Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019
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Date of Graduation
Spring 2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (BA)
Department
Department of Psychology
Advisor(s)
Krisztina Jakobsen
Abstract
When teaching, many professors try to increase their students’ retention of the information that is taught. Instructors can incorporate active learning, repeated testing, collaborative testing, and/or corrective feedback into traditional forms of teaching (e.g., lecture), or they can combine all of these components and transform their entire course, such as with Team-Based Learning (TBL). The current study compares retention of course material in TBL, lecture, reading, and control conditions in a lab setting. In the first session, students received one teaching method and learned about an article on whether having pets led to lowered blood pressure. During the second session, students came back to the lab to take a test on what had been taught a week before. The results indicated no difference in test scores between TBL and lecture conditions, but TBL led to higher retention of material than reading and control conditions. Lack of difference between TBL and lecture conditions may have been due to the information being conveyed in multiple forms (e.g., audio, visual). The limited amount of time spent in the lab also may have impacted the effectiveness of TBL because it takes multiple meetings to form a team. Further research may add supplementary learning sessions within a lab setting or compare lecture and TBL within a classroom setting where students are exposed to four components that may increase retention during every class meeting.
Recommended Citation
Larkin, Rachel, "Retention across pedagogies" (2015). Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019. 82.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/honors201019/82
