So What Exactly is SCALE-UP?

by Victoria Holec

Analytical Assistant, Learning Environment Evaluation Project (LEE)

Over the past 12 months, the term SCALE-UP has surfaced on multiple occasions throughout our campus. It was first introduced to us as part of the consulting process for the Destination Project’s new academic building, of which many faculty members across all departments have been a part. In fact, it may have been at one of those consultation meetings that you first heard the term SCALE-UP. This article provides a brief introduction to what SCALE-UP is, and will conclude with some exciting news for you!

How SCALE-UP became what it is now

SCALE-UP now most commonly stands for Student-Centered Active Learning Environment with Upside-down Pedagogies. It originated in the late 1990s at North Carolina State University with Robert J. Beichner. SCALE-UP is derived from studio physics and was meant as an initiative to bring an active learning environment to large introductory classes in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines. The SCALE-UP initiative showed a plethora of successful outcomes for students, such as improving grades, reducing failure rates, fostering better conceptual understanding, improving problem-solving skills, and improving student attitudes toward introductory STEM classes (Beichner, 2008; Beichner, Saul, Allain, Deardorff, & Abbott, 2000; Beichner et al., 2007). In particular, failure rates of female students in these science courses are cut in half and those of visible minorities are cut by a factor of four. SCALE-UP also eliminates the back-of-the-room phenomenon, according to which high-achieving students sit in the front, and poor students sit in the back of the class (Miller Kregenow, Rogers, & Price, 2011). While SCALE-UP originated in science and engineering, it has now been used with a variety of subjects, including business, astronomy, and literature.

A teaching approach…

First and foremost, SCALE-UP is a pedagogy or teaching style. If you look closely at the elements of its name, you will see why. First, SCALE-UP engages students in active learning. Active learning happens when the responsibility of the learning is with the learner rather than with the instructor. Second, SCALE-UP assumes an upside-down pedagogy, which is also commonly known as flipped teaching. That means that content is delivered to students outside of and prior to class, while in-class activities centre on hands-on problem solving. The instructor serves more as a guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage. Another big part of the SCALE-UP pedagogy is classroom management. Students collaborate in teams of three or in larger groups of six or nine. Roles within the teams are carefully assigned at the beginning of class to maximize student participation. These roles include the team manager, the recorder, and the critic, and they typically rotate throughout the term. Student activities are divided into tangibles, which are shorter hands-on exercises that students should be able to answer based on their preparation, and ponderables, which are more challenging activities in which students apply what they have learned at a higher level. For courses such as physics and engineering, SCALE-UP eliminates a separate lab component, as this approach intrinsically integrates lab and lecture with active, hands-on learning occurring in class, and content delivery happening before and outside of class.

…plus a learning environment

SCALE-UP as a teaching style is really facilitated by a classroom environment that encourages this approach to teaching. Beichner’s team designed the first SCALE-UP room at NCSU that has since become the exemplary framework for anyone implementing or adapting SCALE-UP. A typical SCALE-UP room has round tables that sit nine students each. Thus, each table sits three teams, which are labeled A, B, and C. Tables are further numbered, so each team can be easily identified (e.g., 4C = Team C at Table 4). This allows for splitting the room into thirds using team number, or in half using table number (odd/even). More recently, smaller SCALE-UP-type rooms have grouped their teams around tables of six students, often due to smaller class sizes. Round tables easily facilitate collaborative activities among students. In a SCALE-UP classroom, there is no front of the room. The instructor station is typically located in the centre of the room, and the instructor spends most of the class time circulating among students. Students usually have access to one projection screen per table to display materials, as well as ample whiteboard space to record activities or work through problems. Importantly, if the teaching style and the learning environment don’t match, SCALE-UP is minimally successful (Lasry, Charles, Whittaker, Dedic, & Rosenfield, 2013).

But what if I’m not good with technology?

While SCALE-UP classrooms are often technology heavy, it is entirely optional to use it. Technology is considered as more of an organizing feature that allows for the web-based aggregation of resources such as activities, calendars, syllabus, lab reports, and notes. Beichner himself describes that the tables in the room are actually the most important technology. From reading SCALE-UP adopter reports, it seems that the most common teaching technology used in these rooms is the whiteboard. Traditionally, each team of three students has access to a laptop that is stored in the classroom. The ideal situation is that each table has a projection medium, such as a data projector or an LCD screen, to which students can project materials from the laptops. The instructor has the ability to project his/her content to all the screens in the room, and to project any single student laptop to all screens as well. This facilitates sharing interesting findings or even unforeseen problems with the entire class. The Learning Environment Evaluation (LEE) Project in conjunction with the Teaching Centre is happy to provide training workshops for instructors interested in learning how to use this technology.

SCALE-UP is coming to the U of L!

As part of the planning for the Destination Project new academic building, LEE has been asked to evaluate the effectiveness of a SCALE-UP room on campus. After an extensive planning process, a SCALE-UP room was built at the UofL during the summer of 2014. Because this room has to be accommodated in an existing space, the capacity will be for 36 students. Do you want to try out a session, module, or component of your course in the SCALE-UP approach? We’re looking for volunteers to pilot this exciting project with us. If you have a single lesson or a few that you would like to teach the SCALE-UP way in a SCALE-UP classroom, let us know! If you want to take the leap of faith and convert your entire course into a SCALE-UP course, we’d be more than happy to support you all the way from course design to implementation.

Some ponderables for you

So you think this SCALE-UP idea is neat, but are not sure if it would work for your course? Here are some questions for you to consider in thinking about your specific class:

How do I foster student engagement?

How do I flip my course?

How do I teach without a front of room?

What kind of teaching support do I need?

How do I manage student teams?

Contact one of our teaching development facilitators for ideas on how to convert your course into a SCALE-UP course. Check out the LEE project website at http://uleth.ca/teachingcentre/lee/what-is-scale-up for more information and resources. The LEE project is an initiative of the Teaching Centre.

References

Beichner, R. J. (2008, September). The SCALE-UP project: A student-centered active learning environment for undergraduate programs. Invited white paper for the National Academy of Sciences.

Beichner, R. J., Saul, J. M., Abbott, D. S., Morse, J. J., Deardorff, D. L., Allain, R. J., Bonham, S. W., Dancy, M. H., & Risley, J. S. (2007). The student-centered activities for large enrollment undergraduate programs (SCALE-UP) project. In Redish & Cooney (Eds.), Research-Based Reform of University Physics, College Park, MD: American Association of Physics Teachers.

Beichner, R. J., Saul, J. M., Allain, R. J., Deardorff, D. L., & Abbott, D. S. (2000). Introduction to SCALE-UP: Student-centered activities for large enrollment university physics. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education, Seattle, WA, Session 2380.

Lasry, N., Charles, E., Whittaker, C., Dedic, H., & Rosenfield, S. (2013). Changing classroom designs: Easy; Changing instructors’ pedagogies: Not so easy…. AIPR Conference Proceedings, 1513, 238.

Miller Kregenow, J., Rogers, M., & Price, M. F. (2011). Is there a “back” of the room when the teacher is in the middle? Journal of College Science Teaching, 40(6), 45-51.