Student Presentation Based Teaching (SPET) Approach for Classes With Higher Enrollment

Abstract

Recently student presentation based effective teaching (SPET) approach was designed for elective courses or senior level courses with less than ten students. SPET approach is mainly designed for research active, busy faculty who are interested in active student teaching but have very less time to prepare for the class activities. SPET is based on the student making 10–20 minutes presentation in the class to address the conceptual questions that are assigned 1–2 weeks before the presentation day. However, SPET approach becomes impractical for large class size due to the reason that during one class period all the students can not present. To make sure that all the students are well prepared through their self-study about the conceptual questions an instructor has to design different assignments for the student presenters and non-presenters. Such makeshift arrangement makes SPET cumbersome to practice for large class size. To address the limitations of SPET approach we recently developed a new strategy to establish SPET relevancy for the large class size. The modified SPET focused on group presentations. A group of 3–4 students were assigned conceptual questions and topics to cover in the group presentation before the day of class discussion. However, the number of questions assigned per group were intentionally kept high so that each student group divide the presentation preparation load. However, each group member was expected to understand the whole presentation. To test student mastery, some content and application related questions were asked by the instructor. This modified SPET approach has opened new student active learning through collaboration. The instructor can directly provide the feedback during the in-class presentation. This presentation will highlight the results of students’ feedback and data about student learning from the modified SPET approach. To date modified SPET has been tested on 26 senior level mechanical engineering students and 24 high school students attending freshman-level Introduction to Engineering course at University of the District of Columbia.