Traditional academic lectures have long been criticized as providing a passive learning environment to students. Often, they do not capture the audience's attention, resulting in learners being distracted or bored and thereby reducing their learning efficacy. Consequently, they are being abandoned by many schools and universities as an educational…

Effective teaching requires the use of techniques and strategies to counter student passivity and enhance engagement. Research demonstrates that drawing improves memory retention, increases motivation to learn, provides an opportunity to learn what makes an image an effective communication tool, allows demonstration of conceptual understanding,…

The move away from transmission-based lecturing toward a more student-centred active learning approach is well evidenced in STEM higher education. However, the examination of active learning has generally remained confined to formal timetabled contexts, with assumptions made that students independently manage the transition between timetabled and…

A survey of 722 physics faculty conducted in 2008 found that many physics instructors had knowledge of research-based instructional strategies (RBISs), were interested in using more, but often discontinued use after trying. Considerable effort has been made during the decade following 2008 to develop and disseminate RBISs in physics as well as…

Biomedical engineering (BME) spans a wide range of research fields and professional activities. Most BME departments use a seminar series to introduce graduate students to exciting research conducted outside their own university, learn about professional opportunities, and enhance their understanding of related topics (e.g., ethics in BME,…

The goal of this research was to test the effectiveness of a new science curriculum focused on increasing awareness and knowledge of microplastic pollution in middle school students. The curriculum utilized three teaching methods including lectures, object-mediated learning, and peer collaboration to enhance student engagement and learning. The 84…

The use of full online learning is projected to continue indefinitely. An instructional design for online learning that incorporates didactic, active learning activities, and health welfare is proposed. A single-subject multiple baseline design with two controls and two experiments was implemented with a class of 30 nursing students. Four weeks of…

Recent years have witnessed the spread of purpose-built active learning classrooms throughout the higher education sector. While these innovative learning spaces are well-suited for a variety of active learning strategies, their lack of a single focal point means they are inconvenient spaces for lecturing. While educational developers often…

College calculus plays an important role in STEM students' degree and career aspirations. One of the key factors considered in assessing a student's ability to be successful in calculus is their proficiency in topics from prior mathematics courses such as algebra and precalculus. This study set out to examine the impact of students' precalculus…

Higher education is beginning to focus on how to effectively cultivate IoT engineers who possess both hard skills and soft skills. Therefore, from the perspective of activity theory and combining it with project-based learning, this study constructed a project-based learning framework based on activity theory and applied this framework to an IoT…

Interest in active learning continues to grow worldwide. Although the large volume of active learning research has provided a myriad of ways to implement active learning in the classroom, the construct remains underdeveloped and difficult to operationalize because of three main issues in the research literature: (a) the confusion surrounding what…

To evaluate the impact of active learning approaches in a basic molecular and cell biology course for undergraduate students, we assessed the effect of learning by teaching and peer review on the learning outcomes. A literature seminar activity with peer review and feedback was organized as a compulsory activity for all students, covering about…

Pedagogical training is considered an efficient tool to train university teachers to understand and foster active learning. In Finland, pedagogical training courses are organized periodically at universities, and university teachers participate voluntarily to improve pedagogical knowledge and skills for teaching in higher education settings. This…

Active learning has often been reported to improve student outcomes in STEM courses. However, there are barriers to its implementation, and it is challenging to include this approach in large classrooms with fixed seating. This investigation explores the development of a novel approach in which the class contact time was reallocated for a general…

Early 2021 was an opportunity to discover how lecturers were planning future in-person teaching following pandemic-induced online teaching and their reasons for doing so. In interviews, six experienced lecturers identified rationales and underpinning evidence for teaching decisions. The strongest reoccurring pedagogical rationales were enabling…