Introduction
Team-based learning (TBL) relates to an active learning, small team instructional methodology which allows learners to implement conceptual cognizance through a series of undertakings, including immediate feedback and team and individual work. The learning domains enhanced by TBL include the cognitive, social, affective, and psychomotor realms. According to Ismael (2016), TBL’s active learning procedure allows students to utilize their kinetic, writing, auditory, and visual learning styles to bolster their cognizance and retain it. Faculty typically assigns students to teams using a transparent procedure to ensure team diversity and prevent the likelihood of pre-existing friendship group-based categories.
Facilitators also provide feedback and clarity to students during the RAP (Readiness Assessment Process), which consists of TRAT (Team Readiness Assurance Test) and IRAT (Individual Readiness Assessment Test) (Fu, n.d.). They further distinguish gaps in students’ comprehension and underlying challenges through follow-up queries and enhance their critical thinking. During activities involving clinical problem-solving, students are required to utilize their ethical viewpoints, clinical reasoning, collective knowledge, proficiencies, and values to resolve complex clinical issues applicable to actual life situations. Learners also contribute to their team members’ grades by providing qualitative and quantitative feedback.
Purpose Statement
TBL is a pedagogical strategy that involves engaging learners’ knowledge through group collaboration and individual testing. This paper aims to highlight TBL’s pros and cons, the strategy’s best uses, and helpful tips for the pedagogue using it in healthcare and academic settings. It also provides an overview of research evidence supporting TBL’s efficacy and a comprehensive description of its applicability to a specific nursing course.
Best Uses of the Strategy in Healthcare and Academic Settings
The TBL instructional methodology typically initiates significant transformations within the classroom to ensure learners’ accountability for their initial exposure to or conversancy with content and relevant concepts through guided self-study. To ensure the strategy’s effective use, the instructor should develop teams consisting of five to seven members to foster inquiry (Alberti et al., 2021). When optimizing team cohesion conditions, the pedagogue should establish groupings with a diverse assortment of members and avoid allocating students with previously established relationships within the same group. These teams should be maintained across the semester to encourage the development of self-directed learning through time.
The educator should distinguish opportunities for team-based tasks or assignments to ensure TBL’s efficacy. Although team-based workpieces can be developed from any topic or subject matter, they function appropriately when they engage learners in multi-faceted team-building and problem-solving exercises (Koohestani & Boghcheghi, 2016). TBL-related tasks should involve procedures or skills whose practical applicability in the clinical setting is feasible. Examples of team-based tasks within the healthcare profession include the prediction of probable patient outcomes and diagnostic procedures.
Regarding the design of TBL assignments, instructors should select tasks that demand students to apply course concepts and themes during decision-making and whose implementation is practicable or straightforward. The 4S strategy (significant issue, same problem, specific choice, and simultaneous report) can be used when developing TBL assignments (Chen et al., 2018). This approach emphasizes creating issues relevant to students, ensuring that all groupings work on a similar task, students’ devising a specific alternative to solve the problem, and learners report their selected choices simultaneously.
The instructor should also create scenarios, problems, or questions focused on enhancing students’ engagement. They should consider strategies to enhance students’ participation and maintain authenticity when developing issues or questions for teams (Branney & Priego-Hernandez, 2018). The devised problems or queries must promote the exploration of different probable responses and be linked to course outcomes. TBL assignments can be structured to focus on small-scale issues and be interspersed throughout the laboratory or lecture.
The educator should also ensure regular feedback throughout the semester. To enhance a better TBL experience, the instructor should ensure that learners familiarize themselves with the learning materials and engage fully in group discussions. Pedagogues must provide rationales for the process, brainstorm with learners regarding the appropriate criteria for peer assessments, and utilize qualitative narratives and numeric ratings to promote peer evaluations’ efficacy (Ismael, 2016). They should also implement periodic peer evaluations, incorporate feedback mechanisms, ensure anonymity, and differentiate examination scores.
Moreover, the educator must ensure that students research and understand assigned readings and materials for every course unit. To attain this goal, the instructor should assess learners’ preparedness for team activities and accountability by introducing the Readiness Assurance Process (RAP) (Fu, n.d.). Furthermore, lecturers can integrate TBL instructional approach into online learning strategies by developing group discussion activities, forums, and synchronous e-learning classrooms. Pedagogues should also create a learning community that fosters cohesion within teams and manage learners’ expectations.
Helpful Tips for Educators Utilizing TBL
TBL is especially effective in learning environments typified by opportunities to practice and learn problem-solving and apply core concepts. Educators need to familiarize themselves with the recommended strategies for ensuring TBL’s efficacy. Some of the helpful tips associated with TBL’s use include ensuring that the assigned pre-class preparation materials are realistic for learners to complete and understand; this will enhance students’ self-efficacy and motivate them to finalize tasks before attending in-class sessions.
While designing readiness assessment tests (RAT), the instructor should integrate both complex and easy questions into the assessment tests. According to Fu (n.d.), this acts as an incentive for promoting teamwork, particularly when administering TRAT. To increase the probability of developing successful teams, instructors should ensure that the groups are highly randomized and diverse. This can be attained by creating teacher-formed teams and integrating factors including learners’ GPA, years in school, major, interests, learning styles, strengths, and previous TBL experience during group formation. The instructor should also avoid existing teams, ensure transparency regarding the procedure, highlight TBL’s benefits, and develop groups of five-to-seven learners.
To promote accountability, the educator should award grades to groups and implement peer assessment procedures; this approach serves as an incentive for learners to build teams and collaborate. Grading learners’ performances will motivate them to engage in and complete pre-class preparation to record better performances in in-class IRAT. Pedagogues should also provide students with essential tools, reward or recognize learners with outstanding performances, and give a rationale for the TBL procedure. Regular and immediate feedback is also crucial for TBL’s success. Fu (n.d.) recommends using Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique cards (IF-AT) for TRAT evaluations. The educator should walk around and give feedback and comments to groups while learners participate in resolving the issue, especially during application activities. Furthermore, lecturers can provide feedback during whole-class discussions to conclude and debrief the applied activities.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Unlike other instructional strategies, TBL promotes the interaction between groups without the need for multiple educators’ presence; this minimizes faculty burden and allows instructors to become learning facilitators. TBL also encourages students’ active engagement in the learning process; its application exercises phase demands that learners actively engage with other group members to ascertain specific responses and devise well-reasoned arguments for those answers.
Branson et al. (2016) further highlight this approach’s efficacy in facilitating high-performing teams’ creation. TBL also fosters team and individual accountability during the learning process. IRAT enhances learners’ responsibility for pre-class preparations; this is further reinforced through application exercises and TRAT, which promotes their accountability to other team members.
Furthermore, the TBL approach has been associated with high-order thinking proficiencies. This strategy scaffolds the learning procedure by taking learners through RAP for every course module, thereby enhancing their readiness for highly complex course concepts’ application. Ultimately TBL offers visible measures or metrics for assessing students’ learning. Despite the advantages listed above, this instructional strategy has been linked with various drawbacks.
First, TBL requires instructors to restructure course contents into group-based projects. Second, according to Alberti et al. (2021), facilitation methodologies related to TBL can be uncomfortable, mainly if one is new to the strategy. Lastly, when learners come to the classroom unprepared, they may be constrained and unable to make meaningful contributions to the teamwork process.
Evidence of TBL’s Effectiveness
Findings from various studies reveal TBL’s efficacy in enhancing aspects such as student engagement. For instance, outcomes of a quasi-experimental survey by Koohestani and Baghcheghi (2016) revealed TBL’s positive impact on nursing students’ understanding of their psycho-social classroom climate. Furthermore, the results of mixed-method observational research by Branney and Priego-Hernandez (2018) further demonstrate that many learners preferred TBL to other instructional methods. The study participants also reported high TBL satisfaction levels and accountability (Branney & Priego-Hernandez, 2018).
Branson et al.’s (2016) findings also identified TBL as an efficacious and acceptable instructional approach for undergraduate nursing students. Ultimately, a metanalysis by Chen et al. (2018) also supports the arguments presented by other researchers. Their findings demonstrated that TBL was a more appropriate approach for teaching medical students than LBL; it helped improve learners’ skills, attitudes, and knowledge. From the above analysis, it is evident that TBL is an effective instructional strategy.
Implementation of the Strategy
TBL Application in the Clinical Pharmacology Unit
Pre-Class Preparation
- This particular course’s learning objective is to improve learners’ knowledge, competence, attitudes, and skills in clinical pharmacology procedures.
- The course director will select teams – the educator will seek staff and faculty input to distinguish undesirable learners’ groupings, including social organization affiliations, cliques, and couples.
- They will develop heterogeneous teams to expose learners to peers with different experiences and backgrounds; this can be done through random assignment, personality results grouping, and ability grouping.
- Each team will consist of five-to-seven learners; this is the recommended size. Team permanence will also be considered during the group formation process.
- Reading assignments assigned to the students will include text readings, lecture notes, and videos.
Readiness Assurance Process
- The instructor will adopt the “backward design” approach when creating TBL materials, including RAP.
- They will also ascertain the ultimate learning outcomes and develop a team application exercise.
- The instructor will then develop the RAT (IRAT and TRAT) for each instruction unit, consisting of multiple-choice questions. At the start of every instruction unit, the IRAT will be administered to each learner and graded by the educator. Learners will then assemble in their respective teams and take the TRAT, consisting of similar IRAT queries. The IF-AT self-scoring sheet will be used during the TRAT assessments. The TRAT and IRAT scores will be at the pedagogue’s discretion; these scores will be recorded for each learner.
- Following the TRAT’s completion, learners may appeal to their missed queries by presenting rationale ground on the allocated readings. The educator will address the appeals to the entire class – credit will be awarded to the question if the provided rationale is considered adequate.
Course Concepts’ Application
- This phase will consist of activities developed by the content expert to enhance learners’ comprehension of course content and strengthen group cohesion.
- Students will be required to collaborate to resolve challenging issues developed by the instructor.
- The problem must be significant and relevant to the learners; teams will work on a similar issue; groups will be requested to make a particular choice; they will report their responses simultaneously.
Team-based Learning Sequence
Conclusion
TBL’s fundamental goal is to progress beyond content delivery and coverage in class and focus on making sure that learners have the chance to practice utilizing course conceptualizations to resolve issues. Various studies support TBL’s use, with findings associating this instructional approach with students’ positive outcomes. The approach is associated with multiple cons and pros, including its capacity to enhance learners’ accountability, high-other thinking adroitness, and team cohesion.
References
Alberti, S., Motta, P., Ferri, P., & Bonetti, L. (2021). The effectiveness of team-based learning in nursing education: A systematic review. Nurse Education Today, 97, 1–12. Web.
Branney, J., & Priego-Hernández, J. (2018). A mixed methods evaluation of team-based learning for applied pathophysiology in undergraduate nursing education. Nurse Education Today, 61, 127–133. Web.
Branson, S., Boss, L., & Fowler, D. L. (2016). Team-based learning: Application in undergraduate baccalaureate nursing education. Journal of Nursing Education and Practice, 6(4), 59–64. Web.
Chen, M., Ni, C., YHu, Y., Wang, M., Liu, L., Ji, X., Chu, H., Wu, W., Lu, C., Wang, S., Wang, S., Zhao, L., Li, Z., Zhu, H., Wang, J., Xia Y., & Wang, X. (2018). Meta-analysis on the effectiveness of team-based learning on medical education in China. BMC Medical Education, 18, 1–11. Web.
Fu. C-C. (n.d.). Team-based learning: An overview of team-based learning design, guidelines and strategies. College Star. Web.
Koohestani, H. R., & Baghcheghi, N. (2016). The effects of team-based learning techniques on nursing students’ perception of the psycho-social climate of the classroom. Medical Journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 30, 1–7. Web.
Ismael, N. A. S. (2016). Effectiveness of Team-Based Learning in teaching Medical Genetics to Medical Undergraduates. The Malaysian Journal of Medical Science, 23(2), 73–77. Web.