We are excited to announce a new publication out in the December issue of CBE Life Sciences Education: "Caution, student experience may vary: social identities impact a student's experience in peer discussion."
Active learning is being adopted across STEM classrooms, but not all students may reap the benefits of these practices. Multiple barriers may prevent students from fully engaging in active learning, including anxiety, feeling dominated by other students, and not believing that active learning is useful. This paper explores the experiences of different populations of students in peer discussions - a common way that active learning is implemented in large lecture classes.
When we asked students how they feel - we found a gender effect. When asked about their comfort participating in active learning, women were much less comfortable than men in participating in whole class discussions, which may help explain why female voices are not heard as often as males in these classes. In contrast, women and men are equally comfortable during small group discussions. Despite equal comfort, their experiences in these groups were different. Women were more likely to prefer to collaborate with other group members, while men were more likely to take on the role of the leader. Further, women valued peer discussions much more when they had a friend in the group – which didn’t seem to matter to men. Taken together, these experiences indicate that active learning is not the same for all students. It also means that perhaps to allow women and men to have the same opportunities in active learning classrooms, we need to incorporate more small groupwork, structure that small groupwork so students can participate more equally, and perhaps give students the chance to work with friends.
This article is one of the five featured articles for the December issue of CBE LSE! Special thanks to fellow authors Sarah Eddy and Mary Pat Wenderoth. To check out the article, please click here.