Integrating discussion and digital media to increase classroom interaction

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Abstract

A push has been made over the past decade to utilize “short and sweet” media clips in the classroom to engage students with the material while being cognizant of shortening attention spans. While useful, short clips may lack depth and not be able to connect topics across lessons. Longer video clips often have depth, but students may not be as engaged with the material. This paper presents a method of “breaking” longer clips into smaller segments to account for potential attention deficits and integrates classroom discussion in between segments to engage students with the material.

Section snippets

Literature review

In a special issue of the Southern Economic Journal in response to Becker’s Chronicle article, Hoyt (2003) suggested that if economics educators wanted to increase student engagement in their economics courses that they should focus on creating some type of “hook” to bring students into the material instead of adapting the material to the learner. One method of creating a learning hook is through the deliberate practice of selecting engaging examples that match the theory in order to reinforce

Pedagogical approach

There are two streams of pedagogy being combined to enhance active learning in the classroom. On their own, each provides benefits to the learning process, but their combination would ideally result in a multiplicative impact in order to justify their use. This research has not been tested in economics classrooms to date but has support from life science teaching fields and education pedagogy fields. Packaging videos with interactive questions may increase the relevant cognitive load and

Examples

Below are examples of clips of topics that can be used in a college-level principles of microeconomics course. The clips used below have been successful in getting students “hooked” with a topic and provide a sufficient amount of suspense to maintain a high level of engagement during lecture. All clips are currently (unbroken) on the Economics Media Library (Wooten, 2018). Appendix A shows a slide-by-slide handout of clips and response questions posed to students and the discussion below

Conclusion

Longer video clips have been shunned in recent pedagogy work because of the notion that the attention span of students is not conducive to longer videos with “boring” economics topics. To echo Hoyt’s (2003) criticism that the material need not be changed to adapt to the learner, video clips need not be selected to appease the assumed deficit in attention. Longer video clips, which contain detailed story lines and can connect many topics together, can be adapted to the audience rather than

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