Active Engagement: A Key to Increasing Retention in

EngineeringRichard M. Felder

Hoechst Celanese Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering

North Carolina State University<www.ncsu.edu/effective_teaching>

It is clear that an education which is an active discovery of reality is superior to one that consists merely in providing the young with ready made truths.

(Jean Piaget)

Pressures to improve teaching

• Applicants Attrition

• Complaints from employers (grads lack critical skills)

• Research on teaching & learning traditional methods don’t work

• Outcomes-based accreditation (ABET, Bologna, Wash. Accord)

• Competitive on-line programs

• THE WORLD IS FLAT

• Changing student demographics

• The people we’re weeding out are unqualified & don’t belong in engineering!

Myth

Fact 1

Students who stay Students who leave

(GPA)S = (GPA)L

(Statistically indistinguishable)

Fact 2

Correlate GPA at graduation with career success (starting salaries, rate of advancement, employer evaluations. Average correlation coefficient?

1 0 +1

Fact 3• Some schools have successfully reduced

attrition, including of women and minorities.

1990 2000 2010

55%60%

75%

• Clearly, it can be done. So just do it! (J. Bordogna)

How?

Constructive alignment

Effective technology

Analysis & synthesis

Cooperative learning

Inductive teaching

Abstraction & experience

...

Active engagement

Faculty development

As you enter a classroom ask As you enter a classroom ask yourself this question: If there were yourself this question: If there were no students in the room, could I do no students in the room, could I do what I am planning to do? If your what I am planning to do? If your answer to the question is yes, don’t answer to the question is yes, don’t do it. do it.

(Ruben (Ruben

Cubero)Cubero)

Why use active learning?

• Full student involvement in class

• More and better responses to questions

• Much higher energy level

• Good for multilingual classes (non-native speakers get chances to catch up with the lecture)

• Many research studies confirm effectiveness [Prince, 2004], including...

Experimental study: Gave 50-minute lecture, tested immediately afterwards. Results:

70%70%

20%20%

% retained% retained

00 5050tt (min) (min)

t t =time in lecture when information =time in lecture when information was presentedwas presented

Give active exercises or breaks

In-Class Teams

Form teams of 2-4, choose recorders. Give teams 30 seconds--3 minutes to

–Recall prior material–Answer a question–Start a problem solution–Work out next step in a derivation–Think of an example or application

– Explain a concept– Figure out why a given result may be

wrong– Brainstorm (object is quantity, not quality)– Generate a question– Summarize a lecture

Call on several individuals for responses first. Then take responses from volunteers. This always works, regardless of class size.

Think-pair-share

More time-consuming, more instructive than immediate group work.

• Students think of responses• Exchange responses in pairs, create better

ones• Pairs share responses with class

Concept Tests with Clickers

• Ask class a multiple choice question– Conceptual, challenging– Good distractors based on common

misconceptions

• Have students vote individually, then pair to discuss, then revote

• Discuss why wrong answers were wrong

Faculty Development

• Orient new faculty (teaching, research, & campus culture)

• Prepare future faculty (workshops, mentoring)• Give enrichment experiences to experienced

faculty (workshops, learning communities)• Mentoring• Make some of it STEM-specific• Make continuous improvement in teaching an

expectation for all faculty

More information about the content of this presentation (active learning, engineering faculty development, other topics) can be found at

<www.ncsu.edu/effective_teaching>

Click on “Education-Related Papers” on the home page and then click on the topic of your choice.