Role Play as an Engagement Tool in STEM Education
Conference Tracks
Teaching Practices (Poster Only) – Analysis, synthesis, reflection, and discussion
Abstract
Role-playing is gaining popularity as an effective tool for providing an engaging leaning experience in the classroom. These activities and laboratory experiments employ small-group collaboration to help increase student engagement, immerse students in the learning process and help create ownership of knowledge. One example is a role-play exercise to teach students about natural selection and evolution using a hands on activity. Students create an organism with adaptations to survive in a pre-selected environment. This was part of a semester-long Earth Summit role play that was used in an Introduction to Environmental Science course. Significant improvement in student attitude and self-efficacy in science were found using a pre/post survey. We describe the outcomes of these exercises, the process for preparing role-playing activities, how to conduct them and how we made changes in course design based on our data.
Session Format
Poster
Location
Poster
Publication Type and Release Option
Event
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Wilkinson, Andrew and Evers, Chad A., "Role Play as an Engagement Tool in STEM Education" (2019). SoTL Commons Conference. 9.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/sotlcommons/SoTL/2019/9
Role Play as an Engagement Tool in STEM Education
Poster
Role-playing is gaining popularity as an effective tool for providing an engaging leaning experience in the classroom. These activities and laboratory experiments employ small-group collaboration to help increase student engagement, immerse students in the learning process and help create ownership of knowledge. One example is a role-play exercise to teach students about natural selection and evolution using a hands on activity. Students create an organism with adaptations to survive in a pre-selected environment. This was part of a semester-long Earth Summit role play that was used in an Introduction to Environmental Science course. Significant improvement in student attitude and self-efficacy in science were found using a pre/post survey. We describe the outcomes of these exercises, the process for preparing role-playing activities, how to conduct them and how we made changes in course design based on our data.
