B1. Provide classroom activities and learning experiences that connect content to students’ lives in and out of the classroom.
This may include providing opportunities for students to explore current events and highlighting the practical, societal, and environmental applications of course material.
Connecting class content to students’ lives in and out of the classroom can recruit and sustain student interest and emphasize the value of what they learn (CAST, 2018). Authentic tasks and activities can also demonstrate relevance to students’ career goals. Activities that prompt students to connect the content to their personal lives engage in the affective domain of learning, which can give students insights about themselves and what they value, as well as a deeper understanding about their peers (Fink, 2013).
Strategies & Examples
- Incorporate Case Studies or Scenario-Based Learning. In small groups, ask students to examine a real-life situation that reflects the concepts you’re teaching and its context in depth and produce a summary that determines the key factors that contributed to the outcome. Alternatively, you can ask students to write their own case studies and facilitate the discussion in their small groups. The National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science has an extensive collection of case studies in various disciplines.
- Use Problem-Based Learning. Present students with a real-life dilemma or problem that needs to be solved related to your course content. Students engage in a “research journey” where they examine previous knowledge, collect new information, analysis, and determination of possible solutions. The Problem-Based Clearinghouse has sample problem prompts for many disciplines.
- Use Digital Stories to Connect Students’ Lived Experiences to the Content. A Digital Storytelling assignment, in which students create a multimedia learning artifact (combination of video, audio, graphics, and text), offers students an outlet for self-authorship and connecting their lived experiences with particular issues discussed in class.
- Integrate Activities that Prompt Students to Raise Awareness on a Topic They Value. An Issue Awareness Ad activity asks students to identify an important issue related to class content, research the issue, and use their persuasive skills to create an advertisement to raise awareness (Barkley & Major, 2016). A Briefing Paper assignment also asks students to explore an issue or problem that is relevant to them by researching the issue, preparing a summary of the main factors involved for a specific audience, outline potential solutions, and end with a call to action.
Considerations
As with any complex assignment or activity, it may be difficult to implement it in a large enrollment course. If your course includes discussion sections, digital stories, issue awareness ads, or briefing papers might be more effectively implemented in that venue. Scenario-based and problem-based learning can be used in large enrollment courses if the instructor scaffolds the activity into smaller chunks with time in class to do some small group discussion with nearby peers and/or research.
Resources
Barkley, E. F., & Major, C.H. (2016). Issue awareness ad. In Learning assessment techniques: A handbook for college faculty (pp. 330-333). Jossey-Bass. Permalink.
CAST (2018). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 2.2. Retrieved from http://udlguidelines.cast.org
Nundy S., Kakar A., Bhutta Z.A. (2022). The why and how of problem-based learning? How to practice academic medicine and publish from developing countries? Springer, Singapore.
Thomsen, B. C., Renaud, C. C., Savory, S. J., Romans, E. J., Mitrofanov, O., Rio, M., ... & Mitchell, J. E. (2010, April). Introducing scenario-based learning: Experiences from an undergraduate electronic and electrical engineering course. In IEEE EDUCON 2010 Conference (pp. 953-958). IEEE. Permalink.