Using Textscrolls to Aid Learning

What is the context and the issue we are addressing? 

Students on Health and Social Care courses at London Met come from a wide variety of backgrounds and prior educational experience. Many have been away from formal education for a long period of time. Students can have a lack of self-belief in reading comprehension and find researching peer reviewed journal articles challenging. This then results in studying inhibition and a reluctance to delve deeper into this material, in part, by a desire not to be seen to fail. This has a knock-on effect for depth of their understanding of learning material and academic attainment.  

Using text scrolls is one way of demystifying Higher Education research and academic texts comprehension by providing an alternative way of approaching and understanding research articles. The ‘unbound’ magnified texts, provide students with new ways of interacting with research articles and a structure on how to unpack text sources to aid text comprehension. They can break down the texts into constitute parts, identify key passages, and make elaborate notes in the margins. Students were able to engage in this task as teams or individuals. The belief is that they will replicate this strategy in their personal reading and studying processes and establish and further develop active reading skills. 

What is the solution?

A peer-reviewed journal article was chosen from the module reading lists which referred and connected to the learning materials covered in the week. Text scrolls of the article were enlarged, printed, and spread out in the classroom for students to interact with. 

Participants were asked to work in small groups walking around the table looking at the article, stopping at any point. Their first task was to break up the article into its sections – introduction, literature review, methodology etc – to understand the roles of these different parts and what each component was aiming to achieve. It was hoped that this knowledge and clarity gained through interacting with research articles in this way helped to instil confidence when approaching other peer-reviewed articles. Questions then focused students on critically evaluating the text by asking them to explore key aspects such as: who authored the article, for what purpose, what were the limitations in findings, and the evidence base etc. 

What happened? Or what was the impact?

All the students engaged in the exercise and there was a lot of activity, discussions and energy in the classroom resulting in positive feedback collated from students informally as they provided their reflections on the model. However, it would clearly be desirable to carry out more formal and structured evaluation including a follow up survey as part of the module. If possible, this could be spread over several weeks to assess any long-term gains in confidence in addressing comprehension of research articles. 

One impact from a pedagogical perspective is that in introducing a new way of teaching it encourages the exploration of other ways of engaging more effectively with student (active) learning. Orion is planning to undertake a more formalised evaluation by gathering feedback on the task from students in two of the modules he is leading at Level 4 and 5.  

Could the practice change be rolled out more widely? 

This approach could be used and replicated across courses and schools and may hold particular relevance for students at level 4 at the start of their academic higher education journey.