Abstract:

Teaching basically can be seen as the act of conveying, explaining and dispatching information from a teacher to a group of students [1]. Traditionally, the students are expected to sit down quietly during the learning session and take notes on the taught subjects. This approach is identified as the transfer theory of teaching [2]. Meanwhile, Bligh (2000) defined the traditional lecture as “continuous exposition by the teacher”. This definition suggested that the student activity is limited to listening, taking notes and asking occasional questions to the lecturer. However, students may learn in many ways such as seeing and hearing, memorizing and visualizing, reasoning logically and intuitively. Although, the student’s ability to learn is varied depending on the student’s native ability and preparation before class, the lecturer teaching style also play important role in effective learning. Traditional way of teaching may cause the student to feel bored, inattentive and loose interest towards the subject. Subsequently, the student prone to do poorly in tests, fail in courses and even in some cases drop out of school. The chained event doesn’t stop there. The lecturer may experience hostile or passive class environment and poor students’ attendance [3]. Hence, new teaching style such as active learning need to be implemented to retain student’s attention and interest in the classroom towards the subject resulting in improved grades and attendance. Active learning engages students during the learning process through activities and/or discussion in class [4]. In short, active learning promotes higher order thinking such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation through various attractive activities such as class discussion, think-pair share and collaborative-based learning. The purpose of this paper is to share experience implementing active learning activities in one of Petroleum Engineering course for undergraduates via think-pair-share, ice-breaking activities, group portfolio, focused discussion pairs, team-based project and reflection. At the end, this paper will discuss the effect of implementation of active learning on student performance and motivation via class observation, student’s satisfaction survey, lecturer evaluation survey and student’s grades. The study was conducted in two separate group of students from two different semesters. One group represent the group of students learning through traditional teaching methods and the other represent groups of students learning through active leaning methods. Despite the struggle to adapt multinational and diverse personalities among the team members to accomplish the assigned tasks and activities, the respond from the students were surprisingly overwhelmed. In fact, the student’s satisfaction survey shows a very positive respond towards the implemented active learning activities. The students remarked that the activities were enjoyable and they gained more interest in the subject. Finally, the final grades show the numbers of student fail the course reduce significantly while the overall student’s performance increasing when active learning is implemented.

Keywords:

Active Learning, Teaching Experience, Student Satisfaction, Student Performance.