POWERFUL LEARNING EXPERIENCES: USING INTERACTIVE DEMONSTRATIONS TO FACILITATE STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT OF LEARNING OUTCOMES

Many professors have expectations of what they want students to be able to do with course concepts, but they struggle to teach in a way that facilitates achievement of these expectations. Dr. Thomas H. Morris, a Brigham Young University professor, felt his sedimentology and stratigraphy students were not performing at the level he expected. In order to determine how to improve the achievement of learning outcomes in his course, we made an initial course evaluation. This revealed two major problems impeding student learning: (1) a lack of formative assessments prior to exams prevented the professor from gauging how well students were achieving learning outcomes, and (2) students were given limited opportunities to practice learning outcomes during his lecture-based classes. The solution to these problems was implementing instructional methods that would allow the professor to observe student learning while giving students in-class opportunities to apply concepts. One method that can do this is the use of interactive demonstrations. Many demonstrations were showcased at the 2006 SERC workshop, Teaching Sedimentary Geology in the 21st Century. We selected several of these demonstrations, along with previous course demonstrations, and made them interactive by creating exercises that would provide in-class opportunities for students to (1) develop and practice problem solving skills, (2) strengthen their observational skills, (3) stimulate questions and discussion, and (4) communicate and defend their results. Our assessment results provide evidence that interactive demonstrations were powerful learning tools for achieving expected learning outcomes. These assessments include written exercise reports, oral presentations, exams, field trip experiences, and student surveys. Student surveys also suggest that interactive demonstrations were important learning experiences that helped students better understand abstract concepts as well as being able to visualize processes. However, the clearest demonstration of student learning was observed during an end-of-semester field trip. The instructor, after 15 years of teaching, had never observed students efficiently working together to make and defend their solutions to field problems like the students in his redesigned course.