Notes that the manner in which the author was using the incorporation of electronic slides into his lectures allowed students to become disengaged from the learning process. Presents strategies to combat disengagement and strategies to supplement textbook slides. Concludes that student disengagement can be counteracted with limited expenditure of…

A student-centered learning model for a course on information systems project management consisted of individual study and group discussion with facilitator guidance. Data from session records, repertory grids, and a learning network diagram showed that interactive learning was more effective and students took responsibility, although some…

Suggests that using educational technology does not mean ignoring what is already known about education and learning, noting that: lessons today's digital children can learn from analog adults are commonsensical; children need real-world experiences; technology can promote style over substance; lecture can be an effective teaching method; linear…

This paper reports the introduction of electronic handsets, like those used on the television show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? into the teaching of philosophical logic. Logic lectures can provide quite a formidable challenge for many students, occasionally to the point of making them ill. Our rationale for introducing handsets was threefold:…

Interactive Web-based tutorials were developed as a supplement to lectures in an introductory statistics class. A quasi-experimental design compared learning outcomes of students who attended one of two classes that offered the tutorials to students as an extra-credit course option to those who attended a lecture-only class. Analysis of critical…

The present research examined relationships among medical school applicants' preferred approaches to learning, methods of instruction, and specialty areas (n=912). Based on confidential responses to a progressive series of paired comparisons, applicants' preferences for lecture (L), self-study (SS), group discussion (GD), and computers (C) were…

A graduate level research methods and statistics course offered on the World-Wide Web was evaluated relative to the traditional. With their consent, course members were randomly assigned to the two versions of the course for the first block of sessions. For the second block of sessions the groups crossed over to access the alternative version of…

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is a contemporary teaching approach that has become increasingly applied way of academic education since its beginnings in the 1960s. Its popularity has grown since it was introduced into medical education and spread to various fields in the last decades. This small group learning approach using major principles of…

Purpose: This paper aims to describe the process and the outcome of a situation in which a professor of anatomy and physiology made supplemental use of a course management system (CMS) to assist with the instruction of 242 students. The purpose of this instructor's use of WebCT was to: increase student autonomy and improve access to information;…

A new initiative to incorporate diversity issues into the common engineering curriculum at the University of Wollongong (UoW) in Australia is outlined and the effect on student awareness quantified. The diversity issues were illustrated in the example of women in engineering, seeing that the numbers of women in engineering have dropped drastically…

In this article, the authors present the results of a survey of students at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands concerning the students' opinions about how PowerPoint should be used in university lectures. The most important outcome of the survey is that a vast majority of the respondents prefer a modest layout. Most students dislike…

For the past eight years the University of Michigan has offered two different styles of biochemistry courses each semester, one a standard lecture-based and discussion-section (SLB) course and one a self-paced, non-lecture Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) course. We tracked student responses to selected exam questions that were used in…

Interteaching is a new method of classroom instruction that is based on behavioral principles but offers more flexibility than other behaviorally based methods. We examined the effectiveness of interteaching relative to a traditional form of classroom instruction--the lecture. In Study 1, participants in a graduate course in special education took…

A major problem for large-enrollment, introductory college courses in natural resources and life sciences is poor attendance. To ameliorate this problem, we designed a hybrid course (part online, part face-to-face) to incorporate the advantages of online learning while retaining benefits of face-to-face instruction. We taught a hybrid introductory…

Classical physics has a long history of using demonstrations and experiments to develop ideas in introductory courses. The purpose of this exploration is to examine the effectiveness of a desk-top activity for helping students develop abstract reasoning. In the pilot exploration, students in three laboratory sections of a single physics course…