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,…

Maintaining student engagement in online and recorded lectures is a challenging aspect of higher education. In light of this, active learning through in-lecture question activities was investigated using a pre-teaching focus group (n = 12) and student evaluations (n = 43) after an in-class trial. Data analysis was underpinned by flow theory, which…

Active learning exercises engage students during lectures, but often fail to take account of the individual learning position of each student. The 'quecture' is a partially flipped lecture that incorporates students posing their own questions (quecture questions), discussing them during lectures and revisiting them later. These interactive…

Active-learning approaches have recently been broadly promoted on many campuses, but research is limited on how varying levels of interaction impact student success. The aim of this study was to compare student success between two sections of an introductory biology course that used classroom response systems (i.e., clickers), but were taught with…

This paper describes the application of formative assessment methods in a flipped freshman engineering circuits course. This student-centered approach provided value for the instructor seeking to improve the learning environment and content in real-time, and for the students who actively participated in the process of course improvement. Three…

The present study aims to explore an embodied approach to students' deep learning; specifically, how deep learning is interactively achieved through teachers' languaging dynamics and multimodal representations in interactive lecturing in L2 higher education (HE) contexts. The purpose is to understand how an instructor's embodied and multimodal…

Background: With the increased attention on the need to retain students within STEM majors, it is important for STEM instructors to adopt evidence-based instructional practices that are student-centric and employ active learning techniques. However, traditional approaches for increasing student-centric, active learning practices such as workshops,…

Despite the perceived advantages of student centred learning (SCL) in higher education, novice teaching academics' attempts to implement such approaches may be thwarted by a lack of experience with teaching in general and with SCL in particular, difficulties locating suitable practical advice on SCL, and the demands of early career academic…

Massification in higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa is an ongoing reality that poses particular challenges and opportunities for these nations (Mohamedbhai, 2008). Like Scott (1995), we use the term massification to refer to the rapid increase of students attending higher education institutions in the latter part of the 20th century and into…

A significant issue mathematics instructors face is how to cover all the material. Mathematics teachers of all levels have some external and internal pressures to "get through" all the required material. The authors define "the coverage issue" to be the set of difficulties that arise in attempting to cover a lengthy list of topics. Principal among…

In this study, we used targeted active-learning activities to help students improve their ways of reasoning about carbon flow in ecosystems. The results of a validated ecology conceptual inventory (diagnostic question clusters [DQCs]) provided us with information about students' understanding of and reasoning about transformation of inorganic and…

We investigated some of the key features of effective active learning by comparing the outcomes of three different methods of implementing active-learning exercises in a majors introductory biology course. Students completed activities in one of three treatments: discussion, writing, and discussion + writing. Treatments were rotated weekly between…

Instructors often use Microsoft PowerPoint lectures and handouts as support tools to provide students with the main concepts of the lectures. Some instructors and researchers believe that PowerPoint encourages student passivity. We conducted 2 studies to determine whether the use of content-based questions (CBQs) would enhance learning when…

Describes a teaching method that provides instant assessment of student learning and allows instructors to take corrective measures in the same class period. The method is based on asking a multiple-choice question after every 10-20 minutes of lecture and getting responses from students. This methods allows all students to actively participate and…

Ways in which violating traditional expectations about teaching helps change, shape, and focus student ability to extract meaning from works of art are discussed. Alternative teaching modes include use of inquiry methods rather than lectures, in-class reading of the artwork as text instead of assigned readings about the artwork, and group…