Ophthalmic optics is a foundation course for optometrists that underpins their knowledge about the behavior of light for the application of visual aids to correct structural and ocular-motor visual dysfunction. For this reason, students need to have a strong understanding of this topic to improve their practical proficiency. Similar to other advanced degrees, optics has traditionally been a hurdle topic for students in the early stages of their tertiary education that has led to a teacher-centric approach(12). This approach leads to superficial strategies of learning, including memorization of facts and formulae without progressing to higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, which restricts students from gaining a deeper level of learning. For this reason, we attempted to create and deliver an active learning assignment to encourage students to engage with the content in a more meaningful manner and hopefully, improve academic outcomes following the assignment.
The current study assessed the impact of a novel assessment style for ophthalmic optics on student engagement and investigated the relationship between assessment style and academic performance. The results showed that students who participated in the cooperative storytelling assignment had a statistically greater improvement in academic performance in written test performance following the assessment. The performance gain was maintained on subsequent written assessments post-assignment for the cooperative storytelling cohort. Conversely, students who participated in the traditional passive learning assignment had no significant change in academic performance following completion of this task. In addition, the effect of improvement in scores following the cooperative storytelling assessment was greater in students who had lower academic performance compared to academically high achievers. Finally, the cooperative storytelling cohort had lower baseline academic performance that may have led to the potentially greater gains than the passive learning cohort. Students were given access to all presentations to aid preparation for post-test assessments.
Our results confirmed previous studies that showed, on average, student’s academic performance significantly improved when they engaged in small group learning assignments in medicine(13) and optometry(14, 15). In addition, Carini et al. investigated the association between student engagement and academic performance in multiple disciplines of tertiary education and found a positive correlation with grades and critical thinking(16). They also observed that student engagement produced greater outcomes for academically lower performing students. To our knowledge this is the first study in an optics course for optometry students, that investigates the effect of changing an assessment task from a passive based learning task to a team-based active learning strategy, on engagement and academic performance. Our study also demonstrated that the greatest gain in academic performance was in the academically lowest quartile of students and could be recognized as an effective strategy to raise understanding and performance in students struggling with optical concepts.
We also sought to explore the impact of the active learning strategy on student experience. Student experience is an important consideration when applying new teaching methods and the current study confirms student satisfaction with the cooperative storytelling model of assessment.
We utilized indigenous ways of learning into the Optics unit to respect the diverse learning approaches of our students and to promote equal opportunity for our learners. Our study showed that facilitating student learning by providing flexible, culturally safe, assessment styles allowed students who were visual learners to experience and reinforce their understanding of difficult optics principles. Significant performance gains by the students struggling with optical concepts may be related to motivational gains for students who exhibit different learning approaches to the traditional lecture style, that contains more superficial learning(17). Further studies identifying students optimal learning style may confirm this finding.
There are several limitations of this study. Firstly, the student cohorts between the assessment styles were non-contemporaneous and not controlled, which may have affected the outcomes. In addition, we conducted the assessment within the constraints of the university assessment policy that restricted us from randomly assigning students in the same year different written assignments. Secondly, our sample size is small, which limits our ability to stratify according to different factors that might affect the outcomes, such as entrance scores for program entry. Therefore, our findings would benefit from confirmation in a larger cohort. Finally, the assessment grading was subjective and bias may have been introduced between cohorts. We minimized this bias by using the same examiner between both cohorts and a second examiner to adjudicate a random sample of assessments for moderation purposes. We also had a clear, well defined marking rubric that had been moderated by a separate member of academic staff.