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Newsletter: Fall 2004

Pathways to success

by: Christina Goode and Jerry Riehl

Research findings over the past 30 years unequivocally support the fact that student learning and retention are strongly correlated with student engagement. The more actively engaged students are with the subject matter being conveyed, with faculty and staff, and with other students, the more likely they are to persist and achieve at higher levels. Perhaps the most consistent thread that runs through much of the research is the simple fact that students must be mentally engaged in order to learn. The connection between engagement and student success has been emphasized in a number of major research studies and reports on the undergraduate experience in American higher education.

In perhaps the most comprehensive compendium of the research associated with the outcomes of the college experience, How College Affects Students (1991), Pascarrella and Terenzini affirm from their synthesis of 30 years of research that "students who are actively involved in both academic and out-of class activities gain more from the college experience than those who are not so involved."

Involvement In Learning: Realizing the Potential of American Higher Education
(Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education, ITC 1984) concludes that involvement is a key factor in persistence, academic achievement, personal growth, and overall satisfaction with the college experience.

In 1987, Chickering and Gamson published the "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" in which they suggest, "Students must do more than just listen. They must read, write, discuss, or be engaged in solving problems. Most important, to be actively involved, students must engage in such higher-order thinking tasks as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation....Strategies promoting active [engaged] learning can be defined as instructional activities involving students in doing things and thinking about what they are doing."

Bonwell and Eison (1991) contend that "research studies evaluating students' achievement have demonstrated that many strategies promoting active learning are comparable to lectures in promoting the mastery of content but superior to lectures in promoting the development of students' skills in thinking and writing." They suggest that "two effective ways to involve students during a lecture are to insert brief demonstrations or short, ungraded writing exercises followed by class discussion." They also suggest that Òother active learning pedagogies worthy of instructors' use include cooperative learning, debates, drama, role playing and simulation, and peer teaching.

In "Implementing the Seven Principles:Technology as Lever" (1996), Chickering and Ehrmann describe appropriate uses of computers, video, and communications technology to advance the seven principles to benefit both learners and instructors. The seven principles provide an interesting framework from which to address student engagement and engaged learning (See the back cover for the list of seven principles).

What is engaged learning?
Engaged learning, often used synonymously with active learning, has various definitions throughout literature with an overall implication that the learning requires some form of interaction between the learner and the content. One definition of active learning, provided by Silberman (1996), states, “To learn something well, it helps to hear it, see it, ask questions about it, and discuss it with others. Above all, students need to ‘do it’—figure things out by themselves, come up with examples, try out skills, and do assignments that depend on the knowledge they already have or must acquire.”

A recent study on the average retention for learning activities (National Training Laboratories, Bethel, ME) emphasizes the need to develop pedagogical strategies that engage the learner. For example, the study cites the following average retention of learning rates for a variety of pedagogical strategies:

learner retention rates graph

Effective mental engagement (hence retention) relies on the instructor’s ability to understand how students learn and to develop instructional objectives and learning materials that will address students’ learning style or learning modalities as well as the strengths and weaknesses of their multiple intelligences. Learning style, or modality, refers to the manner in which learners prefer to acquire information.

As instruction embraces Web-based delivery, faculty must continue to seek instructional strategies that incorporate various learning styles.

In striving to reach a class of students with varied or preferred learning styles and where each student possesses multiple intelligences, “the idea is not to teach each student exclusively according to his or her preferences, but rather to strive for a balance of instructional methods. If the balance is achieved, students will be taught partly in a manner they prefer, which leads to an increased comfort level and willingness to learn, and partly in a less preferred manner, which provides practice and feedback in ways of thinking and solving problems which they may not initially be comfortable with, but which they will have to use to be fully effective professionals” (Felder, 2002).

As you are preparing your course content, be sure to review the many quick tips, workshops, and resources the ITC provides to help you develop instructional materials that will engage your students along their pathway to success!

References
Bonwell, Charles C. and Eison, James E., (Sep 91). Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. Washington, D.C. ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education. (Eric Document Reproduction Service Number ED 340 272)

Chickering, A. W., and Gamson, Z, “Applying the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education,” New Directions for Teaching and Learning Vol. 47 (1991), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers.

Chickering, Arthur W., and Ehrmann, Stephen C. (1996). “Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever,” AAHE Bulletin, October, pp. 3-6.

Felder, Richard M. (2002). Learning Styles. Available:
http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Learning_Styles.html

Pascarella, E. T. and P. T. Terenzini. (1991). How college affects students: Findings and insights from twenty years of research, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Silberman, M. (1996). Active Learning 101: Strategies to Teach Any Subject. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in Higher Education (1984). Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of Higher Education. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Education.