The main objective of this article is to present and describe two multimedia experiences carried out during two practice groups in the Journalism and Audiovisual Communications program. Thirty students participated in Experience A during 14 teaching sessions, and the experience required each student to record a 3-minute interview of someone…

Background: This paper presents a case study from a physics course at a Norwegian university college, investigating key aspects of a group-work project, so-called learning labs, from the participating students' perspective. Purpose: In order to develop these learning labs further, the students' perspective is important. Which aspects are essential…

The author explores concrete ways to help students learn more and have fun doing it while they support each other's learning. The article specifically shows the relationships between cooperative learning and deep learning. Readers will become familiar with the tenets of cooperative learning and its power to enhance learning--even more so when…

This article reviews a classroom application titled "The Quest for Kudos Challenge," which is a long-term, multitask, large group competition to attain a reward that was designed to adhere to the recommendations for creating a cooperative learning experience while maintaining the elements of a constructive competition. The application…

Many instructors have fallen into the syllabus habit of the first day, and students have come to expect nothing more. While reviewing the syllabus is important, it is not all that engaging for either the instructor or the students. In this article, the author establishes the pedagogical importance of the first day of class experience through the…

Debates have been used to develop critical thinking within teaching environments. Many learning activities are configured as working groups, which use debates to make decisions. Nevertheless, in a classroom debate, only a few students can participate; large work groups are similarly limited. Whilst the use of web tools would appear to offer a…

The goal of this study was to explore how students debate with their peers within a designed context using a digital dialogue game, and whether their epistemic beliefs are significant to the outcomes. Epistemic beliefs are known to colour student interactions within argumentative discourse, leading some students to hold back from interactions. By…

The use of group work in classroom activities is a method used for motivating learning and increasing the idea of pleasure through learning. The current study investigates the advantages of group work in exams in the English department, in the College of Basic Education. 40 students in two classes of "The Introduction of Phonetics and…

Higher education institutions should not only aim to educate academic experts who master their own fields, but also give their students generic skills important in the current society. New teaching methods are required to support the development of such skills. The study examined how a group of voluntary university lecturers re-designed their…

Practicing medicine and creating art are both informed by observation and perception, yet how artists and doctors view the world and their place in it might be quite different. By bringing two populations together--RISD students and Warren Alpert Medical School students--into one experimental course, "No Innocent Eye: Knowledge and…

Although many college courses adopt online tools such as Q&A online discussion boards, there is no easy way to measure or evaluate their effect on learning. As a part of supporting instructional assessment of online discussions, we investigate a predictive relation between characteristics of discussion contributions and student performance.…

In entry-level university courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, students participating in associated laboratory sessions generally do better than those who have no related lab classes. This is a problem when, for various reasons, not enough lab sections can be offered for students and/or when students opt out of…

Self-assembly is the fundamental but counterintuitive principle that explains how ordered biomolecular complexes form spontaneously in the cell. This study investigated the impact of using two external representations of virus self-assembly, an interactive tangible three-dimensional model and a static two-dimensional image, on student learning…

In designing St. Olaf College's Regents Hall of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, we attempted to create learning spaces to accommodate classes of 50-100 students and a variety of teaching pedagogies. In this study, we compared three different 72-seat classrooms furnished with half-round tables for four, straight tables, or a serpentine shaped…

New technological developments have minimized training, hardware expense, and distribution problems for the production and use of instructional videos, and any science instructor can now make instructional videos for their classes. We created short "Khan style" videos for the topic of buffers in biochemistry and assigned them as…