Higher education lectures: From passive to active learning via imagery?

An important contemporary challenge to the large group lecture in higher education is that it encourages passive learning which is claimed to be out of sync with intellectual expectations and social needs. Attempts to change this practice have salvaged some aspects of the higher education experience for students, but they have not transformed the learning environment that is the most usual one, that is, one characterised by lectures, into an arena of active learning. This article tests recent multimedia learning propositions which claim that using certain images dislocates pedagogically harmful excesses of text, reducing cognitive overloading and exploiting under-used visual processing capacities. The experiments yielded unpredicted results which indicate that the use of certain images can also prompt students to become active co-producers of knowledge. This is not about visual aids, where images are a side-bar to a traditional lecture. This is about images as the medium through which active learning is energised. Marshall McLuhan famously remarked that ‘the medium is the message’. But for this article, the message is the medium

Variation in external representations as part of the classroom lecture:An investigation of virtual cell animations in introductory photosynthesis instruction

The use of external representations (ERs) to introduce concepts in undergraduate biology has become increasingly common. Two of the most prevalent are static images and dynamic animations. While previous studies comparing static images and dynamic animations have resulted in somewhat conflicting findings in regards to learning outcomes, the benefits of each have been shown individually. Using ERs developed by the Virtual Cell Animation project, we aim to further investigate student learning using different ERs as part of an introductory biology lecture. We focus our study on the topic of photosynthesis as reports have noted that students struggle with a number of basic photosynthesis concepts. Students (n = 167) in ten sections of introductory biology laboratory were introduced to photosynthesis concepts by instructional lectures differing only in the format of the embedded ERs. Normalized gain scores were calculated, showing that students who learned with dynamic animations outperformed students who learned from static images on the posttest. The results of this study provide possible instructional guidelines for those delivering photosynthesis instruction in the introductory biology classroom. © 2016 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 45(3):226–234, 2017