Posts Tagged ‘encouraging student participation’
April 17 - Helping Students Discuss Technical Content
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
“What did you think about the reading?” can serve as an acceptable discussion prompt if your class is reading a novel, but a question like that doesn’t generate much response when the assigned chapter is in an engineering mechanics book or a principles of accounting text. For those who teach “technical content” — and by that I mean material with “right” answers and preferred ways of doing things, like problems with specific solutions or checklists of procedures — it can be doubly difficult to get students talking.
April 5 - What Group Dynamics Can Teach Us about Classroom Learning
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning
I am unabashedly proud of my pedagogical article resource file. I’ve been collecting good articles on teaching and learning since the early ’80s. I use the file almost every day, and in the process of looking for a particular article, I regularly stumble onto others whose contents I remember when I see them but have otherwise forgotten.
February 13 - Student Comments: Moving from Participation to Contribution
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
A colleague and I have been revisiting a wide range of issues associated with classroom interaction. I am finding new articles, confronting aspects of interaction that I still don’t understand very well, having my thinking on other topics challenged, and learning once more how invaluable and personally satisfying a pedagogical exchange with a colleague can be. My colleague recommended an article I had forgotten. The article is old but the point it makes is just as relevant today, if not more, than when it was made in 1987.
December 19 - What Is the Best Way to Grade Participation?
By: Mary Bart in 20 Minute Mentor, Assessment & Learning Goals
Class participation benefits learners and instructors alike; offering students a real-time opportunity to interact with course content and letting professors know whether their points are getting across. Yet it’s not a simple process to assess. If grading participation is a gray area in your curriculum, you’re not alone. This program will help you develop an effective way to evaluate participation.
November 15 - Six Ways to Get Your Online Students Participating in the Course
By: Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti in Online Education
Have you ever worried about the level of participation in your online courses? Perhaps you have difficulty encouraging students to interact with one another, or maybe you find student responses to be perfunctory. Surely there must be a way to encourage the kinds of participation that really supports learning.
November 5 - Using Student Clickers to Foster In-Class Debate
By: Leslee Shepard, EdD in Effective Teaching Strategies
Integrating technology with appropriate teaching strategies can help stimulate participation and create a student-centered atmosphere conducive to learning. One technology shown particularly successful in boosting student engagement is clickers (Martyn, 2007). In fact, a research study found that student test scores were significantly higher when clickers were used as part of an in-class lecture as compared to a different section of the same class that didn’t use clickers (Mayer, Stull, DeLeeuw, Ameroth, Bimber, Chun, et al. 2009).
September 6 - Tips for Overcoming Online Discussion Board Challenges
By: Errol Craig Sull in Online Education
Discussion boards are often viewed as the heart of online courses, and for good reason: the students can interact with one another 24/7, sharing, debating, and offering ideas, insights, suggestions, and information that stimulate the learning process. Yet challenges do happen in discussion, and these can be formidable. Left alone, they can quickly limit the effectiveness of any discussion and create problems throughout the online course.
September 4 - How Accurately Do Students Track Their Participation?
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning
Grading participation presents a number of challenges. If instructors rely on their sense of who participated, how often, and in what ways, that can be a pretty subjective measure. After all, besides noting who’s contributing, the instructor needs to listen to what the student is saying, and frame a response while keeping the larger discussion context in mind. Is the discussion staying on track? Are there points that have yet to be made? If instructors opt for a more objective system, they face the cumbersome task of comment counting during the actual discussion. While listening to the student, the instructor must find the student’s name and record the comment. It requires a challenging set of multitasking skills.
August 13 - Improve Participation to Enhance Learning in Online Courses
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
Online courses have their benefits, but increased student participation usually isn’t often one of them. Without the physical space of a classroom, how do you create an environment for meaningful discussion? Learn how to enhance the student experience by using six concrete strategies to boost participation, deepen learning, and increase student satisfaction with online courses.
July 9 - Classroom Discussion: Professors Share Favorite Strategies for Engaging Students
By: Mary Bart in Effective Teaching Strategies
In the typical college classroom a small handful of students make the vast majority of comments. As a teacher you want to create a classroom environment that helps students of various learning styles and personalities to feel comfortable enough to contribute as well as understand the importance of class preparation and active participation. To reach this goal requires a constant balancing act of encouraging quiet, reflective students to speak up and, occasionally, asking the most active contributors to hold back from commenting in order to give others a chance.
