Teaching development grants final and financial report: Enhancing students’ learning through team-based learning (TBL)

Given empirical evidence demonstrating positive effects of team-based learning (TBL) on students’ learning, the current project aims to implement and evaluate the effects of this innovative pedagogy in courses in Teacher Education Programmes as well as Non-Teacher Education Programmes. TBL is defined as a special form of collaborative learning pedagogy with defined sequence of individual work, group work and immediate feedback from content experts in the creation of a motivational framework whereby students hold each other responsible for coming to class prepared and contributing to team discussion of predesigned scenarios (Michaelsen, Knight, & Fink, 2004). In this project, PPSs will design teaching materials based on this pedagogical approach. They will then implement TBL in their classrooms. It is planned that TBL will be implemented in one Psychology-related course, one GE breath course and one Early Childhood Education Course for one semester (the experimental groups). Comparison groups (students enrolling in the same course but in different classrooms/semesters) will be included. Various evaluation methods will be adopted. Quantitatively, self-report measures of students’ learning outcomes will be administered before and after the delivery of the courses. Quality of students’ assignments will be compared between the experimental groups and the comparison groups. Qualitatively, a number of students from each course will be invited to participate in semi-structured interviews to explore their experiences in TBL and effects of TBL on their learning. Findings will be shared to the HKIEd teaching community and a teaching manual on using TBL as pedagogical strategy in higher education will be published.