Abstract:

Team Based Learning (TBL) is a pedagogy that emphasizes teamwork and individual accountability, resulting in students who are highly invested in their modules, and who are engaged with the learning resources, their team mates, their class, and ultimately more aware of their own learning. TBL is a flipped classroom approach, that in Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore has already been disseminated to at least a dozen undergraduate schools and programmes in various disciplines, ranging from medicine, engineering, education, sciences, humanities, and arts.

In NTU, TBL is usually run with technological support, either partly or all throughout the different parts of its prescribed sequence: from preparation, individual readiness assurance, team readiness assurance and application exercises.

The Teaching, Learning and Pedagogy Division (TLPD) which is in-charge of disseminating improved pedagogies, including TBL, supports processes to ensure relevance, acceptance and effectiveness of these methods. For TBL, we continue to promote and provide training through a certification programme' a continuous support system called TBL clinics, a troubleshooting and advising programme through TBL Observation, a feedback system through Student Evaluation of Teaching as well as surveys and Focus Group Discussion (FGD). This paper focuses on the student engagement and feedback as gathered through FGDs.

At the end of every semester, an FGD is conducted on at least one of the courses running on TBL. Over a span of 2 years, 6 FGDs have been conducted on 51 students representing a total group of about 500 students. The FGD delved mainly on how the TBL made an impact on student learning, and how the students feel about these courses, vis-a-vis their other non-TBL courses.

The findings include the students feeling they exerted more effort in TBL (Y=84%, N=16); and revealing the portion of TBL they learned the most from:
1- preparation phase,
2- application exercises,
3- team readiness assurance,
4- individual readiness assurance

What their most important learning resource is:
1- preparatory materials,
2- team mates,
3- professor,
4- other teams.

They were also asked about how they learned in TBL (Discussions, Teammates were the among the most commonly mentioned); and how they compared their TBL class vs non-TBL class (Better, Prefer are mentioned most, along with Learn/ing). Among their comments, the words that were most commonly cited to describe TBL are: Interesting, Fun, Interactive, and Memorable.

The increased level of engagement is well-documented in TBL. Other future directions of TLPD as an institution is to expand the studies on behavioral modifications due to TBL, biases of TBL on performance of some personality types, and TBL's ability to deliver institutionally-expected and professionally-required learning outcomes.

Keywords:

TBL, student engagement, focus group discussion.