The present study investigated the interaction between college student entry characteristics and effective instruction. The experimental design involved 380 introductory psychology students and consisted of a Lecture Organization (low, high) by Test Anxiety (low, moderate, high) 2 x 3 design. The dependent variables included student attention,…

The Napier University Business School, Edinburgh, Scotland and the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium embarked on a 3-year collaborative research project to evaluate lecturing techniques at Napier and to compare the results of the evaluation at Napier with those achieved at Leuven. Leuven had developed the EVADOC Questionnaire to monitor…

This study was conducted to explore the relationship between teaching methods and students' grades at the college level. Subjects, 58 undergraduate students enrolled in 2 introductory education courses, were organized into groups and exposed to one of two teaching methods: the lecture format and reciprocal teaching. Reciprocal teaching engages…

This pamphlet examines instructional improvement process in postsecondary education. It first discusses the importance of teaching, revealing that too little sustained attention to the process of teaching is a major deterrent to its improvement, and explains why teaching evaluation has been largely abandoned as the sole improvement mechanism.…

This paper reports on the use of a semistructured but open-ended format to gather students' perceptions about the activities and behaviors they experience in different tertiary learning environments and the reasons why they feel the way they do. Tertiary students were asked to write about events they liked, did not like, felt helped their…

This study was designed to demonstrate whether students attain a higher level of learning when they are required to synthesize information through a process of inquiry and believe they will be evaluated with essay questions. The control section of an introductory educational psychology class was taught about accommodating student differences,…

These two documents present (1) a user's guide to the Personal Teaching Improvement Guides Program developed at the University of California, Berkeley and (2) a sample guide. The program uses results of student evaluations (keyed to 24 teaching practices) and descriptions of successful teaching practices to individualize instructional improvement…

Prompted by the lack of research on learning in large college classes in terms of the cognitive processes and strategies students use, an experimental, preliminary study implemented generative activities in an undergraduate educational psychology class of approximately 70 students. The activities involved such things as stopping in the middle of a…

The six editions of the newsletter provide a forum for the sharing of research findings and instructional strategies by faculty of Western Michigan University. Topics addressed include: active learning; lecture variations; lecture techniques; grading student participation; leading discussions; overcoming silence; discussion challenges; course…

Most information is still conveyed to university students through lectures. This necessitates that students have sophisticated listening and note-taking skills, and poses additional difficulties for non-native students. To identify areas for improvement, science lectures in English in the Sultanate of Oman were analyzed. The relationship between…

A sensitive topic can be used effectively in a class of English as a second language (ESL) if planned carefully. While there are the risks that non-native students will become embarrassed and withdrawn, or will develop negative feelings about American society, there are ways to minimize those risks. This can be done by considering the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of computer-aided instruction as compared with the traditional lecture method of cognitive learning of new curriculum materials. It was hypothesized that students instructed by the computer-aided instruction method would gain higher knowledge of the subject matter in terms of cognitive…

This set of lecture notes is used as a supplemental text for the teaching of fluid dynamics, as one component of a thermodynamics course for engineering technologists. The major text for the course covered basic fluids concepts such as pressure, mass flow, and specific weight. The objective of this document was to present additional fluids…

The use of of the Automatic Interaction Detector (program AID3 of the OSIRIS statistical package) to study a university program is discussed. The performance of students who took general physics lecture and laboratory concurrently is compared to the performance of those who took them separately. Five years of data are analyzed, covering 1,997…

Compiled as a resource guide for faculty development programs, this manual presents a collection of ideas, materials, and resources designed to increase the effectiveness of adjunct staff members in postsecondary occupational education. After a statement of the manual's purpose, the next section provides a perspective on disadvantages facing…