Exchanging Ideas for Active Learning

At NYIT’s semiannual Assessment Day in late August, faculty members shared examples of how they help students improve critical thinking skills. They later posted summaries of their presentations in a faculty gallery on the web pages of NYIT’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

Adjunct Professor Joby Jacob, Ph.D., described “putting students in the driver’s seat” by challenging them to explain observations and evaluate scientific theories on their own. Assistant Professor Ana Petrovic, Ph.D., presented students with real-life problems to solve using online databases, teamwork, and communication. Professor David Hogsette, Ph.D., discussed his course’s critical thinking journal assignments that encourage students to understand, evaluate, and establish a position.

In his annual convocation address, Guiliano stressed the need to increase student engagement and urged faculty members to embrace the “disruptive innovations” that are changing the notion of a prescribed curriculum and format.

In a poetry course Guiliano taught last year, students from Old Westbury faced off against their Manhattan counterparts in a Jeopardy-like contest. They designed the questions and competed via NYIT’s distance learning classrooms. Some groups even wrote software and graphic designs for a new game.

“That was real world and interdisciplinary,” says Guiliano. “Everyone had fun. There is no rule that teaching and learning cannot be enjoyable.”

Assistant Provost Francine Glazer, Ph.D., director of NYIT’s Center for Teaching and Learning, says learner-centered education helps students discover new connections to material—that “aha!” moment—rather than “pouring information into their heads” about facts, concepts, and relationships among ideas.

“A learner-centered approach would have students finding and forming those connections by themselves,” says Glazer. “Another thing that we know from studying how the brain works is that memories get solidified if there’s a strong emotional component. That’s why engagement is important.”

Notable education researchers Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson, authors of Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education, argued nearly 30 years ago in favor of “active learning,” cooperation, and feedback—basic tenets of project-based assignments that motivate and inspire students of all ages. Stan Silverman, director of NYIT’s Technology-Based Learning Systems and a nationally recognized expert in instructional technology, says project-based learning builds students’ understanding of content and their ability to solve problems in groups.

Silverman works primarily with K-12 teachers, who have often led the drive to bring technology and learner-centered education into their classrooms. Efforts in university environments help continue those educational trends on a higher level, with resulting improvements in student learning.

“There are multiple paths to explore the problem and multiple solutions,” says Silverman. “NYIT has an opportunity here, because of our global nature, to put students into real problem-solving environments, to make that the focus and locus of student activity.”

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