student engagement

By: Shawn Orr, Director of the Center for Innovation and Teaching Excellence, Faculty in Communication Studies at Ashland University – Ohio Icebreakers often come with a dreaded connotation that implies frivolous activities done on the first day of class with limited benefits to student learning. Consider that one icebreaker—”introduce yourself and tell us one interesting thing about yourself”—that is used over and over while yielding little enthusiasm or class engagement. Yet, semester after semester, we pull that icebreaker out and use it again. Why? Because we want to start the semester off by fostering student connection and community. This Read More…

Essie Childers, Instuctor at Blinn College in Texas, shares insight into how MindTap for Student Success helped her organize and manage a blended class while improving student engagement and performance. When professor Essie Childers went in search of a new online platform to help motivate students in her Learning Frameworks course, she knew she needed a program designed to increase her efficiency as well as create a safe place for students to contemplate and reflect. She found what she was looking for in MindTap, with its journaling feature and its automatic grading and feedback. Challenge Essie’s search for an engaging online program Read More…

Could achievement badges be the motivation your students need? One of the common causes of learners’ lack of motivation and failure to complete is a failure to understand why the learning activities are valuable. Are learners in your courses asking themselves:

Why am I doing this?
When will I be done?
Why does this matter?

If they are, they might also be coming to conclusions like:

I’d rather spend my time on something else.
I’m not going to make it to the end—I can’t even see where the end is.
This doesn’t matter to me.

Badges Boost Student Motivation

One way of addressing these problematic perspectives is to Read More…

“My class went from a 50% pass rate with a competing product to an 85%, 90%, and 92% pass rate for my 3 sections with MindTap Math Foundations.” –Jea Joseph, Instructor, Oakwood University Last Fall, students and instructors from around the country used MindTap Math Foundations in their developmental math classes. They noticed a difference.

63% of students felt that they would earn a grade of B or better

Built with students, for students in Developmental Math from the ground up, MindTap Math Foundations (MTMF) instills confidence in students and motivates them to succeed. Helpful tools, such as step-by-step tutorials, learning Read More…

One of the biggest challenges in e-learning is keeping up motivation throughout the course. For many college students, enthusiasm for classes may wane mid-semester; online students, who lack the face to face feedback to reinforce their motivation, may experience this even more strongly than their on-campus peers. To re-energize your online discussion, think about the kinds of discussion questions that will not only engage your students in the course material, but also help them relate and apply the material beyond the classroom.

Motivation and instructors

“Your instructors will typically be an excellent source of motivation,” Ryan Watkins and Michael Corry advised Read More…

Guest Contributor: Carlos Diaz, The American School, Vietnam It is the cold truth: a video game will catch your students’ attention more than the elaborate, cool plan you stayed up all night preparing for. For some instructors, this may be a sad truth. For others, this is simply the way society is evolving. But hopefully, you can see this as an opportunity. You can use games in your classrooms to boost engagement, confidence and learning. More and more students are responding positively to what is known as Game Based Learning (GBL): teaching strategies using games or gamification to find a better Read More…

It can be frustrating to face a classroom of college students who appear uninterested in the material and topic of the course, or to ask a question of the class and receive only silence in response. How can you increase class participation? Engaging students in learning can be a challenge, but there are many techniques you can use to grab the attention of your college students and hold their interest. In some cases, you can integrate elements of pop culture into their assignments. But other techniques, including creating low-risk assignments or designing opportunities to role play scenarios, can help Read More…

Studying is essential for college students to remember facts, understand material, and get the most out of their education, yet there aren’t courses in studying. Fortunately, there are ways you can help if students are exhibiting poor study skills. Within lesson plans, before or after class and in office visits, teachers can encourage student engagement in study sessions. If you’re considering creating a new study session for students in your class, here are some classroom ideas to develop essential study skills and strategies on how to study for a test.

Importance of study sessions

Students may be stressing over their preparedness for Read More…

Written by Lawrence Barkley and Christine Sandoval, authors of Grammar and Usage, Naturally, 1st Edition   In no other field except grammar and rhetoric, to our knowledge, do instructors sometimes forego the use of the field’s professional vocabulary when teaching the subject in introductory courses. Take, for example, the following two sentences, one from anthropology, the other from biology. In anatomical position, the skull is the most superior skeletal element, connected to the postcrania by the occipital condyles attaching to the superior articular facets of the atlas. The CRISPR/Cas (Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR associated protein) system, a prokaryotic immune system Read More…

Throughout this spring we received great videos of instructors across the country sharing the ways that they make it count with digital tools. Some encourage classmate collaboration while some foster critical thinking and others involve social media, but all utilize digital resources in unique and compelling ways to engage students in learning. The votes are in, and we are thrilled to announce these three winners of the Make It Count contest:

First Place

Aiyda Evans, Morgan State University

In her Introduction to Sociology course, Aiyda uses YouTube to present music videos from around the world to incite student discussion around Read More…