We have the distinct pleasure of working with hundreds of university faculty members from India in a webinar series sponsored by the Indo-Universal Collaboration for Engineering Education (IUCEE) led by Dr. Krishna Vedula, retired Dean of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts—Lowell. We will present a webinar to them each month starting with an overview and continuing with webinars corresponding to the 12 chapters of our book, Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide (2nd ed., Wiley, 2024). After each webinar we will post a handout containing the main points we raised and our responses to questions the participants asked in the Chat. Over the next year, we’ll be sharing some of their questions and our responses in this blog, in the hope that you’ll find them useful!
Following are two questions from the first webinar, which was an introduction to and preview of the series.
Q1: What is your take on today’s students—has their interest in reading and learning declined along with their attention span?
A1: Many contemporary teachers who raise these complaints apply them to the vast majority of the current student generation, which we have not found to be the case, but the complaints are certainly true of some of the students. Be that as it may, complaining about the students serves no useful purpose: if we are to have new engineers in the next decade, they will come from this student generation.
On the other hand, there may be something we can do about students’ apparently declining interest levels and attention spans. Our theory is that the problem is due in part to significant improvements in our understanding of what makes teaching effective gained through good cognitive and classroom research. When we professors were students, most of our teachers taught using the same traditional model: I present information in lectures, the students take notes on the facts and problem-solving methods I present and try to reproduce both on my assignments and tests. Thanks to the science and research (both of which we will share with you throughout our book and in these webinars), growing numbers of newer teachers are using much better teaching methods, more students are experiencing and benefitting from those methods in some of their classes, and those students have become increasingly intolerant of the older less effective methods. We urge you not to fall into the trap of blaming today’s students’ poor attitudes entirely on their apparent lack of interest and motivation to learn; instead, try some techniques we will be describing and demonstrating and see if you don’t start seeing changes in those negative attitudes in many of your students.
Q2: How can we make our classes more interesting and motivating for students?
A2: Among many other ways we will discuss, (a) begin your discussion of each new topic by relating it to important real-world applications, connect it to the students’ personal interests (which you can learn about by asking for a one-page biography in your first assignment), and include those applications and connections in your class sessions and assignments; (b) s actively engage the students in every class session (active learning) rather than making them primarily passive recipients of traditional lectures. (Again, detailed answers to this question are included in every chapter of our book and will be included in every future webinar.)
