About our "Office Hours" Videos AND a Paper about How Students Cope with Anxiety from Active Learning Practices

By Megan Sumeracki

Cover image by Anke Sundermeier from Pixabay

About our Office Hours Videos

Last month, I put out an “Office Hours” video on Patreon about a paper investigating how undergraduates cope with anxiety in intro biology courses. What is an “Office Hours” video, you ask? They are special “thank yous” for our Patreon supporters! Our blog, podcast, and downloadable materials are all freely available on our website. However, as the content on our website and our weekly mailing list has grown, so have the maintenance expenses. To try to manage this, we have a Patreon Page (https://www.patreon.com/learningscientists). This provides a way for individuals to help support the website. As a thank-you and token of our gratitude, we post monthly office hours videos once per month for anyone joining the $5 tier or more.

The videos are casual and cover a wide variety of topics, such as descriptions of papers, explanations of interesting concepts (like Anendophasia: differences in inner voice, working memory and expertise), and personal readings from our books. If supporters ask us to cover a specific topic, we can usually accommodate!

If this sounds fun and interesting, and you can, please consider becoming a supporter (even if just for a short time, anything helps!). To give you a sense of these videos, I’m providing access to the most recent Office Hours Video from July, 2024, about the paper on how students report coping with anxiety during active learning practices, here:

Now, onto the written coverage of this paper, by Jennifer Brigati and colleagues (1)!

Note: my written coverage overlaps with the video, but is not a perfect replication. There’s a little something extra in each, based on how I’ve been tossing these ideas around in my head over the last few weeks.

The study

In their 2020 paper, Jennifer Brigati and colleagues (1) asked for self-reports of anxiety and coping associated with a few active learning strategies, specifically four strategies that they report are being used in their introductory biology courses: taking volunteers to answer questions, cold calling, using clickers, and using group work. In their study, they measured the relative levels of anxiety students report feeling when engaging in these learning strategies in class, and what coping strategies students report using to manage this anxiety when these activities are used.

Importantly, this paper is descriptive. Having a sense of how anxious students feel, and how they try to cope with their anxiety, can help us understand students’ experiences and fuel future research questions. The authors cannot (and, appropriately, don’t try to) determine whether certain learning strategies cause anxiety, whether specific coping strategies are more effective than others at reducing anxiety, or overall, how much learning occurred based on any combination of these variables. In fact, learning is not even being measured here. Instead, the authors note that the active learning strategies examined in this paper ought to produce learning in the classroom when used (based on other research). There is no random assignment to the learning strategies, nor random assignment to any interventions related to coping strategies. Instead, the authors note that some of these strategies may produce anxiety, and they wonder what the relative rates of anxiety were and how students choose to (or report choosing to) cope with this anxiety.

The authors used a survey to ask University students in introductory biology courses how anxious they feel during four active learning activities. They also asked open-ended questions about how the students cope with their anxiety when these strategies are being used.

The results that I found most interesting, and a call for more research!

I was interested in this paper because it includes cold calling as one of the active learning strategies. I have used and researched the use of cold calling as a way to promote/very strongly encourage covert retrieval. My goal is to make covert retrieval practice more effective by encouraging retrieval practice to take place mentally (you can read more about that research here.)

Whenever I talk about or write about cold calling, the typical concern is that it might produce anxiety. This paper speaks to these concerns, and to me suggests the need for more research in this area.

Reported anxiety:

Students in this study did report feeling more anxious when they were called on by name (i.e., cold called) than when they were asked to engage in group work or respond to a clicker question. This finding lends some credibility to the concern that cold calling might lead to anxiety (of course, this study cannot determine cause and effect). However, usually when I talk about cold calling, the assumed alternative is asking for a volunteer. Students also reported feeling more anxious when they were asked to volunteer to answer a question than during group work or using clickers.  To me, this suggests that cold calling might be worth it because it should encourage more retrieval across the class as a whole—so that students are prepared to answer if they are called upon—which ought to promote learning (2).

But, shouldn’t we try to remove anxiety from our classes as much as possible?

Not necessarily. Anxiety may not always be a bad thing! If a student’s feelings of anxiety lead them to better prepare for class, then more learning may occur. If anxiety leads students to avoid the situation, then the anxiety may harm learning (or at least not improve it above a baseline condition). And, the types of coping strategies students reported using did differ by the type of active learning strategy employed.

Types of coping strategies reported:

The coping strategies reported were classified as being adaptive or maladaptive. Adaptive coping strategies were those that served to reduce anxiety in a way that was healthy or non-harmful. These were things like seeking support from peers, taking deep breaths, using positive self-talk, preparing for class, asking a classmate or TA, problem solving, just doing the best they can, etc. Maladaptive coping strategies were those that focused on getting the anxiety-provoking event over as quickly as possible, rather than trying to use it to promote learning. Examples included escape responses like, just don’t answer, decide to lose points, don’t raise a hand or volunteer, avoid eye contact, etc.

Most interesting, at least to me, was that the types of coping strategies students reported using when the instructor took volunteers in class were different from the types of coping strategies they reported using when cold calling was used. The students reported using more adaptive coping strategies when cold calling was used in their classes. They reported more maladaptive coping strategies when volunteering was used.

So… what do we do based on this work?

Do we avoid cold calling because it is associated with anxiety? Do we use cold calling instead of taking volunteers because cold calling is associated with adaptive coping strategies? Do we throw out asking students to answer aloud altogether?

To that last point, using clickers is also an option, and in the Brigati et al. paper clicker questions were associated with lower levels of anxiety as well as more adaptive coping strategies.  However, using clickers does come with some costs—financial, possibly for the student and the institution, if clicker systems are used, and/or attention costs if smartphones or other devices are used. There could be equity/access issues with either system. Asking students to write the answers without a volunteer is also another option to avoid both cold calling and asking for a volunteer.

We can’t really answer these questions based on this paper alone. To me, all of this highlights a need for more research that takes anxiety, coping, type of learning strategy (or even just form of retrieval practice as a first step), and long-term learning into account.

(For the researchers reading this, I’m thinking about a factorial design that combines different types of retrieval practice and responses during class—writing vs. thinking; asking for a volunteer vs. cold calling vs. nothing out loud—and that measures both anxiety levels and long-term learning. Perhaps we can collaborate!)

References:

(1) Brigati, J. R., England, B. J., & Schussler, E. E. (2020). How do undergraduates cope with anxiety resulting from active learning practices in introductory biology? PLoS ONE 15(8): e0236558. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236558

(2) Sumeracki, M. A., & Castillo, J. (2022). Covert and overt retrieval practice in the classroom. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 8(2), 282–293. https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000332