Abstract
One of the most significant challenges facing Higher Education today is getting students to take responsibility for their own learning. In Science and Engineering this is complicated by the decline in the mathematical and problem solving skills of students entering university. Several techniques for addressing these issues have been applied to the Dynamics module on the first year Physics course at the University of Manchester over the last two years. These include the use of Just-in-Time Teaching, e-learning and e-assessment, interactive voting systems and peer instruction. We first encourage students to start to construct their own understanding via e-learning and then challenge their understanding during a lecture-based session using an interactive voting system. This is followed by more e-learning, which features formative e-assessment, and by a staff-supervised problem session using the Just-in-Time Teaching approach. Thus we have been able to improve student engagement with the course material and have achieved a significant improvement in examination performance. This paper will describe the implementation of the various new techniques and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.
Highlights
New DirectionsMarion Birch and Niels Walet School of Physics and Astronomy Schuster Building The University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL marion.birch@ manchester.ac.uk niels.walet@ manchester.ac.uk
The School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester has a first year intake of over two hundred students
Outcomes of the 200607 initiatives A very positive outcome of the 200607 initiatives was that examination performance improved significantly with the average examination mark increasing from 50% in the previous year to 67% in 200607
Summary
Marion Birch and Niels Walet School of Physics and Astronomy Schuster Building The University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL marion.birch@ manchester.ac.uk niels.walet@ manchester.ac.uk. We first encourage students to start to construct their own understanding via e learning and challenge their understanding during a lecturebased session using an interactive voting system
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