126 Future Forwards: Exploring Frontiers in Education
his or her interest and by responding to at least one other thread started
by someone else in the group. Students were also asked to scour Twitter
for what they considered to be the most intriguing tweets on the
environment and to retweet at least one of those tweets each week to
the class. Last but not least, students were expected to work in groups to
develop short lessons on environmental topics of interest, which were
posted to a blog with opportunities for peers to comment. The discussion
threads, tweets, and mini-lessons that resonated most with members of
the class then became the topics for more in-depth exploration by the
entire class through labs and project work. Evidence of the success of this
effort to give students greater voice in the direction of their learning can
be seen in the student survey data for this specific course. 73% of
students in environmental science reported better or much better
flexibility to explore their own areas of interest, 86% of students reported
better or much better choice in how they applied their learning, and 93%
of students reported better or much better connection to real world
problems or contexts. These results were well above the already
noteworthy outcomes in these areas for our blended courses across the
board.
The Value of Self-Paced Learning
While all of our blended courses aimed to give students greater control
over the time, place, path and pace of their learning, one course in
particular stood out in providing students with a self-paced, mastery-based learning experience. The physics teacher used the Meteor platform
to build a custom application called OpenLab to support student-driven
learning rooted in a modeling approach. The OpenLab application
enabled students to schedule and track themselves at their own pace
through the collaborative and cyclical process of developing and
deploying their models, while at the same time freeing the teacher to
work with individuals or small groups to address specific learning needs
as they arose. The course teacher reported that students in the blended
physics course with OpenLab showed significant improvement in the Test
of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics (TUG-K), moving from 28% to 75%
when most high school students average only 40% upon completing an
introductory physics course. This also marked the first time at Cary
