Overhauling Technical Handouts for Active Student Participation: A Model for Improving Lecture Efficiency and Increasing Attendance

This instructional paper is intended to provide an alternative approach to developing lecture materials, including handouts and PowerPoint slides, successfully developed over several years. The principal objective is to aid in the bridging of traditional “chalk and talk” lecture approaches with more active learning techniques, especially in more technically-oriented disciplines that employ data or require carefully structured graphs or mathematical manipulation. Using several examples, the paper shows how scarce lecture time can be used more efficiently, thus freeing up students to focus on higher order cognitive issues. Such an approach lends itself to more active-centered techniques. It also improves the incentives for students to attend lectures. The approach is time consuming in its initial development, but arguably pays for itself over the long run.

Find article at The International Journal of Teahching and Learning in Higher Education.