Developing the FILL+ Tool to Reliably Classify Classroom Practices Using Lecture Recordings

Abstract

Lectures are a commonly used teaching method in higher education, but there is significant debate about the relative merits of different classroom practices. Various classroom observation tools have been developed to try to give insight into these practices, beyond the simple dichotomy of “traditional lecturing versus active learning”. Here we review of a selection of classroom observation protocols from an ethological perspective and describe how this informed the development of a new protocol, FILL+. We demonstrate that FILL+ can be applied reliably by undergraduate students after minimal training. We analysed a sample of 208 lecture recordings from Mathematics, Physics, and Veterinary Medicine and found a wide variety of classroom practices, e.g. on average lecturers spent 2.1% (± 2.6%) of the time asking questions, and 79.3% (± 19%) of the lecture talking, but individuals varied considerably. The FILL+ protocol has the potential to be widely used, both in research on effective teaching practices, and in informing discussion of pedagogical approaches within institutions and disciplines.

The Cost of Asking: ‘Say that Again?’: A Social Capital Theory View Into How Lecture Recording Supports Widening Participation

“…It is notable that Participant A states they 'obviously' can't request this in the lecture, as this may be contrary to how many lecturers may feel they conduct their lectures. While activity within lectures is varied by lecturer, the majority of lecture time is predominantly the lecturer talking (Smith et al, 2013b;Eddy et al, 2015;Kinnear et al, 2021). In our study, WP participants discussed why they felt they weren't able to request these affordances from lecturers.…”

Using data about classroom practices to stimulate significant conversations and aid reflection

“…Further limitations are the need for access to lecture captures and the time (and associated cost) required to analyse the lectures. However, our previous research found that undergraduate research assistants could carry out the analysis reliably after minimal training (Kinnear et al, 2021). Work is currently underway by the authors to explore issues around the practical implementation and sustainability of our approach in formal academic development settings.…”

“…This final category describes activities where there is some interaction between students and the lecturer, such as questions to and from the lecturer, which feel substantially different to listening to a monologue, but as most students are not themselves engaged in the interaction it does not fall into the fully interactive category. More recently the FILL+ framework was developed by Kinnear et al (2021) as an extension of the FILL framework. The FILL+ protocol was used on recorded lectures and demonstrated that minimal training of coders was required to produce reproducible characterisations of lecture behaviour.…”

“…From a previous project we had access to FILL+ data from 247 lectures from 45 lecturers (Kinnear et al, 2021). Seventeen participants for the current project were recruited from that cohort with the aim of achieving participants from across the STEMM disciplines: (Mathematics (8), Physics (3), Veterinary Medicine (3), Biology (2), and Chemistry (1)).…”

“…In this paper we address this issue by providing teachers with accurate and detailed data about their teaching practices. We used the Framework for Interactive Learning in Lectures, FILL+ (Kinnear et al, 2021;Wood et al, 2016) to generate objective data about the time spent on different classroom activities. Data is presented in the form of three graphs.…”