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In recent years, a consensus has emerged among researchers that teacher quality matters enormously for student performance. Students taught by more-effective teachers learn substantially more over the course of the [...]

Fifty-one college students responded to survey questions regarding their perceptions of the traditional lecture method of instruction that they received in a 200-level psychology course. At a time when many [...]

Distance education is the 'fastest growing form of domestic and international education' (M. S. McIsaac & C. N. Gunawardena, 1996, p. 403). Unfortunately, research investigating effective use of distance education has not kept pace with implementation. In this study, the authors evaluated how lecture-based distance education could best be supplemented with various learning activities. Undergraduate volunteers participated in 1 of 3 post-distance-education lecture activities: individual study, cooperative learning, or interactive multimedia. Then they were tested on knowledge of lecture material and were asked how much they enjoyed the distance education experience. Results indicated that although the interactive multimedia group enjoyed the learning activity more than the cooperative learning and individual study groups, the cooperative learning group learned the most.

The purpose of this study was to describe the choices of content development and task presentations of four teachers with varying experience and the subsequent achievement in skills test of their 125 junior high school students over the course of an 11-day volleyball unit. The results supported the importance of teachers presenting clear, detailed, and game-oriented progressions of content and tasks to improve students' learning.

Byline: Alenoush Saroyan (1), Linda S. Snell (2) Abstract: Many factors contribute to the way a lecture is conceptualized and delivered. These include one's philosophy and beliefs about teaching, knowledge of pedagogical principles, availability of resources, and the realities surrounding the instructional situation. In this paper three types of lecturing styles are described and their differences are highlighted in the context of current conceptions of teaching and pedagogical principles. The three lectures are subsequently characterized as content-driven, context-driven, and pedagogy-driven. Evaluation data suggest that the more pedagogically oriented the lecture, the higher it is rated by students. Author Affiliation: (1) Centre for University Teaching and Learning, McGill University, 3700 McTavish Street, MontreA'al, QueA'beA'c, Canada, H3A 1Y2 (2) Division of General Internal Medicine, Room A-421, Royal Victoria Hospital, 687 Pine Avenue West, MontreA'al, QueA'beA'c, Canada, H3A 1A1 Article History: Registration Date: 17/09/2004

Byline: Christopher T. Husbands (1) Abstract: The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) organizes institution-wide surveys of all its undergraduate and postgraduate taught-course offerings. Students taking each course are requested to assess various teaching modes (lecturing, small-group teaching, and seminar teaching), as relevant to the particular teachers involved in the respective course. One finding of these studies is that certain individual teachers, even within the same teaching mode (say, lecturing), are evaluated more highly in some courses than in others. The article uses LSE's data-base on student course-evaluation to examine reasons for this. The data analysis focuses on two principal issues: Do those teachers assessed differently for the same teaching mode across different courses have distinctive personal characteristics to distinguish them from other teachers not differently assessed? Do courses that are assessed especially discrepantly for a particular teacher have certain distinguishingfeatures? The findings on the first question are generally negative. On the other hand, such course-level characteristics as the number of student enrolments, the number of other lecturers involved in the course and students' general feelings of satisfaction with various aspects of the course do affect how a lecturer is assessed on that course in relation to his or her overall level of assessed lecturing competence. Author Affiliation: (1) London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, UK Article History: Registration Date: 17/09/2004

In 2 experiments, mechanically naive college students viewed an animation depicting the operation of a bicycle tire pump that included a verbal description given before (words-before-pictures) or during (words-with-pictures) the animation. The words-with-pictures group outperformed the words-before-pictures group on tests of creative problem solving that involved reasoning about how the pump works. In a follow-up experiment, students in the words-with-pictures group performed better on the problem-solving test than students who saw the animation without words (pictures only), heard the words without the animation (words only), or received no training (control). Results support a dual-coding hypothesis (Paivio, 1990) that posits two kinds of connections: representational connections between verbal stimuli and verbal representations and between visual stimuli and visual representations and referential connections between visual and verbal representations.

General chemistry lectures appear to have little effect on course performance based on a survey of students completing first and second semester general chemistry taught by different instructors. The variance between scores was minimal with the only significant difference occurring when a different distribution of students went to the second semester course. Attendance was also studied and there was little variance in scores between those who attended consistently and those who did not. Therefore, some efforts should be made to change lecture techniques so that lecture will make a difference in learning.

In teaching general chemistry, it is very difficult to encourage lecture participation on the part of students who make it a habit to sit in the back of the classroom, but a teacher can encourage these students to be active by putting a previously unannounced list of names of students on the board and asking that those with those names sit in the front row. With a little extra time, the teacher can talk informally to those students for a few minutes before class begins and focus on the front row during lecture. Where this has been used, attendance was not better, but the students as a group seemed to ask better questions. Students thought the class a more active learning community with this method and found it was easier to interact with the professor, an improved situation, overall. Table lists results of end-of-semester student survey.