Experiential Learning Courses Research Articles

Building souls and CVs with a student-run podcasting course

This case study discusses an experiential learning course comprising a 12-episode podcast series dedicated to transformative learning in higher education. The three-credit course, which was designed by two student leaders (station managers at the university radio station) in collaboration with a faculty collaborator, was informed by the 10 design principles of authentic learning. The central premise of the podcast series hinged on two key questions: What are the ideal conditions where students build their souls as they build their CVs?; What are the conditions for transformative learning whereby students reflect on their learning experience as collaborators with their professors and with one another? The case study offers recommendations to students, faculty, and educational developers who might integrate this model into their own practices.

Advancing experiential learning through participatory design

Participatory design (PD) as a module development tool offers significant potential to enhance experiential learning courses such as laboratory modules. Involvement of students and other stakeholders results in pre-delivery feedback on module design, implementation strategy, and teaching material. In this study, PD was employed for design and development of a systems control and reaction engineering laboratory project. The nature of stakeholder interaction at various levels was analysed and specific examples for how such an approach improved the development process is presented. Current students provided feedback on how the module was perceived by their peers and participated in developing solutions to make the learning process more inclusive. Senior students and graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) were able to contribute at a higher technical design level. Students were intellectually stimulated by the module design, enhancing the overall teaching and learning process.

Improving learning opportunities for special education needs (SEN) students by engaging pre-service science teachers in an informal experiential learning course

ABSTRACTInclusive education (IE) has the potential to improve special education needs (SEN) students’ learning outcomes, but IE requires teachers receive adequate training to be effective. We introduce an approach to pre-service teacher preparation using experiential learning in an informal learning environment to educate beginning teachers about effective science teaching for SEN students. Using data collected from observations, survey, interviews, and autobiographical reflections, we explored how teachers’ engagement in an informal teaching experience impacted their perceptions about SEN students, their beliefs about the value of teaching science to SEN students, and their beliefs about their future responsibilities to support SEN students in inclusive classrooms. Findings expand our understanding of how to prepare new science teachers to improve science learning for students who are routinely marginalized in formal educational settings. Building from these findings, we discuss the need for transforming pre-service teacher education using university-based experiential learning courses that simultaneously offer SEN students targeted, high quality content learning experiences that could also have a positive impact on SEN students’ attitudes about and achievement in science. We conclude by raising questions about the need for expanded policy, teacher preparation programmes, and additional research focused on improving science teaching and learning for SEN students.

Developing Students’ Well-Being Through Integrative, Experiential Learning Courses

This study examined the effects of experiential learning courses on the well-being of undergraduate students (n = 76, 77.6% female, 67.1% White). A repeated-measures design was used to compare changes in resilience, mindfulness, emotional reappraisal, and social connectedness across three different course formats. All students saw increases in mindfulness; social connectedness was particularly sensitive to the course format. Through integrating academic and experiential learning, students can experience steady increases in multiple components of well-being.

“You can never understand a culture until you experience it”: How an experiential learning course prepared students for practice with Latino communities through learning for advocacy

ABSTRACTThis study used grounded theory to analyze focus group data of students participating in an experiential learning course developed in partnership with a local Latino-serving community agency. A central phenomenon, Learning for Advocacy, emerged from the data, describing a process through which students’ personal encounters led to the development of awareness and perspective taking, thereby encouraging students to develop an advocacy orientation for practice with Latino clients and communities. Study findings highlight (a) how experiential courses support students’ development of an advocacy orientation and (b) how social work programs in newly emerging Latino communities might approach the development of an experiential learning course to prepare students to serve these communities.

Triggers of emotional highs in experiential learning

ABSTRACTThis study is concerned with emotional highs in experiential learning and, more specifically, determining triggers that lead to emotional highs. The research aims not only to understand the invisible side of emotions, but also genuinely consider how learners make sense of their experiences. To study the triggers of emotional highs, a deliberate decision was made to approach the phenomenon as an experience. Hermeneutic phenomenology is used as an overarching methodology. The study focused on experiences of 15 adult learners who participated in 1 of 3 experiential learning courses. The 3 courses were residential, lasted 4–8 days and took place with an equal number of days indoors and outdoors. Learners were asked to make sense of their lived experience through surveys, reflection and semi-structured interviews. Eight themes of emotional high triggers emerged, including Sense of being pushed, Out-of-me experience and Escaping one’s environment.

Peer evaluations within experiential pedagogy: Fairness, objectivity, retaliation safeguarding, constructive feedback, and experiential learning as part of peer assessment

This paper describes the analysis of peer assessment processes in experiential learning courses at a Midwestern public university. Factor analysis was used in the creation of constructs measuring perceptions of fairness, objectivity, retaliation safeguarding, and constructive feedback. Constructs were based on student fears that peer assessment is unfair, peers measure based on emotions (objectivity), giving a bad score will hurt me in later courses (retaliation safeguarding), and feedback is not developmental. As well, it was determined whether there was a belief, by end users, that peer assessment is a critical component of experiential learning. The authors surveyed 477 students within semester courses practicing experiential learning pedagogies and developed constructs for fairness (α = 0.785), objectivity (α = 0.774), retaliation safeguarding (α = 0.862), constructive feedback (α = 0.692) and experiential learning (α = 0.743). No within-factor multicollinearity was found in any construct.

A concentrated certificate program incorporating Experiential Education: helping students prepare for a career in the dynamic area of Health Law

Law students who wish to practice in the area of health law must acquire knowledge, skills, and values that are necessary for them to have an understanding of the legal issues that challenge lawyers and that prepare them for life-long learning in this rapidly growing and changing industry. This paper explores how a concentrated health law certificate program provides students a focused path through the law curriculum. Not only does the program require students to take a range of health law courses, but students take multiple courses that incorporate experiential learning, including clinics, externships, and other courses that integrate clinical teaching methodology. This article highlights the development of a health law certificate program, designed to guide students through the law curriculum to choose among the most beneficial courses for a health law practice. To identify the necessary courses, health law faculty and health law practitioners first explored the knowledge, skills and values that a successful health law practitioner needs. This article also examines the process of developing and implementing the certificate program.

Communications Education & Training: Scholarship of Research and Supervision in Communications

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) encourages teachers and educators to examine their own classroom practice, record their successes and failures, and ultimately share their experiences in a formal and scholarly way so that others may reflect on their findings and build upon existing teaching and learning processes. SoTL acknowledges that concerns for privacy and other ethical issues associated with studies involving human subjects place limits on the types of research that can be conducted in the classroom setting. Nevertheless, SoTL provides a mechanism for raising the standard of discussion concerning teaching and learning in the literature. The Scholarship of Research and Supervision (SoRL) is a related concept that invites the same reflective approach to improving the quality of training through research, especially that conducted at the postgraduate level. This Feature Topic on SoTL is intended to hasten the incorporation of SoTL and SoRL into communications engineering curricula by providing educators and researchers with an opportunity to share their experience, best practices, and case studies. The articles run the gamut from case studies in experiential learning and research-oriented courses to a comprehensive study of student understanding of key concepts to a novel framework for conducting lab-based courses.

The Role of Multicultural Information in Experiential Learning

This paper is based on the author’s empirical experience in assisting cultural immersion programs through developing multicultural collections, promoting diversity resources, and creating a supportive information environment for faculty and students. After summarizing the significance, goals, learning objectives, and program models of cultural immersion, this paper discusses the principles of selecting multicultural materials, cultural immersion information, and practical tips on designing and maintaining web-based sources. This paper also addresses the issues of developing an effective mechanism to build collaboration between librarians and faculty members with respect to cultural immersion curricula and to create an open information environment for disseminating multicultural resources for experiential learning courses.

Comparison of Flipped Model to Traditional Classroom Learning in a Professional Pharmacy Course

The flipped classroom is an approach to incorporate active learning that is being used in secondary education, higher education, and professional schools. This study investigates its impact on student learning and confidence in a professional degree program course. A quasi-experimental study was conducted to evaluate pharmacy students enrolled in a semester-long didactic traditional classroom course compared to students learning the same material using a flipped model through online self-study modules in a hands-on experiential learning course. Before and after each learning experience, students of each group completed a 16-item knowledge assessment on four topic areas and rated their level of confidence with each topic area on a Likert scale. There was a significant difference in knowledge with students in the traditional course scoring higher than students using flipped approach in the experiential course. Furthermore, the flipped experiential course students did not improve assessment scores from pre-test to post-test. For confidence rating, the traditional course group ranked confidence higher than the flipped experiential group for all topics. These findings challenge the notion that the flipped model using self-study in an experiential setting can be a substitution for didactic delivery of pharmacy education.

If You Build it, They Will Come: What Students Say About Experiential Learning

In the Fall of 2013, soon after the reduction in applications that many law schools experienced in 2011-13, the University of Denver’s law school lead the way nationally in making a significant additional investment in experiential learning. Starting that fall, it provided the option for all incoming students to spend one entire year of law school in experiential learning courses and programs. While this commitment was being rolled out, the authors prepared a study of the impact of the program on enrollment and the educational experience of students. A three-year study - each year surveying 1Ls - also included follow up surveys of 2Ls and 3L/4Ls, with additional “look back” questions for the 3L/4L surveys. What we learned was that applicants chose Denver Law on several traditional factors (such as cost and location) but also strongly indicated that the experiential learning component was an important part of their decision. In the 3L/4L surveys, students reflected back on their law school education, and still ranked experiential learning as very important to them, while noting the importance of other practical concerns, such as employment outcomes for graduates. Further, they indicated that many opportunities for professional formation were offered in experiential courses that they took. Finally, we noted a significant increase in overall satisfaction with their legal education, as compared to a similar question prior to the implementation of the expansion of experiential learning at Denver Law.

Managing Contextual Complexity in an Experiential Learning Course: A Dynamic Systems Approach through the Identification of Turning Points in Students' Emotional Trajectories

This study adopts a dynamic systems approach to investigate how individuals successfully manage contextual complexity. To that end, we tracked individuals' emotional trajectories during a challenging training course, seeking qualitative changes–turning points—and we tested their relationship with the perceived complexity of the training. The research context was a 5-day higher education course based on process-oriented experiential learning, and the sample consisted of 17 students. The students used a five-point Likert scale to rate the intensity of 16 emotions and the complexity of the training on 8 measurement points. Monte Carlo permutation tests enabled to identify 30 turning points in the 272 emotional trajectories analyzed (17 students * 16 emotions each). 83% of the turning points indicated a change of pattern in the emotional trajectories that consisted of: (a) increasingly intense positive emotions or (b) decreasingly intense negative emotions. These turning points also coincided with particularly complex periods in the training as perceived by the participants (p = 0.003, and p = 0.001 respectively). The relationship between positively-trended turning points in the students' emotional trajectories and the complexity of the training may be interpreted as evidence of a successful management of the cognitive conflict arising from the clash between the students' prior ways of meaning-making and the challenging demands of the training. One of the strengths of this study is that it provides a relatively simple procedure for identifying turning points in developmental trajectories, which can be applied to various longitudinal experiences that are very common in educational and developmental contexts. Additionally, the findings contribute to sustaining that the assumption that complex contextual demands lead unfailingly to individuals' learning is incomplete. Instead, it is how individuals manage complexity which may or may not lead to learning. Finally, this study can also be considered a first step in research on the developmental potential of process-oriented experiential learning training.

Experiential Learning to Advance Student Readiness for Level II Fieldwork

Occupational therapy (OT) students question their readiness for Level II fieldwork prior to their first placement. Many request more hands-on experiences with clients during their coursework, in preparation for the practice setting. As part of a two year Master of Occupational Therapy program, a fourth semester course was designed to address readiness for fieldwork and engage students in the OT process with actual volunteer clients. This course utilized the primary components of a clinical setting: client interaction, evaluation, intervention and outcomes review, clinical decision making, documentation, and communication, to promote student proficiencies as clinicians in preparation for fieldwork experiences. Weekly student reflections, survey data, and exit interviews identified that the experience was a highly valuable process that aided participants in their readiness to practice as student clinicians. This paper will describe the experiential learning course design, the learning methods used and the outcomes as identified by student perceptions of the impact on their learning and readiness for fieldwork.

Doctoring Undercover: updating the educational tradition of shadowing

ABSTRACTBackground: Premedical students are educated in basic biological and health sciences. As a complement to traditional premedical coursework, medical school applicants are encouraged to shadow practitioners, with the hope that observation will introduce students to the culture and practice of healthcare. Yet the shadowing experience varies widely across practitioners and institutions; resources that guide students’ critical reflection and structure the experience are scarce.Development: A pilot experiential learning course, Doctoring Undercover: Shadowing and the Culture of Medicine, was developed to fill this gap. The course consisted of three parts: an introduction to medical culture through the disciplines of medical sociology, history, anthropology, and bioethics; a site placement in which students applied these fields’ analytical techniques to the study of medical culture and practice; and the development of an online activity guide that other premedical students may adapt to their shadowing circumstances.Implementation: Students reported that they were exposed to new disciplinary perspectives and interprofessional environments that they would not traditionally encounter. Students’ contributions to the shadowing guide encouraged active learning and reflection on the dynamics of effective patient-provider relationships and shadowing experiences.Future Directions: Locally, the class may be scaled for a larger group of premedical students and incorporated into a formal pathway program for premedical students; the content will also be integrated into the clinical medicine course for first-year medical students. Online, the guide will be promoted for use by other institutions and by individuals planning extracurricular shadowing experiences; feedback will be solicited. Tools for evaluating the short- and long-term impact of the course and guide will be developed and validated. Observational and experimental studies of the course’s impact should be conducted.Abbreviations: ICM: Introduction to Clinical Medicine; SCE: Selective Clinical Experiences

An Analysis of Community Pharmacy Shared Faculty Members’ Contributions to Teaching, Service, and Scholarship

Objective. To identify community pharmacy shared faculty members across the United States and to describe their roles and responsibilities in terms of teaching, service, and scholarship. Methods. This study was a mixed-methods analysis using surveys and key informant interviews. Results. Twenty-two faculty members completed the survey; nine were interviewed. Their major roles and responsibilities included teaching in community-based and experiential learning courses, precepting students and/or residents, being actively involved in professional organizations, providing patient care while leading innovation, and disseminating findings through scholarship. Conclusion. Community pharmacy shared faculty members contribute to their academic institutions and community pharmacy organizations by educating learners, providing direct patient care, and advancing community practice through innovation and service to the profession. Findings of this study can be used as a guide for academic institutions and community pharmacy organizations interested in partnering to develop a community pharmacy shared faculty position.

Teaching With Dogs: Learning About Learning Through Hands-on Experience in Dog Training

This paper summarizes a pilot study of an experiential learning technique that was designed to give undergraduate students a greater understanding of the principles and theories of learning and behavior, which is traditionally taught only in a lecture-based format. Students were assigned the role of a dog trainer, and they were responsible for designing and administering empirically and theoretically based training regimens to shelter dogs to teach them new behaviors that would make them more adoptable. Results from student feedback and their performance on assessments suggest that this activity was well-received by the students both for the learning benefit and enjoyment aspect, and this translated to a moderate level on their assessments. Details about how the learning and behavior class was made into an experiential learning course, the outcomes of this experience, and suggestions for improving the educational benefit of this experiential activity are discussed. This hands-on program offers a new alternative for teaching learning and behavior. Future offerings of this course and others like it present ideal opportunities for researching the effectiveness of more experiential methods of teaching and learning.

On the bus and online: instantiating an interactive learning environment through design-based research

ABSTRACTThe World Health Organization converted an award-winning experiential learning course that takes place on a bus traveling down the “cold chain” for time- and temperature-sensitive pharmaceutical products in Turkey to an online interactive learning environment through design-based research. Similarities and differences in the objectives of the two courses as well as the overlap in the learning activities, tools, and technologies deployed in courses are delineated. Many learning activities from the real bus course were successfully moved to the online course, but a few learning activities from the bus course could not be replicated in the online environment. However, several new and arguably more effective learning activities were implemented online that could not be accomplished on the bus. Design principles for developing online experiential learning environments were derived from the design-based research.

Experiential Learning: Being a Real-Event Planner

Experiential learning is an effective education method used to bridge the gap between classrooms and the real world. Given the much applied nature of the discipline, scholars and practitioners emphasize the value and importance of experiential learning. This study reports on a case of experiential learning to a convention and meeting management class at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. A total of 30 undergraduate students were given a task to organize a real conference for the school. The process of conducting an experiential learning course of conference organization is discussed. Student feedback on the learning experience of organizing a real event is analyzed. Implications and suggestions for enhancing students’ learning experiences via experiential learning courses are provided.

Integrative Biological Chemistry Program Includes The Use Of Informatics Tools, GIS And SAS Software Applications.

Wesley College is a private, primarily undergraduate minority-serving institution located in the historic district of Dover, Delaware (DE). The College recently revised its baccalaureate biological chemistry program requirements to include a one-semester Physical Chemistry for the Life Sciences course and project-based experiential learning courses using instrumentation, data-collection, data-storage, statistical-modeling analysis, visualization, and computational techniques. In this revised curriculum, students begin with a traditional set of biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics major core-requirements, a geographic information systems (GIS) course, a choice of an instrumental analysis course or a statistical analysis systems (SAS) programming course, and then, students can add major-electives that further add depth and value to their future post-graduate specialty areas. Open-sourced georeferenced census, health and health disparity data were coupled with GIS and SAS tools, in a public health surveillance system project, based on US county zip-codes, to develop use-cases for chronic adult obesity where income, poverty status, health insurance coverage, education, and age were categorical variables. Across the 48 contiguous states, obesity rates are found to be directly proportional to high poverty and inversely proportional to median income and educational achievement. For the State of Delaware, age and educational attainment were found to be limiting obesity risk-factors in its adult population. Furthermore, the 2004-2010 obesity trends showed that for two of the less densely populated Delaware counties; Sussex and Kent, the rates of adult obesity were found to be progressing at much higher proportions when compared to the national average.