Abstract
The General Education Foundation (GEF) Programme is a common core for all CUHK undergraduates. One of its missions is to promote students’ academic preparedness, including their cognitive ability and critical thinking skills, and hence students’ smooth transition from secondary to university education.
In 2014, we saw the need to understand more about students’ thinking complexity and measure their improvement in thinking. By applying the Narrative Qualitative Assessment (NQA) method, a group of GEF teachers analyzed students’ writings and identified that most undergraduates (mostly year 1 and 2) retained at a preliminary level of thinking complexity in a way that, for example, they failed to identify uncertainties in an open-end question and always looked for a standard answer to the problem.1
Based upon the aforementioned findings, this project is proposed to address students’ such learning needs, namely, to improve their awareness of turning from an answer-driven thinking approach to a more sophisticated one, which is useful for addressing complicated open-ended questions often encountered in university education. An interactive mobile application (e.g. an App) will be developed for users to know their thinking patterns and obtain immediate suggestions on future improvement. Such a mobile application, as a way of supporting student learning in the online environment and beyond, will be particularly useful for students to know themselves without necessity to meet the teacher face-to-face.
To achieve the purpose, the App consists of two key components, a set of scenario-based questions to collect students’ self-evaluation on their thinking complexity and five feedback videos corresponding to the five thinking complexity levels. Based on their answer to these scenario-based questions, users of the App will be directed to one of these feedback videos, which provides a summary of their thinking complexity patterns and actionable suggestions. For students, these questions can stimulate self-awareness of their own thinking habits; suggestions in the feedback can provide directions for future improvement. For teachers, data from students’ self-evaluation, when combined with the NQA study on students’ writings, can directly inform the classroom teaching.
1 The findings have been reported and published in the Teaching & Learning Innovation EXPO 2017, and the full report was published to the Association of Core Texts and Courses in 2017 Fall.
Brief write-up
Project objectives
This project is proposed to design and to develop an interactive web application named MASCOT for students to self-evaluate their thinking complexity and to obtain immediate suggestions on future improvement.
Activities, process and outcomes
Collaborating with the Information Technology Services Centre (ITSC), the team designed and developed MASCOT from November 2020 to April 2021. Then, the team invited students to use MASCOT after 2020-21 Term 2 and during 2021-22 Term 1. 332 responses were collected, and 268 valid data were obtained.
Deliverables and evaluation
The team also invited students to provide feedback on MASCOT through questionnaire. Moreover, 2 rounds 6 focus group interviews were conducted in June 2021 and January 2022 to get in-depth feedback of students on MASCOT. The feedbacks are positive. Based on the 132 questionnaire responses, 92% of the students agree (in 6-point Likert Scale) that MASCOT can help them further reflect on their learning in General Education Foundation (GEF) courses and 93% agree that the suggestions provided by MASCOT are useful for their future improvement on the thinking complexity.
Dissemination, diffusion, impact and sharing of good practices
So far, there are five GEF teachers that have used MASCOT in their classes. The team has given two oral presentations. One journal paper has been accepted and will be published by大學通識教育聯盟.
Impact on teaching and learning
Findings in this project will be integrated into the Narrative Qualitative Analysis study which contains both student self-evaluation and teacher evaluation components, to systematically understand students’ cognitive characters, development, and the teaching effectiveness of the GEF courses.
