated with various verbs describing the skills associated with that category.

Comparison of Bloom's taxonomy with the Digital taxonomy

The taxonomy represents the way we learn. Students have to remember concepts before they can understand them. When a concept is understood it can be applied. The ability to apply knowledge implies that it can be analysed and if we can analyse it then we can evaluate its impact. Creating a new concept requires that we are able to remember, understand, apply, analyse and evaluate it.

When I analysed and compared the ILA to Bloom’s revised taxonomy many skills were showcased. Some needed more representations and these will be discussed under recommendations.

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy

Students were well-versed in the application of skills such as note-taking, bullet-pointing, highlighting, locating, retrieving, naming, searching and "Googling". They were encouraged to keep a journal or “Record of Research” documenting their research findings and for taking rough bullet point notes of information they expected to use when presenting their topic. This all assisted them to remember the new concepts encountered in the ILA.

Their understanding of the Ecological Footprint concept was developed by directing them to the Ecological footprint site – getting then to complete the quiz on the site and then answer further questions for homework once they had perused the site. Class discussions also enhanced this understanding. Lessons in advanced Boolean search techniques also assisted the understanding process. Completing organisers during Step 4 of their task sheet would also have required an understanding of the topic.

Application of knowledge was evident when they started to use their knowledge and understanding of the topic to construct and conduct the questions in their surveys and interviews. It also helped with knowing which photographs to take and which information to keep or discard when they compiled their AVD.

The students’ analysing skills were tested/ given a work out when they analysed their research findings from their surveys and statistical data and tabled or graphed them. Analysis of statistical data gathered from other sources eg books and the internet also contributed to their “analysis toolkit”. It was recommended that ideas were presented in mind maps and other graphic organisers – this too would have required analysis. It would also have required creativity.

Once all of the above tasks had been completed the students were ready to compile and assemble their AVDs. This required the evaluating skills of checking, critiquing, detecting, monitoring to get everything as it should be.

Creativity was required to create interesting open-ended questions for friends and family to ask them during the presentation. Creativity was also required for the tokens and other exhibition extras required for their final presentation.

References

Bruce, C. Edwards, S. & Lupton, M. (2006) Six Frames for information literacy education: exploring the challenges of applying theory to practice. Special issue. Information Literacy - the challenges of implementation.

Brunner, C. (2012). The Inquiry Process. Retrieved from http://www.youthlearn.org/learning/planning/lesson-planning/how-inquiry/how-inquiry

Edwards, S & Bruce, C. (2002) Reflective Internet Searching: and action research model. The Learning Organisation: An International Journal. 9 (3/4): 180-188

Lupton, M., & Bruce, C. (2010). Chapter 1: Windows on Information Literacy Worlds: Generic, Situated and Transformative Perspectives in Lloyd, Annemaree and Talja, Sanna. Practising information literacy: bringing theories of learning, practice and information literacy together. Wagga wagga: Centre for Information Studies, p. 3-27.