In a higher education system driven by student satisfaction, there has been a recent push towards more student-centred methods of teaching such as collaborative learning and seminar discussions despite an increase in student numbers. In contrast, some academics defend the transformative and educative possibilities of the lecture by challenging its…

In 1970, education theorist Paulo Freire (1970) sharply critiqued dominant pedagogy--or what he called the banking model of education--for stripping students of their agency. In the banking model, he wrote, instructors are empowered as narrating subjects as students who become alienated as passive listening objects. In the decades since, research…

In this article I examine the role of the contemporary university in light of the mass increase in class sizes that has occurred on an international scale. While we may look nostalgically back to a time when lectures numbered a few hundred students and tutorials had as few as ten, massification at undergraduate level is an inescapable fact of…

Different Learning Paradigms can be presented by different educators as a result of utilizing several types of Information and Communication Technologies in the Learning Process. The three abstract Learning Delivery Models are: "Traditional", "Distance", and "Hybrid Learning". Hybrid Learning attempts to maintain the…

Research into the effects of large classes demonstrates that students are disadvantaged in terms of higher order learning because interactions between teachers and students occur at lower cognitive levels. This has significance for social work education, with its emphasis on the development of critical thinking and problem solving, both higher…

We measured student knowledge and motivation at the beginning and end of a three-week general psychology course. Two large lecture sections (N = 215 and N = 154) were compared; one used a cooperative learning process, and one did not. Student knowledge significantly improved in both sections, but there was no additional benefit derived from using…

The teaching faculty for this course sought to address their own concerns about the quality of student learning in an impersonal large lecture biology class for majors, the difficulties in getting to know each student by name, and difficulties in soliciting answers and reactions from the students during the lecture. Questions addressed by this…

Many recent authors have examined the new role that Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) programs are playing in the rethinking of academic culture and discourse at contemporary universities. In this essay, the author argues that the WAC movement is centered on an understanding of knowledge as being intertextual, interdisciplinary, dialogical,…

Although research has confirmed block scheduling's nonacademic benefits, effects on academic achievement are mixed. Teachers do not always replace lecturing with more effective participatory teaching methods. To work best under an intensive or alternating block schedule, schools should adapt the math curriculum to reduce course redundancy and…

The results of a three-year project introducing small-group experiential learning techniques into a traditionally structured first-year lecture course are presented. Ways to introduce the techniques into large classes with no increase in resources are discussed. (MSE)