Students enrolled in three levels of general chemistry self-reported their attention decline during both lecture and other teaching approaches via personal response devices (clickers). Students report attention declines of 1 min or less more often than longer attention lapses. The data suggest that student engagement alternates between attention…

Recently, the Medical University of South Carolina adopted a lecture recording system (LRS). A retrospective study of LRS was implemented to document the students' perceptions, pattern of usage, and impact on the students' grades in three basic sciences courses (Cell Biology/Histology, Physiology, and Neurosciences). The number of accesses and…

Humor has not always been looked on with favor in academia. For centuries, the "ideal" professor was a paragon of serious academic pursuit with no time for frivolous commentary. There was nothing funny about the rigors of learning. However, a growing body of literature is emerging that documents the potential positive effects of the systematic and…

Problem-based learning (PBL) has been introduced to medical schools around the world and has increasingly become a popular pedagogical technique in Asian countries since 1990. Gross anatomy is a fundamental basic science course in virtually all medical training programs, and the methods used to teach it are under frequent scrutiny and revision.…

The preponderance of the evidence from the engineering education literature demonstrates that inductive teaching methods are more effective than deductive approaches. When students are already familiar with the fundamentals of a topic, however, deductive approaches may make more sense. This paper discusses the implementation of a combination of…

A challenge for undergraduate learning in strategy is that the students lack professional work experiences. Without a rich background of experience, many strategic management topics are difficult to grasp. Our solution has been to develop a strategic management capstone course that combines service-learning and problem-based learning. The…

The present article examines the effectiveness, teaching, assessment methods, and the importance of finance concepts in three undergraduate finance courses in a private university in Malaysia. Approximately 224 undergraduates (finance majors) were surveyed and demonstrated positive attitudes toward the effectiveness of the finance subjects. The…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between personality type and preference for instructional methodologies (lecture, online and simulation). The sample consisted of 94 practicing gerontology nurses (RNs and LPNs) who attended a continuing education workshop on the care of the acutely ill elder at a public university in the…

Lectures are a central element of traditional university learning, but Australian lecturers increasingly face very low levels of lecture attendance. A significant amount of research exists that investigates the drivers of lecture attendance. However, those studies typically study single factors in an isolated manner, thus overestimating the…

Oregon State Univ. has offered FST 102 "Maraschino Cherry" as a 1-credit orientation course since 1994. The maraschino cherry serves as a vehicle from which faculty give their disciplinary perspective, for example, the chemistry of the maraschino cherry, processing unit operations, microbiology and food safety, food law, sensory…

This paper examines the role of ideology in academics' conceptions of their discipline. The focus is on how individual ideologies affect the way academics conceptualise and enact the discipline in practice. It uses data collected for a study involving 18 academics in 15 disciplines working at seven different institutions which had the broader…

This paper describes a teaching experiment involving the use of a combination of traditional chalkboard and digital photography in order to produce lecture notes from the blackboard. During lecturing the blackboard is used instead of transparencies or PowerPoint presentations. This reduces the speed of presentation and leaves room for…

Little empirical investigation has been conducted on high school students and teachers using online instructional multimedia developed entirely from the classroom teacher's traditional live-lecture format. This study investigated academic achievement, engagement, preference, and curriculum development using screen-capture instructional…

This study investigated the effect that varying degrees of faculty self-promotion had on 322 student evaluations. As high student evaluations are correlated with greater student learning, it is imperative that we assess how faculty's presentation style is perceived by students so as to enhance instruction and therefore student learning. Students…

High-stakes tests take time away from valuable learning activities, narrow the focus of instruction, and imply that science involves memorizing details rather than understanding the natural world. Current tests lead precollege instructors to postpone science inquiry activities until after the last standardized test is completed--often during the…