Educational Methods Commons^™

Editorial Board

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

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Editor's Note

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

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Table Of Contents

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

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More Than Just Pulling Weeds: A Case Study Of Engaging Upper- Division Conservation Biology Students In Service-Learning, Kimberly Pause Tucker, Christine E. Moran

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

The field of conservation biology focuses on maintaining biodiversity by mitigating both global and local threats. One of the top threats to biodiversity is the worldwide problem of invasive species. Each community has its own pests to control, and students can engage with this global issue on a local scale through well-designed service-learning courses. This article discusses how students engaged with conservation biology through an integrated service-learning project tackling invasive species at a local nature center. Products of the class, data from class artifacts, as well as student feedback on evaluations are also presented.

Experiential Learning In Teacher Education: Increasing Awareness Of Diversity Through The Immersion Experience, Nadine Dolby, Jubin Rahatzad

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

Sixty-four years after the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision, schools, neighborhoods, and communities in the United States remain largely segregated by race and class. As a result, many incoming students arrive on college and university campuses with limited exposure to people from a wide array of backgrounds and identities. In this article, we examine how students enrolled in an undergraduate teacher education course, Multiculturalism and Education, learned from and reflected on an experiential learning assignment. The assignment, called “Immersion Experience,” required them to have a brief experience in a cultural context that is different from their own. Through …

A Stem Experiential Learning Experience: A Five-Year Synthesis Of Lessons Learned, Deborah L. Mccarthy

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

From Fall 2012 to Fall 2016, 127 teacher candidates at a public university in southern Louisiana and elementary school students in grades four, five, six, and eight formed a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) partnership to develop and implement science projects. The research questions of the accompanying study over the five years were: 1.Will mentoring a science project increase student understanding of best practices afforded by the scientific method? 2. What strategies improve the quality of a STEM experiential learning experience? A paired-samples t-test on teacher candidates’ pre- and post-test scores showed a significant difference in mean scores, indicating …

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Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

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Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

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A Model Of Student Learning: A Cross-Disciplinary Examination Of Student Reflections Of Service-Learning Experiences, Elizabeth Goodman, Jonathan Westover, Letty Workman, Maureen Andrade

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

The purpose of this study was to measure and analyze student service and engaged learning outcomes employing the qualitative tradition of phenomenology. This study was based on the “Five R” service and engaged learning framework. The population for this project included 565 students enrolled in sixteen different course sections (eight distinct classes) taught by twelve faculty members across six academic departments in three colleges/schools on the campus of a regional teaching university in the Intermountain West. The results yielded support for each “R” in the framework (reciprocity, reflection, rewards of synergy, responsibility, and reality), thereby supporting the validity of the …

Soil Science In Precision Agriculture Lesson Plan, Carson Ellis Cronkright

Agricultural Education and Communication

Due to the increasing demands for the American agricultural industry to provide exceptional products at an increasing rate of production, as well as implement the practice of sustainable farming, it is imperative that more modern concepts be taught at a younger age (Ray, 2013). In order to inform students of advancements and the future of agriculture in the United States, curriculum and lesson plans should reflect this movement in industry in order to provide relevant information and maintain the highest quality of education possible. This project will provide a constructed lesson plan as one example of adopting more progressive methods …

Final Portfolio - Sparc Open Education Leadership Program, 2017-18, Christopher A. Barnes

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Final portfolio of work completed for the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program, 2017-18, including the Capstone Project Final Report, the Community Resource entitled “Piloting Faculty OER Grant Programs: A Practical Guide for Librarians,” and the blog Opening Up Liberal Arts Colleges (linked). “Piloting Faculty OER Grant Programs" is also available separately in The Cupola.

Polycommit: Building Better Habits Through Gamification, Elliot Fiske

Master's Theses

Computer-assisted learning is older than Turing machines, and constantly evolves as technology improves. While some teachers are resistant to using technology in the classroom, “e-learning” techniques are becoming more common in almost every school, from K-12 to universities. As technology becomes more widespread, it becomes crucial to examine the various methodologies of computer-assisted learning and find the techniques that are most effective.

This paper explores the effectiveness of one such methodology, spaced repetition. This technique applies to homework assignments available to students online. We include an exploration of several existing apps that use this technique, and introduce our own novel …

Improving Introductory Computer Science Education With Draco, Mike Dongyub Ryu

Master's Theses

Today, many introductory computer science courses rely heavily on a specific programming language to convey fundamental programming concepts. For beginning students, the cognitive capacity required to operate with the syntactic forms of this language may overwhelm their ability to formulate a solution to a program.

We recognize that the introductory computer science courses can be more effective if they convey fundamental concepts without requiring the students to focus on the syntax of a programming language. To achieve this, we propose a new teaching method based on the Design Recipe and Code Outlining (DRaCO) processes. Our new pedagogy capitalizes on the …

District-Wide Instructional Initiative Framework, Jessica Charles, Tracy Fray Oliver, Doug Knecht, Emily Sharrock

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

Describes the Bank Street Education Center's District-wide Instructional Initiative Framework, a tool that guides the Center's partnership work with school districts who are engaged in a process of instructional improvement. The Framework was developed out of research on district improvement, organizational development, school leadership, and professional learning, as well as the Center's own experience implementing large-scale district reform in the largest school district in the nation: New York City.

The Effect Of Animated Self-Concept Videos On Hispanic Fifth-Grade Students Self-Concept, Richard Hill

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Studies have documented a major downturn in the self-concept of fifth-grade students as they transition to middle school (Twenge & Crocker, 2000). Two of the major risk factors are being female and Hispanic (Cavazos-Rehg & DeLucia-Waa, 2009). Various interventions have been tried with limited success. The purpose of the present study is to use an animated self-concept video series to test if an animated self-concept video series could support and/or increase the self-concept of fifth-grade students, particularly those in the Hispanic and female risk categories. The study population (N = 192) was a convenience sample drawn from a sample size …

A Phenomenological Study Of Educators' Perspectives Of School Climate In Secondary Schools Implementing Positive Behavior Intervention And Support, Tory Lawrence

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS) is a school-wide initiative implemented in many schools across the United States as an approach for addressing discipline concerns and promoting a positive school climate. This study used a phenomenological design to examine the school climate perceptions of 13 staff member from three secondary schools from two school districts in the southeastern region of North Carolina that were implementing PBIS with fidelity. The transformative learning theory, which explains how knowledge may be obtained from lived experiences of individuals, guided the research study in examining three research questions: (a) How do select secondary school staff …

Exploring The Relationship Between Students' Sense Of Community, Student Satisfaction, And Doctoral Program Retention, Adam Roberson

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This is a study examining the interaction between certain doctoral student engagement indicators (peer, institution, curriculum, faculty, spirituality) and student satisfaction. The scope is to understand if student sense of community is a significant moderator to this interaction in order to address the issue of student attrition. It is important to understand these interactions and the influence of sense of community so that institutions of higher education better analyze student commitment. The outcomes of this study may be used as a means to design and implement engagement strategies that are effective in student retention and completion. Doctoral students were invited …

Effective Teaching And Learning: Flipped Learning In The Classroom, Mohammed Fahad Alsobaie

Dissertations

It is important that adequate knowledge concerning how flipped learning can be implemented in a classroom to support students learning in elementary schools (Backlund, Hirsh & Segolsson, 2017). This is a qualitative study, which used a general qualitative approach to explore teachers’ perspectives and their experiences about flipped learning effectiveness in classrooms at the elementary school level. The population and sample in this study were five elementary school teachers in urban locations in the Midwest region of the United States who utilize flipped learning in their classrooms. The data on the use and impact of flipped learning on teaching and …

Motivating Students To Learn A Programming Language: Applying A Second Language Acquisition Approach In A Blended Learning Environment, Lulu Sun, Christina Frederick, Caroline Liron, Li Ding, Lei Gu, Andrew Calvin Griggs Ii, Paula Sanjuan Espejo

Publications

Learning a programming language typically involves acquisition of new vocabulary, punctuation, and grammatical structures to communicate with a computer. In other words, learning a programming language is like learning a human language. A recent study showed that programmers use language regions of the brain when understanding source code and found little activation in other regions of the brain devoted to mathematical thinking. Even though programming code involved mathematical operations, conditionals, and loop iterations, researchers found that programming had less in common with mathematics and more in common with human language.

Multiple True–False Questions Reveal The Limits Of The Multiple-Choice Format For Detecting Students With Incomplete Understandings, Brian A. Couch, Joanna K. Hubbard, Chad E. Brassil

School of Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

By having students select one answer among several plausible options, multiple-choice (MC) questions capture a student’s preferred answer but provide little information regarding a student’s thinking on the remaining options. We conducted a crossover design experiment in which similar groups of introductory biology students were assigned verbatim questions in the MC format or multiple true–false (MTF) format, which requires students to separately evaluate each option as either true or false. Our data reveal that nearly half of the students who select the correct MC answer likely hold incorrect understandings of the other options and that the selection rates for individual …