Conference Papers

| paper |

This paper describes an effort to improve student learning in a large, introductory American Government class at Penn State in the Fall, 1996 semester. The principal innovation consisted of asking groups of three students formed in recitation who also sat together in the large lecture to engage in discussion and joint exercises and quizzes. The instructor's impressionistic evaluation concluded students readily engaged in group work in the large lecture, but that it was not possible to determine how well the goal of helping students understand politics was attained. The student evaluations also produced a mixed and inconclusive picture of a core of very satisfied and very dissatisfied students bracketing an ambivalent majority. The attempt to assess learning directly through a "before-after" essay was compromised by a lack of serious effort by many students on the ungraded essay at the end of the class. Students who made a good effort on this essay showed improvement in the number of concepts employed and how well they were mobilized as well as in the organization of their essay. However, the significance of these improvements cannot be assessed due to the unavailability of baseline data, a problem also arising in the interpretation of student evaluations. The paper concludes by discussing the justification for further refinement of the active engagement techniques in a future semester and by proposing ways instructors might devise mechanisms for cooperating in devising and evaluating such techniques.

{ Top of Page }

Copyright on these papers is held by their authors or by the professional society which sponsored their original presentation.

Teaching Politics is published by William J. Ball (ball@tcnj.edu)