As students are first learning to construct mathematical proofs, it is often helpful for them to have the opportunity to see and evaluate proofs that others have written. In fact, several textbooks designed for use in a transition or bridge course include a few exercises in which students are given a proposed proof and asked to determine if it…

For students, theory is often one of the most daunting aspects of sociology--it seems abstract, removed from the concrete events of their everyday lives, and therefore intimidating. In an attempt to break down student resistance to theory, instructors are increasingly turning to active learning approaches. Active learning exercises, then, appear…

A new field of children's learning is emerging. This new field differs from the old in recognizing that children's learning includes active as well as passive mechanisms and qualitative as well as quantitative changes. Children's learning involves substantial variability of representations and strategies within individual children as well as…

In 4 experiments, students received a lesson consisting of computer-based animation and narration or a lesson consisting of paper-based static diagrams and text. The lessons used the same words and graphics in the paper-based and computer-based versions to explain the process of lightning formation (Experiment 1), how a toilet tank works…

The author provides practical ways to engage students in active learning in the classroom.

Since MIT's bold announcement of the OpenCourseWare initiative in 2001, the content of over 700 of its courses have been published on the Web and made available for free to the world. Important infrastructure initiatives have also been launched recently with a view to enabling the sustainable implementation of these educational programmes, through…

The purpose of action learning is to learn through devising solutions and strategies in response to problems and implementing them through deliberative action. To understand the relation between action and learning, learners and facilitators need sufficient understanding of both concepts, but they are handicapped by lack of adequate theory and…

An inquiry-based experiment on Sherlock Holmes adventure stories used to actively involve students in a series of laboratory experiments to prove the guilt of the accused murderer is presented. The result from such experiments showed that students were able to distinguish between sugar and possible poison.

A two-year project researching reaction to a new approach to postgraduate, on-campus teaching and learning, the Integrated Learning System (ILS) is described. ILS was intended to partly replace traditional lectures with study guides and to make seminars and tutorials more interactive in order to promote different ways of learning and teaching.…

This article describes the "The Presidential Timeline of the 20th Century," a newly unveiled website jointly created by the Learning Technology Center of The University of Texas at Austin and The National Archives' 12 presidential libraries. This web-based resource provides access to the continually growing store of digitized assets from…

This article describes the design, implementation and evaluation of digital learning material on the social--psychological Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and its use in nutrition behavior research. The design is based on guidelines derived from theories on instructional design. The major component of the design challenge is to implement three…

Through a partnership between the University of North Florida (UNF) and the University of Belize (UB), faculty members from UNF taught a graduate course on Assessment and Measurement at UB to train in-service teachers and principals in the area of educational leadership. Two classes totalling 71 graduate students were taught during a three-week…

Business professors in the twenty-first century have been engaging in another form of problem-based pedagogy to unite business school and business practice. This teaching methodology, called "active learning," has become the new case method in college courses. Like the case-based approach, active learning bridges the gap between theory and…

In this study, the Felder learning styles inventory was administered to students who were non-English majors in a Chinese University. Descriptive statistics identified that participants do vary in their preference for particular learning styles with a great variety of learning style preferences distributed unevenly among the sample population. A…

Discussion is one form of active learning, which has been linked to better learner outcomes. Little is known about the relationship between active learning through discussion and learner outcome in the online environment. Here, we construct an index of active learning online that includes the number of postings a student has read, the number of…