ABSTRACT
Over the past couple of decades, lectures have received a bad rap as an ineffective, student-passive teaching method. But lecturing is still popular and does have its purposes. Listening to a lecture is much like reading a chapter. Active knowledge sharing resembles a knowledge survey but occurs at the beginning of a class session. Some of the lecture activities are classic student-active lecture breaks that are designed to restore students’ ability to focus on the lecture or to reinforce their understanding of the material on a conceptual or applied level. Clicker questions, also known as ConcepTests, represent a technique developed by Mazur years before personal response systems (clickers) found their way into the classroom. As a technology, clickers have encountered some competition from mobile devices and LectureTools software, which works in classes with laptops. In addition to allowing students to raise questions confidentially during class, LectureTools permits the standard practice of pre- and post- metacognitive questions to complement class discussions.
