USING TEAM BASED LEARNING TECHNIQUES IN A GENERAL EDUCATION EARTH HISTORY CLASS: RESULTS FROM AN ONGOING STUDY

The Team Based Learning (TBL) teaching approach aims to help develop a student’s learning skills and is done in a way that holds teams accountable for using course content. TBL is a form of the flipped classroom, where students are required to read content material before they come to class. Students then take readiness tests on the material in preparation for application activities (such as analyzing, evaluating, and creating) that target higher-order learning skills. Earth History, a freshman/general education course, is being taught at the University of South Alabama using TBL techniques as part of the university’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP). TBL teaching methods and class projects used in this course have been discussed previously (Connors, 2012). A review of TBL methods and additional data collected in this ongoing pilot study are presented here and compared to data from Earth History classes that were taught as traditional lecture courses. The data also includes survey results regarding student comprehension, involvement, and enjoyment of this type of instruction.