Context

There was a change from traditional teaching style or the past teaching format to a group discussion learning format associated with undergraduate teaching course that was designated as “Environmental Chemistry”. It is an elective course for third year undergraduate / BSc degree as Chem-3111. The current teaching and learning approach was found to be suited for 30 students in one classroom, who were 19 female and 11 male students.

Aims

The aim of the new teaching method was to:

• motivate self-study and improve the inquisitiveness and interest

• engage students in group discussion with their knowledge that they searched by using the library, internet access and website, YouTube video

• apply the theories that have been taught in classroom to knowledge of daily life’s chemistry

• understand the importance of chemistry in our environment
  

Why the activity was developed:

In the past learning systems, the teacher is a leader of classroom and she/he explained the lecture first. Some students are good listeners and they followed the trend of teacher’s guideline. The passive learning (teacher leading system) is absolutely dependent on the teacher and the teacher cannot evaluate easily if the student understands the lecture when the topic has been finished. The reform of former learning style was implemented by the active, practical and functional schedule for the students. The total number of students (about 30) are separated into suitable groups and asked to discuss about topics within each group and sharing knowledge among groups during the learning period. The students got more collaborative each other and gained critical thinking skills on subject matter.

The activity:

The teacher needs to guide how to study the causes of water pollution and/or sources and prevention of water pollution. The students may work together as a group discussion on the topic from this motivation. They can get critical thinking approach and improve their problem solving skills. They can find a way how to solve a problem that related with teachers should prepare the questions for their thinking and design the learning strategies by using games.

For example, there are divided into three groups among 30 students such as 'Group A', Group B' and 'Group C'. The teacher wrote the questions which it should be known by the student on white board. The student thought and discussed based on their own opinion to get true answer within given interval. After the completion of the time limit, they had given the answer to the teacher and other groups. By doing this activity, the group that gave the correct answer got the marks and that gave wrong answer got no marks, then the group with highest marks was awarded by the teacher. The prizes were note-books or ball-point pen or other stationery.

The students’ learning could be assessed by various types of assessments including short questionsand writing assignments, etc. The improvement of students was checked by the one-minute paper,(Stead, 2005) which is a highly effective technique both for awareness the course and relationbetween theory and daily life’s chemistry. In this method, students have to answer the proposedquestions on a blank sheet of paper within one minute. For example, what is meant by“Environmental Chemistry”? Or do you know how many types of pollution are there? What is water pollution?

Another method is one in which the instructor or tutor give questions to answer for the students in the form of the muddiest / clearest point (Paulson and Faust, 2018) that takes slightly longer than one minute as well as it has a slightly difference when compared with one-minute paper.

For example, What was the muddiest or clearest point in the topic?
Describe some organic and inorganic pollutants of water and their sources.

What is the best method for the control of water pollution?

In addition, writing “Daily journal” is similar to clearest point, though the student must report theiropinion on some topic in the course. This technique is blended the previous techniques, that has more effective as possible to obtain the benefit and admit for study in depth or a deep discussion of a course material. In this approach, it is more suitable for explore the findings and discuss reports of natural science subjects in more recently current topic, such as climate change, greenhouse effect on our planet and so forth (Paulson and Faust, 2018).

Whether in lecture, discussion sections, laboratories, or individual encounters, questioning is animportant part of guiding students’ learning (Arrowsmith, 1997). The discussion of student in pairsor groups could give many advantages and have the opportunity to share their own views, to listen to others, to make sharp their argumentative skill and thinking deeply and quickly.

Feedback from students:

To collect the feedback on the topic, evaluation forms were given to students to evaluate the teaching by students, it was collected by attempting to answer in rating and ranking levels of their satisfaction scale. Some examples of student feedback are as follows.

• "I like group discussion because to discuss water pollution, I searched the meaning of new terms that related to topic from dictionary or google."

• "It is good to get new idea. But sometime we found hard to agree with classmates."

• "We can get the knowledge of water pollution not only from text book but also internet website. And we can apply the method to get pure water and how to prevent water pollution in our environment."
  

By the end of the semester it was clear that teaching and learning in group discussion had provided good understanding of the topics and also nurtured the self-confidence of students.

Strengths and weaknesses of the activity:

The evaluation comments showed that the students found the group discussions both challenging and enjoyable. The in-class assessments gave the teacher information about what the students had been learnt well and which points needed reinforcing.

However, there were some challenges. At first, students found it difficult to change to the active group discussion method. Among thirty students, one or two students answered the questionnaires that teacher prepared for the topic: water pollution. Most of female students were too shy to answer or participate due to Myanmar's culture. Moreover, some students could not think quickly the answer and they worried about giving the wrong answer. Therefore, in Myanmar's teaching system, the teacher could not receive true comments on lecture and herself/ himself because there is a weakness in taking feedback when the lecture has been finished. However, after practising about three lecture times, more and more students started to cooperate in the group discussion. In addition, the teacher/tutor tried to encourage this type of discussion by giving awards when they found out true answer.

Keywords: group discussions; one-minute paper; muddiest/clearest point; daily journal

References

Arrowsmith, R. (1997) Physical Geology at Arizona State University, Science Teaching Reconsidered: A Hand Book, Chapter 2: How Teachers Teach: Specific methods, The National Academic Press. Open Book. [Online]
http://www.nap.edu/read/5287/chapter/3#11 Accessed 25/11/18.

Paulson, D. R. and Faust, J. L. (2018) Active Learning for the College Classroom, Cal State LA. [Online]
http://calastatela.edu/dept/chem/chem2/active/main.htm Accessed 25/11/18

Stead R. D (2005) A view of the one-minute paper: Active learning in higher education, The Higher Aducation Academy and SAGE publications, London, vol 6 (2): 118 - 131

http://www.york.ac.uk/media/staffhome/learninhandteaching/one%20minute%20paper,%read,%202005.pdf Accessed 1/ 2/ 19.

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