The academic success of first-year students' learning in science faculties is by no means assured, especially in an Open Distance Learning setting with its limited number of face-to-face encounters between students and lecturers or tutors. Therefore, such encounters should be highly efficient in view of the considerable amount of knowledge…

Identifying effective and time-efficient approaches to teaching students how to write from scholarly sources benefits students and instructors. Students in a general psychology course learned a concrete method to improve this type of synthesis writing. The intervention was brief, consisting of viewing an online tutorial outside of class and…

Engineering tertiary courses that reflect professional activity mandate the successful application of theorems and concepts in order to solve technical problems. This graduate skill is typically assessed during student problem-solving activities. Furthermore, both collaborative learning and the interactive study method known as self-explanation…

Equivalence-based instruction (EBI) has been used to successfully teach college-level concepts in research laboratories, but few studies have examined the results of such instruction on classroom performance. The current study answered a basic question about the ordering of training stimuli as well as an applied question regarding the effects of…

A multimedia-based learning system to teach children with intellectual disabilities (ID) the basic living and science concepts is proposed. The tutorials' development is pedagogically based on Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning combined with Skinner's Operant Conditioning Model. Two types of tutorials are proposed. In the first type;…

As workloads of faculty and staff increase in higher education, it seems important for new learning opportunities to be devised to improve individual progress through basic musicianship courses. Many university music departments rely on in-class instruction and individual work sessions with the instructors of these courses to enhance student…

We report on a project to introduce interactive learning strategies (ILS) to physics classes at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, one of the leading science universities in France. In Spring 2012, instructors in two large introductory classes, first-year, second-semester mechanics, and second-year introductory electricity and magnetism,…

The authors investigated the effects of student spatial ability, as measured by Raven's Progressive Colored Matrices (J. C. Raven, 1938) and type of instructional program on geometry achievement. Sixth-grade students worked through either 6 instructional activities in Geometer's Sketchpad (Key Curriculum Press, 1993), a dynamic geometry program,…

Introduction: In group learning settings like problem-based learning (PBL), the quality of interaction is closely related to group success. However, research and practice have shown that the interaction in tutorial groups is not optimal. In the present study, a questionnaire was used to measure students' perceptions of occurrence and desirability…