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Burgeoning college enrolments and insufficient funding to higher education have expanded the use of large lecture courses. As this trend continues, it is important to ensure that students can still learn in those challenging learning environments. Within education broadly and undergraduate engineering specifically, active learning pedagogies have been developed to overcome some of those issues in a traditional classroom setting. However, active learning has not been well established in large, lecture-hall classroom environments. This study investigates an active learning approach that was used for an introductory environmental engineering course of 269 students in a tiered lecture hall. Analyses using normalised gain scores illuminate statistically significant differences between learning gains in content delivered using the active learning method versus a traditional, lecture-only delivery. There were no significant interaction effects across different student characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the development of metalearning capacity in the learning of athreshold concept– capacity of transformative significance relative to metalearning in the general response context of a discipline or subject. The development of metalearning capacity is framed within a protocol that invites students to self-construct a ‘learning profile’ of themselves; reflect on it in light of theoretical considerations; and accordingly self-initiate changes to their learning behaviour. Findings are consistent with other studies in different disciplinary contexts that employed the same methodology – namely, that metalearning activity can be successfully focused on a particular threshold concept to benefit a substantial majority of students in a variety of ways ranging across a positive reinforcement of self, a change in conception of what ‘learning is’, to self-initiated change. Metalearning activity is advocated as a theoretically sound, and pedagogically driven, learning intervention – one that adds value to the student learning experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]