Entries Tagged with “motivation”
What factors contributed to your choosing that approach?
What has influenced me to use the technology in the way I’ve been using it is the fact that I’ve been moving from teaching upper division courses to lower division courses. Right now, I’m teaching general chemistry I, the first semester chemistry course for a lot of science majors here at SDSU.
One of the reasons that I’ve been going towards this approach is that I’ve been finding that students are not as interested in what we talk about in class if there are not visual aids to help them understand. I think—understanding and learning and interest kind of go [hand in hand]. It’s hard to say what’s the chicken and what’s the egg and you know, what came first, but I think they’re all rolled into one.
The way that I’ve been using these visual technologies is to try and increase the students’ interest, because I found that especially in lower division courses, students are just not that interested. They think of chemistry as a course that they have to take, but they want to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. By inserting these visual aids I found that student interest has increased quite a bit in learning chemistry, because it helps them to see how it relates to their everyday lives more.
— Hong-Chang Liang, Chemistry
Have you told colleagues or others about your approach? What interest/reaction have you received?
My response to the accusation that this is a gimmick is that I think people who say that are not addressing the needs of students. They’re relating to how students were maybe back when they were students, or maybe back when they first started teaching. But things have changed so much technologically in the last few decades and we really need to—you know, one of our roles as educators is to address how students learn these days, and how students learn in the future, not look back and say “well, back in my day, we did it that way, and that’s the way it should always be.”
— Hong-Chang Liang, Chemistry