Nancy Siraisi has been a prolific and leading scholar in the history of medicine and science of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This lecture of hers is the twenty-eighth of series of lectures named for Charles Homer Haskins, first chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and himself a famed medievalist who brought…

Interactive lecture demonstrations (ILDs) are a powerful tool designed to help instructors bring state-of-the-art teaching pedagogies into the college-level introductory physics classroom. ILDs have been shown to improve students' conceptual understanding, and many examples have been created and published by Sokoloff and Thornton. We have used the…

Podcasting in higher education is the presentation of study material in digital format that can be downloaded as audio or video files onto a MP3 player or computer. These files can then be accessed anywhere and at any time students choose. The use of podcasting is now widespread amongst undergraduate students, yet their application to the specific…

The aim of the study was to assess the medical teachers' preference for various lecture delivery methods like the lectures using chalkboard, utilizing transparencies with an overhead projector (OHP) or lectures using a PowerPoint presentation and their frequency of use of teaching aids. The faculty of the medical college was asked to fill in the…

An innovative strategy called "progressive drawing" was used at the beginning (lid-opener) and later (monotony-breaker) during gross anatomy lectures. Diagrams were drawn on the classroom blackboard with anatomic structures added one by one. Students identified and labeled the diagrams and predicted the next structures to be drawn.…

The present study investigated the impact of class lecture webcasts on students' attendance and learning. The research design employed four data collection methods in two class sections--one with webcast access and another without--of the same course taught by the same instructors. Results indicated the following four major findings. (1) The…

Objective: The authors seek to promote sexuality curriculum development in departments of psychiatry. Methods: The authors first focus on educational philosophy about what residents can be taught about sexual topics and then provide numerical and narrative resident evaluation data following a 6-month, half day per week rotation in a sexuality…

Many lecture halls today have two or more screens to be used by instructors for lectures with computer-supported visual aids. Typically, this additional screen real estate is not used to display additional information; rather a single stream of information is projected on all screens. We describe a controlled laboratory study that empirically…

In this study, we examined 96 undergraduate non-science majors' conceptions of stem cells, stem cell research, and cloning. This study was performed at a large, Midwest, research extensive university. Participants in the study were asked to answer 23 questions relating to stem cells, stem cell research, and cloning in an on-line assessment before…

This study reports the results of the first systematic investigation into Astro 101 students' conceptual and reasoning difficulties with cosmology. We developed four surveys with which we measured students' conceptual knowledge of the Big Bang, the expansion and evolution of the universe, and the evidence for dark matter. Our classical test theory…

There appears to be a direct as well as an indirect link between the scholastic presence of the English language at any particular university and its respective Times Higher Education-Thomson Reuters 2010 World University Ranking, one of numerous world university rankings. Due to the author's familiarity and to some extent intimate relationship…

This study compared the effects of a computer-based stimulus equivalence protocol to a traditional lecture format in teaching single-subject experimental design concepts to undergraduate students. Participants were assigned to either an equivalence or a lecture group, and performance on a paper-and-pencil test that targeted relations among the…

One critical element of increasing science literacy is student engagement. In this article, I report on the impacts of changing an introductory environmental science class to move away from standard lecture delivery and increase student engagement in science. The class was designed around small-group activities, inquiry labs, and substantial use…

This paper investigates the consequences of L2 use in university lectures. Data in the study stem from parallel lectures held by the same experienced lecturer in Danish (L1) and English (L2). It is found that the lecturer takes 22% longer to present the same content in L2 compared to L1, and that the lecturer speaks 23% more slowly in L2 than in…

A strategy of continuous team assessment over three years, comprising of a series of tests and a major project, was introduced into scheduled tutorial classes in an attempt to improve flagging attendance and low student motivation. The assessment tasks were designed to be undertaken in teams of two students, with ongoing feedback as an integral…