Developing Learning Environments
Creativity, Motivation and Collaboration in Higher Education
Publication Year: 2004
Published by: Hong Kong University Press, HKU
Contents
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pp. v-vi
Preface
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pp. vii-viii
Promoting the quality of teaching and learning is a major concern of the University Grants Committee (UGC) of Hong Kong. In 1998 and 2001, the UGC supported major conferences on this theme. This volume results from the second of these events, which focused on the scholarship of teaching and learning. The conference planning committee brought ...
Prologue: A focus on learning as universities change
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pp. 1-18
This prologue has two aims. First, it addresses critical challenges for university renewal, and the centrality of the scholarship of teaching and learning. Second, it sketches issues in Hong Kong's higher education. The prologue provides a context for the selected contributions. The notion that universities are now positioned in a context of complex ...
Part I: Critical and Creative Thinking
The aim of promoting critical and creative thinking is a persistent theme in the global discourse. There may be merit in making it explicit that 'critical' in this context does not imply opposition to a point of view, or a policy of trying to show that it is wrong, but rather a disposition to question and test it, to explore its presuppositions and consequences, ...
1. Experience with PISER for the enhancement of conceptual and critical thinking
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pp. 21-30
The Peer Instruction method, the basis of which was developed at Harvard University (Mazur 1997), involves reading and conceptual quizzes based on a pre-lecture reading assignment. The questions are designed to encourage students to learn by concentrating on concepts rather than on memorization of equations. Students answer the questions ...
2. Walking through students' thinking processes in a problem-based learning (PBL) engineering course
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pp. 31-40
Pedagogical approaches based on a constructivist view of learning have become increasingly widespread in the last generation or more. One noteworthy example of such an approach is problem-based learning (PBL). PBL, perfectly in keeping with contemporary constructivist views of learning, is an instructional approach that uses real-world case ...
3. The problem-based learning approach in social work training: Potential and considerations
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pp. 41-56
Social work practice has long been problem based. But, as a university programme, social work training has often followed the traditional mode of lecturing, apart from its practical fieldwork. Experimentation with the problem-based learning (PBL) approach has led to its becoming a popular approach in tertiary education (Branda 1990; Savin-Baden 1997). ...
4. A case for case studies: One teacher's reflective approach in clinical teaching
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pp. 57-76
Not all teachers are trained to be 'professional' teachers or are prepared in their roles as teachers. Perhaps some excel in their teaching, but many probably would like to learn more about teaching and learning. Over the last century, a large body of research on various issues of teaching and learning techniques and the development of innovative approaches...
5. Learning how to learn
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pp. 77-100
Sharing the view that critical thinking is a central outcome of tertiary education, we report in this chapter an effort in promoting independent learning among university students, the development o f the course Learning to Learn, and its impact on student learning from 1998 to 2001. Preparatory programmes for first-year students have been popular ...
Part II: Motivation In Learning
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pp. 101-104
All the chapters in this section deal in one way or another with the issue of student motivation. As elsewhere, this has received considerable attention in Hong Kong over the past few years, along with growing challenges to the stereotype of 'Chinese learners' as passive rote learners, extrinsically motivated, and relying on rote memorization as a study ...
6. Developing learner motivation through curriculum innovation
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pp. 105-136
There have been recent calls from the government (e.g., Education Commission 2000) for the development of lifelong learning skills in university students. At the same time, however, there have been strong calls from sectors of the business community, along with the government, for students to demonstrate that they have reached 'acceptable' levels of ...
7. Designing dialogue: Using the Web to enhance interaction in the teaching and learning of English
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pp. 137-156
How can Web-based course design best be used to encourage language learners to interact in the target language? Is it possible to identify success factors in using the Web as a means of 'designing dialogue' for learners of English as a second language? These are the questions that are To set these questions in a wider context of enquiry, the importance ...
8. Motivation, academic performance, and the challenge of promoting creativity
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pp. 157-178
Intrinsic motivation is the tendency to engage in tasks because one finds them interesting, challenging, involving, and satisfying. Extrinsic motivation is the tendency to engage in tasks because of task-unrelated factors such as promise of rewards and punishments, dictates fro m superiors, surveillance, and competition with peers (Deci and Ryan ...
9. Large group sessions and problem-based learning
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pp. 179-188
In 1997, the Faculty of Medicine changed the undergraduate medical curriculum from a discipline-based, pre-clinical/clinical-based approach to one in which problem-based learning (PBL), organ system teaching, and integration of clinical and interpersonal skills were emphasized (Tang 2001). In the first three years of the New Medical Curriculum (NMC), students would have two two-hour PBL sessions as well as one half-day ...
10. Vocabulary games to motivate English language learners
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pp. 189-204
With the tremendous expansion in tertiary education m Hong Kong in the 1990s, it is only to be expected that the average standard of English of university entrants across the territory may be lower. Criticism has been levelled at tertiary institutions regarding the standard of graduates' communication skills in both English and Chinese. The very best are ...
Part III: Collaboration in Teaching and Learning
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pp. 205-208
The idea of the individual and perhaps solitary scholar has a long history. For example, the 17th-century French philosopher Rene Descartes was reputed to have shut himself alone in a room heated by a stove to develop his idea for the reform of human knowledge. In truth, however, important thinkers and educators in different cultures and over a very long time ...
11. Incommensurable discourses? The possibilities for collaborative teaching ventures
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pp. 209-228
This chapter investigates issues of interdisciphnary collaboration between different departments.1 It is unusual, because it reports a failure. The reason for doing this is to raise the discussion of collaboration and interdisciplinarity to new levels, especially to the issue of reconciling conflicting philosophies. My aim is to provide an account to explain ...
12. Students' perspectives on interactive learning
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pp. 229-244
In Hong Kong, as in many countries, a central element in teachers' innovatory experimentation in the classroom is interactive learning. In itself, of course, 'interactive learning' is a broad term: learning may take place through any form o f interaction between a person's current conception of some aspect of the world and an alternative conception of ...
13. Students' perceived difficulties in learning and their implications for learning to learn
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pp. 245-268
The expansion of tertiary education makes it possible for students of a broader range of abilities to enter universities. In many countries, university teachers are finding that their students are no longer as highly selected as before, and universities are threatened with the risk of falling standards of graduates and an increased attrition rate (Peat, Dalziel, and ...
14. Field-based support and the learning of novice professionals: Implications from a teacher education programme
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pp. 269-290
Programmes for the preparation of professionals include field-based components, meaning that the learning of novices occurs both in the tertiary institution and in the field. Even if the curriculum for the programme based in the institution is well organized and delivered, learning in the field-based component is subject to circumstances that ...
15. Developing online facilitators
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pp. 291-312
Educational policy initiatives in Hong Kong for the last few years have, as in all other developed economies, stressed the inclusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) into all levels of education: primary, secondary, and tertiary. However, these policy initiatives have mostly taken the form of hardware...
Epilogue: Scholarship of teaching and learning in progress
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pp. 313-322
This volume is the product of a rigorous selection process that involved blind multiple reviews of the full texts of 59 papers out of 74 conference presentations. The selected papers have raised important issues that fit coherently in a book on the theme of developing learning environments. Although many worthwhile papers were inevitably left out, the editorial ...
Notes
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pp. 323-324
References
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pp. 325-352
About the editors and contributors
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pp. 353-358
E-ISBN-13: 9789882200982
Print-ISBN-13: 9789622096905
Page Count: 368
Publication Year: 2004
