Enhancing student learning through classroom discussions in circuits courses

Increasing classroom interactions between instructor and students and among students has been found to be an effective way of helping student learning. In this paper, we discuss three techniques that have been employed in circuits classes to promote student discussions and instructor-student interactions. These techniques are embedded group lab sessions, open-discussion quizzes, and student presentation of problem solving procedures. The effectiveness of the techniques are evaluated by examining student test and exam grade distributions in spring 2004, fall 2004 and spring 2005 semesters. We also present our observations of in-classroom student behavior when these techniques were applied, as well as our improvement of these teaching techniques. Finally, plans to extend these teaching methods to other computer engineering courses are addressed