Abstract: Students learn in diverse ways; therefore, instructors must utilize a wide variety of instructional strategies. Students benefit when instructors use instructional strategies that promote active engagement. In-class debates cultivate the active engagement of students, yet participation in debates is often limited to students involved in debate teams. The benefits of using in-class debates as an instructional strategy also include mastery of the content and the development of critical thinking skills, empathy, and oral communication skills. Debate as an instructional strategy, however, has its opponents. Some believe debates reinforce a bias toward dualism, foster a confrontational environment that does not suit certain students, or merely reinforce a student?s existing beliefs. A variety of debate formats are described which address these criticisms including meeting-house, four-corner, fishbowl, think-pair-share, and role-play debates. Finally, issues related to the assessment of in-class debates are addressed such as whether the students are assessed individually or as a team, what aspects of the debate are assessed, and whether the instructor and/or students will do the assessment.

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Abstract: Educators in professional degree programs are charged with multiple responsibilities in the classroom and in practice settings. We apply our professional knowledge in a variety of settings to serve our communities; we reflect on how to improve practice from our experiences in these settings; we observe our students engaging in learning experiences in the classroom; and we share with our students the knowledge we’ve gained from our experiences and our scholarship within our profession. To accomplish these actions we must serve as both teacher and learner in both classroom and field. Moreover, we want our students to also benefit from the active learning processes of applying, reflecting, sharing, and observing both in and out of the classroom while also functioning as both learners and teachers. Although we can accomplish all these goals over an entire curriculum, this article seeks to provide an example of one teacher’s attempt to achieve these goals within a single Social Work course in Death and Grief. A model is provided that demonstrates how the interactive process works for both the teacher and students in this course and could be adapted for use in other courses incorporating practice settings as part of the curricula.

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Abstract: Interactive technologies make classroom experience more engaging and enjoyable. Students get much more involved in class discussions in the presence of such technologies and tend to learn more through student-student and student-instructor interactions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether student response systems (i.e., clickers) influence student learning and performance. Overall, our findings show that students were satisfied with the use of clickers especially in increasing their participation and engagement in class. A regression analysis is employed to estimate the magnitude of clickers’ impact in two different disciplines. The regression results show that the use of clickers had positive and significant impact on student final course grades. In particular, students who used clickers as part of their course instruction received 4.7% higher course grades on average compared to the students in the non-clicker class when controlling for student abilities and characteristics. The outcome of this study suggests that clickers are useful tools in enhancing student learning and performance.

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Abstract: This instructional article is about an innovative teaching approach for enhancing student engagement and active learning in higher education through a combination of just-in-time teaching and the use of PowerPoint technology. The central component of this approach was students’ pre-lecture preparation of a short PowerPoint presentation in which they answered a few general conceptual questions about the coming lecture topic. The power of PowerPoint, it is argued, is about structuring student thought and student engagement before and during lectures, as well as giving students more power to be involved to shape content and interactivity of university lectures. The article concludes with some valuable lessons and pointers for course instructors across disciplines about the pedagogy and use of PowerPoint as an instructional method for enhancing student engagement and active learning.

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Abstract: This paper examined professors’ conceptions of effective teaching in the context of a course they were teaching in active learning classrooms and how the conceptions related to the perceived role and use of computers in their teaching. We interviewed 13 professors who were teaching in active learning classrooms in winter 2011 in a large research university in Canada. The interviews captured what professors consider effective teaching, expected learning outcomes for students, instructional strategies and the role participants saw for computers in their teaching. Analysis of interview transcripts using a holistic inductive and constant comparison approach resulted in three conceptions of effective teaching: transmitting knowledge, engaging students, and developing learning independence. Professors’ perception about the role and use of computers was found to be in line with their conceptions of effective teaching. Professors whose conception of effective teaching focused on developing learning independence used computers as tools for students’ learning; those with a transmitting knowledge conception considered computers as a means of accessing or presenting information. Data collected from students about their use and their professors’ use of computers in the course supports this conclusion. Results have implications for design of active learning environments and faculty development initiatives.

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Abstract: This study examined test performance as a function of test format (proctored versus unproctored) and course type (traditional versus distance). The participants were 246 undergraduate students who completed introductory sociology courses during four semesters at a southeastern university. During each semester, the same instructor taught a traditional lecture section and a distance section of the course. Students in both course types took unproctored online tests in two semesters while students in both course types took proctored classroom paper-and-pencil tests in the other two semesters. Students scored significantly higher on the unproctored online tests than on the proctored classroom tests. There was no significant difference in test performance between students enrolled in distance courses and those enrolled in lecture courses. Additionally, no significant interaction was found between test format and course type. Implications of these results for the design and structure of online and hybrid courses are discussed.

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Abstract: We evaluated students’ perceptions and reactions to an active learning Karaoke Video project in both a large (104 student) undergraduate class in Natural History of Georgia and a small graduate seminar in Fish Ecology. Undergraduate responses were evaluated with both questionnaires and triangulation interviews and graduate student responses evaluated with interviews alone. There was a slight majority of first and second year students (64%) in the undergraduate class. Students’ majors/proposed majors were dominated by non-science categories, with 76% reporting non-science and 11% reporting science (13% no response). The overwhelming response of students to the 10 question Karaoke Video project questionnaire was positive (p << 0.0001), and 83% responded that the project aided in learning class material. Triangulation interview responses from undergraduate students supported questionnaire results, and graduate students also generally perceived the exercise as positive. Our results indicate that both undergraduate and graduate students responded positively to the Karaoke Video project and that these responses did not vary over several potential inter-student biases. This project was completed with the approval of the Institutional Review Board of the University of Georgia.

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Abstract: Studies have shown Active Learning Classrooms [ALCs] help increase student engagement and improve student performance. However, remodeling all traditional classrooms to ALCs entails substantial financial burdens. Thus, an imperative question for institutions of higher education is whether active learning pedagogies can improve learning outcomes when classroom resources are limited. In this study, we examined the effect of active learning pedagogies on students’ satisfaction of learning processes in ALC and Traditional Classrooms [TCs]. The results show that active learning pedagogy activities are significant factors that increase students’ satisfaction with their individual and group learning processes. In addition, active learning pedagogical activities in both TCs and ALCs influence students’ satisfaction with their learning processes positively.

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Abstract: This paper illustrates a radical course design structured to create active and situated learning in which students participate in communities of practice within the classroom, replicating real-life work situations. This paper illustrates the approach through a People Management module, but the approach is also used across a range of disciplines such as History and Psychology. The Matrix Classroom is a two-stage format which organizes students, firstly into specialism groups developing expertise in a specific aspect of knowledge, and secondly into applied task groups in which they apply their knowledge to a particular case, industry, time-period, or event. The design creates two temporary communities of practice which allow students to participate by both taking leadership roles and acting from the periphery, thereby gradually increasing their exposure and confidence in authentic work situations. This structure creates a peer support network of elected student leaders from whom they can gain “specialist” support. The active nature of the student-led activities are designed to re-contextualize abstract concepts into specific problem situations, thus preparing students for graduate life.

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Abstract: Colleges and universities are beginning to invest in active learning (AL) classrooms in an effort to replace the traditional lecture style pedagogy that is frequently used by many professors in higher education (Eagan et al., 2014). This is a quantitative research study conducted at a medium-sized Midwestern university. Students were given the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Survey in three different classes. The research study compared students’ perceptions of Teaching Presence (TP), Social Presence (SP), and Cognitive Presence (CP) differences from classes first taught in a traditional auditorium lecture-style format, then taught in an AL classroom. This study shows that it is not the physical structure of AL classrooms that had an impact on students’ levels of TP, SP, and CP, but the instructional design of these classes that had an impact in these areas. The study also shows that when implementing AL classrooms, instructors need to make intentional design decisions to keep the levels of TP at high levels.

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