Many educational development resources recommend making conventional lectures more interactive. However, there is little firm evidence supporting either the acceptability (to students) or efficacy of doing so. This research examined the use of short 'interactive windows' (discussions and problem-solving exercises) in first year evolution lectures…

We tested the hypothesis that students in psychology of women classes would perform better on materials covered by multiple-choice exams when the first author presented these materials with active learning versus lecture, autonomous readings, and video presentations alone. Across 3 classes, we coded exam items according to how the instructor…

This study identified teaching styles of university interactive television instructors. The instructors (N = 203), representing nine Land Grant universities, completed a demographic survey and the Principles of Adult Learning Scale, a forty-four item teaching-style assessment instrument. Descriptive statistics revealed that interactive television…

This article describes an experiment that compared different methods of teaching undergraduates the fundamentals of negotiation analysis. Using student subjects, we compared three conditions: reading, lecture-only, and lecture accompanied by student use of a computerized negotiation support system (NSS). The authors examined two facets of…

This study explored the effects of a reciprocal teaching intervention designed to enhance the lecture comprehension skills of college students. Forty low-verbal ability students and 40 high-verbal ability students (as measured by SAT scores) were chosen for the study and randomly assigned to experimental or control groups. The experimental groups…

This paper explores the possibilities of teaching Genesis and the Popol Vuh, the Mayan creation account, in an interdisciplinary course at a church-related institution. The course is part of an alternative, interdisciplinary core curriculum typically taken by two hundred students a year at the university. A comparison of the Popol Vuh with Genesis…

In this study, modeling advantage that depicts the likelihood of a teacher model being imitated by students over other competing models in a particular class was developed to differentiate the rival modeling of two kinds of teachers (the technical teachers vs. the lecturing teachers) between college students' learning styles and occupational…

A laboratory experiment was carried out with 120 undergraduate students to examine a possible aptitude-treatment interaction between teacher clarity and student test anxiety in relation to two outcome measures, namely student achievement and student motivation, with student intelligence statistically controlled. Students completed measures of…

This study examined the knowledge, beliefs and efforts of five prospective teachers to enact teaching science as inquiry, over the course of a one-year high school fieldwork experience. Data sources included interviews, field notes, and artifacts, as these prospective teachers engaged in learning how to teach science. Research questions included…

This research concerns the development and assessment of a program of introductory astronomy conceptual exercises called ranking tasks. These exercises were designed based on results from science education research, learning theory, and classroom pilot studies. The investigation involved a single-group repeated measures experiment across eight key…

Whereas often emphasized in teaching children, the role of caring has been largely ignored in postsecondary education. This study shares college students' perspectives of instructor caring within a large biology lecture course. Within this context caring was perceived as both learning centered, which emphasizes content mastery and higher-order…

This article explores how Hong Kong Chinese engineering students with low English language proficiency manage to cope with their lectures given in English. An ethnographic case study approach was used with multiple sources of data triangulated to provide a picture of the lecture event from both the students' and the lecturer's perspectives. One of…

Teaching GIS is relatively simple, a matter of helping students develop familiarity with the software. Mapping as an aid to thinking is harder to instruct. This article presents a laboratory and lecture package developed to teach the utility of mapping in a course on spatial data analysis. Following a historical review of the use of surface…

This study investigates the level of students' learning when using e-lectures to increase the flexibility of the learning experience. Two cohorts of students were presented with the same material in lecture format. The control group attended a traditional live lecture, while the treatment group was offered an e-lecture with the same content. Both…

In 2003, the School of Human Sciences, Waseda University, Japan, established the e-School, Japan's first complete undergraduate correspondence courses enabling students to acquire their bachelor degrees solely through e-learning. Supported by the widespread availability of high-speed Internet connections, it has become possible to transmit…