In order to determine the learning ability of a student, there’s always a question about what matters most. Is it the course material? Peer pressure? Instructor’s teaching style? Or is it the student’s own innate ability to learn?
In order to address important issues of education, it is important to focus on knowledge, communication, interest and respect. Despite technology taking education to another level, you cannot deny the quality of education being managed by teaching techniques and the presence of an instructor.
These principles are important since they are far reaching. The application is relevant with respect to social sciences esp. business studies, languages and economics. Many academic programs and universities stress the importance of periodic and varied activities in classrooms.
The idea of problem solving is very important in the class room atmosphere. The idea is that the instructor should not rely on only one teaching technique. Diversity in teaching style is important.
The current teaching models focus more on the thinking of the students. This is termed as the cognitive process. The main goal is that the teacher should be able to allow the student to develop a long term memory.
Therefore, the process first requires an encoding task, in which the student learns the basics. The second step is the transformation, where the material is stored in the long term memory of students.
This means that the focus of teaching could be divided into encoding and transformation. Tools that help in the encoding and learning process include infographics, animated content, visuals, graphs and charts.
In the case of long term memory development, the more focus should be on case studies. This is because of the presence of application. Students tend to remember principles that are applicable in their daily lives.
As you can see in the post, there is a lot of focus on diversity. The instructor should switch back and forth between different methods. These methods can include routine lectures to teaching through visual aids. This will also help with keeping the attention of students. Surveys from independent studies and also by the American Psychological Association conclude that students can’t maintain attention in lectures for more than fifteen minutes.
Effective input from technology is in the form of a lecture template. With diverse academic disciplines, there are different lecture templates customized to ideally address the needs of students. A lecture template should be simple enough to be shared with the student. In this way, they would know what topics they are going to study next.
For instance, accounting students could use a template that enlists a main topic such as audit evidence. A course necessary for the CSU accounting degree might utilize the template in order to prepare students for performing audit assertions, audit procedures, and documentation.
While one side of the template enlists the topic, the horizontal lane should identify the explanations that would follow. Well-arranged data tends to be retained in the memory for a longer time.
Apart from the example given above, there is a method which is known as the ‘think-pair-share’. In this method, the teacher can divide the lecture and the student can understand concepts. Self-learning also provides tool to measure the success of the student.
The modern teaching techniques focus on the facilitation of the teacher-student communication process with learning being achieved through more than one model.
