Active participation of learners has been viewed as the key to the learning process. To constructivists, challenging materials and cooperative activities where students participate and become engaged are essential in classroom instruction. In comparison, classrooms in Chinese heritage culture classrooms, where lectures are the main form of…

Does attending lectures improve student performance? Using novel attendance data, we examine statistically the relationships between attendance and performance for first-year and third-year students. The relationship is moderately positive: very high attendance is significantly associated with an improvement in performance over very low attenders…

Lectures have been widely criticized as a method of teaching, but remain a standard component of most university mathematics courses. Does this necessarily harm students' education? This critical review contends that many arguments against lecturing are misconceived, at least when applied to mathematics. The effectiveness of lectures in carrying…

Computer games are fun, exciting and motivational when used as leisure pursuits. But do they have similar attributes when utilized for educational purposes? This article investigates whether learning by computer game can improve student experiences compared with a more formal lecture approach and whether computer games have potential for improving…

This article examines the language-related challenges that first-year students face when adjusting to the demands of English-medium higher education in Hong Kong. The article is based on the findings of a longitudinal study which tracked the university careers of 28 students from a range of backgrounds via in-depth, semi-structured interviews…

The use of toys in physics teaching is common. This brief review of the physics of toys intends to show that they are not only very useful in lectures and demonstrations in order to motivate students but also very interesting from a scientific point of view. However, since their physics is sometimes too cumbersome, the effect can be the opposite.…

In this study, the author examined how attendance in the lab is associated with students' lab grades and overall course grades in an introductory biology course. Results from this study indicate that academic motivation, as expressed by high rates of class attendance, is critical to students' success in introductory science courses. The highest…

This paper examines the complex relation between interest and comprehension recorded by postgraduate students in a language teacher education programme at various stages of two-hour lectures. The quantitative analysis suggests that its relationship with comprehension changes as the lecture continues. The analysis is also triangulated with the…

In this article we describe a case study of interactive lecture experiments in a large introductory physics course. The impact of this pedagogy on student learning and motivation is also discussed. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)

The authors engaged in an education experiment to determine if the integration of lab and lecture activities in zoology and botany proved beneficial to student learning and motivation toward biology. Their results revealed that this strategy positively influenced students' academic achievement, conceptual understanding, and ability to apply…

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…

Although engagement and learning appear linked, quantitatively measuring this relationship is challenging. New technologies offer a window into studying the interactions among classroom activity, student engagement, and positive learning outcomes in computer-equipped classrooms. A Classroom Behavioral Analysis System (CBAS) was developed to…

Growing science apathy at the K-12 education level represents an alarming development with potentially devastating consequences at individual, societal and economic levels. Technology has been incorporated in science education without fundamentally improving test scores or student attitudes. We claim the core of the problem is how technology is…

This study explored relations between students' motivational and cognitive orientations as assessed by the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ), and their attitudes and choices relating to online lecture viewing. Examination performance was also assessed to determine if there were particular affinities between certain…

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is a contemporary teaching approach that has become increasingly applied way of academic education since its beginnings in the 1960s. Its popularity has grown since it was introduced into medical education and spread to various fields in the last decades. This small group learning approach using major principles of…