LILAC 2014 Teachmeet Abstract

1. Can peers be more influential than you? A ‘flipping great approach to teaching
web evaluation
Zoe Young, Cardiff University, YoungZ@cardiff.ac.uk
We have had an information literacy presence on the Cardiff University Mpharm course for many years. Part of
these information literacy sessions for the first year pharmacy students aim to develop students’ referencing and
critical thinking. In past years we have done exercises in class and they have appeared to understand the
concept of evaluating websites but then their group assignment has not reflected this, with many groups having
poor marks for the quality of the materials used.
After evaluating the content and approach with lecturing staff we decided to make one of our sessions more
interactive by combining several techniques. Before this session, they had an induction lecture and a critical
writing workshop. After the session, they had two lectures on information mastery taught by an academic and one
interactive lecture on citing and referencing.
For the group workshops, we used flipped classroom (part of which involved students having to submit websites
before the session), peer to peer learning, discussion and group teaching to get them involved with critical
appraisal of web materials. Our preliminary observations were that these techniques encouraged critical thinking
with the students and the feedback was positive. The details of what we did and how the students reacted to it
will be shared at the TeachMeet.
We are confident that after this years’ sessions we will see an improvement in the quality of the materials used
and therefore higher marks. We are directly involved with the marking and so have access to previous years
scores to enable comparison. This assignment does contribute to their overall module mark. I will give an account
of the approaches used, report on the impact on students’ marks and reflect on how this new and dynamic
approach enhanced the learning experience of the students’.