[Dairy Science Innovations | Innovation Home Page]

Lou Armentano (Dairy Science) "Getting students to make decisions based on data, not advice"

Lou has found that students often use what people say about a topic rather than use appropriate data to guide their beliefs. In his senior seminar class, he and Lewis Sheffield gave them group experience in presenting papers to teach them the habits of interpreting data. He used a three step process.

First, all students are given a paper to read. In class, students discuss the paper in groups of three plus a faculty or grad student guide. The papers are sometimes too difficult, too removed from the practical, or too biological for their backgrounds. Discussion in groups helps them wrestle with the difficulty. Its probably impossible to find one thats too easy since the whole process is new to them. (He did not give students questions to consider in reading the paper, but is considering the idea for next time.)

The second stage is a group presentation of a new paper. The group prepares overheads to aid them in presenting the question addressed in the paper, showing the data, and presenting the conclusions. Lou has not solved the problem of individual accountability in the groups. These presentations weren't graded per se, but simply checked off. It allowed several demonstrations of what the instructors wanted in the individual presentations to follow (stage 3). Feedback was immediate and in front of the whole class. In the first group presentation, the students either didn't use data or used nonscientific data, but the quality of the presentations improved by the last group. This part of the process works best if the papers picked aren't too technical or obscure.

Thirdly, each student gives a talk on his/her own topic. Generally the topics chosen are practical. Students are expected to use peer-reviewed literature and back up their statements with scientific data. With the feedback, during the second nongraded stage, they learned this "habit" of presentation. Student evaluations (some at least) backed up his conclusions: "the best thing about the couse is that we used data to come up with the decision."

[Top ]

UW-Madison, November 1997