In a polarized society, it is a university's responsibility to offer courses that explore highly controversial issues. Traditional forms of debate may create barriers to knowledge and entrenchment of perspectives, with students self-limiting their ability to develop informed opinions. We describe an active learning, double-blinded approach to…

Women are underrepresented among American legislators and political science majors. One explanation is that gender imbalances propagate through space and time. In this paper, we introduce a paired experiment aimed to assess the downstream attitudinal effects of priming the issue of women's representation. At one predominantly male university and…

The authors' scholarly reflective narrative addresses the rewards and challenges of an immersive experiential active learning pedagogy. They ask, "was it worth it?" for students and for themselves. Although research evidence makes it clear that active learning benefits student learning and engagement, designing a course to incorporate…

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…

Peer learning is an active learning technique that has been used for students to internalize difficult concepts. We have developed a method of peer learning, a consensus-based education approach, which allows for discussion and class consensus in large lecture classes. We tracked student success on concepts that employed the consensus-based…

Commonly found in elementary schools, learning stations can also be a useful instructional approach for college classrooms. Learning stations prompt student groups to engage with relevant activities and have thoughtful discussions while at the same time allow instructors to monitor and interact with students.

Even though drawing, as a form of learning, has been confined to disciplines such as fine arts and graphics design, there is evidence that drawing can be an important heuristic device for teaching college students. However, the use of drawing as a pedagogy in teaching sociology is undeveloped. The article starts by discussing the theoretical…

College and university teaching involves almost universally and hegemonically the large group lecture format. This ubiquitous learning and teaching space has, however, long been criticized for the production of passive learning in which the "sage on the stage" transmits, and students receive passively. This article reports on and…

Quiet students are sometimes misunderstood in the college classroom. Students may be quiet for reasons related to personality traits, learned behaviors, or situational factors, but regardless, their silences may be misinterpreted by their instructors as a lack of engagement in their courses. In fact, quiet students are often very engaged in the…

Understanding fear, its causes, and its impact on students can be important for educators who seek ways to help students manage their fears. This paper explores common types of student fears such as performance-based anxiety, fear of failure, fear of being laughed at, and cultural components of fear that impact learning. The cognitive, emotional,…

As institutions of higher learning are increasingly held accountable for student outcomes, faculty are faced with the challenge to clearly articulate and assess what students should learn in their courses. We report on the assessment of a liberal studies learning outcome related to the nature of science, which involved 178 students from 41…

Presented here is a practical tool called the Active Reading Document (ARD) that can give students the necessary incentive to engage with the text/readings. By designing the tool to incrementally develop student understanding of the material through reading using Marzano's Taxonomy as a framework, the ARD offers support through scaffolding as they…

Online videos are used increasingly in higher education teaching as part of the explosion of Web 2.0 tools that are now available. YouTube is one popular example of a video-sharing resource that both faculty and students can use effectively, both inside and outside of the classroom, to engage students in their learning, energize classroom…

To assess the effect of debate format on learning, four formats were separately employed in an environmental issues course. Learning was greatest when students wrote about a debate they witnessed, the teacher provided debate questions, and students received a reward for winning. Students valued debates for developing their arguing skills, used the…

The research methods unit of survey psychology classes introduces important concepts of scientific reasoning and fluency, making it an ideal course in which to deliver enhanced curricula. To increase interest and engagement, the author developed an expanded research methods and statistics module to give students the opportunity to explore…