Integrating Students’ Presentations with Experiential Learning Pedagogy: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Experiential learning has proven to be a powerful pedagogical technique to teach students a wide variety of subjects including the sciences. However, due to its very nature, often it becomes challenging to engage all the students equally due to different reasons. To ensure active participation by all the students, students’ presentations were included in the curriculum, following the hands-on activities. Each student presented a sub-topic from the topic “Natural and synthetic materials” and a subsequent interacting session was followed among the students leading to peer learning. The average total scores in the post-test (after the students’ presentations and discussion) were found to be higher than that in the pre-test, which was significantly different (P-value <0.0001). At the same time, the improvement in the scores in the sub-topics the students presented was found to be greater than in the ones the students did not present (1.52 vs 1.21 times, respectively). Statistical analysis also showed that the total scores of individual students correlated positively with their presentation scores. Overall, students’ performances improved after the intervention through the presentations and subsequent interactions among the students. This pedagogy can be implemented for a larger pool of students to ensure efficient learning.