Small Group Teaching

Background: Scientific education aims to be inclusive and to improve students learning achievements, through appropriate teaching and learning. Problem Based Learning (PBL) system, a student centered method, started in the second half of the previous century and is expanding progressively, organizes learning around problems and students learn about a subject through the experience of solving these problems. Objectives:To assess the opinions of undergraduate medical students regarding learning outcomes of PBL in small group teaching and to explore their views about the role of tutors and methods of evaluation. Type of the study: A cross-sectional study. Methods: This study was conducted in Kerbala Medical Colleges among second year students. A self-administered questionnaire was prepared to evaluate the newly applied teaching system. The study analysis included simple descriptive analysis and determining association through t-test, chi square test and regression analysis and using structural equation models to determine simultaneous association between different students' demographic characteristics and potential predictors using SPSS-20 and Amos software at a significance level of < 0.05. Results:A total of 131 undergraduate medical students participated in the study with a response rate of 94%. The majority (93%) have indicated that PBL strategy contributed effectively to their knowledge development with a similar majority (92%) considering PBL successful new teaching method. About 86% reported that would choose PBL rather than conventional method and also 86% would advise PBL for others. Similarly, high majority indicated that various PBL activities are essential. Regarding the tutors' role in PBL, the majority (92%) indicated that this role was positive and fundamental. According to two thirds (68%) of participants PBL application in Kerbala Medical college was very good application while a higher majority described various PBL sessions as successful and positive and fundamental role of tutors was stressed by most students. Conclusions: This study highlighted the benefits of soliciting student impressions of effective small group teaching. The students' emphasized group atmosphere and facilitation skills of tutor in learning.

The paper looks into and reflects on the issue of encouraging and stimulating student learning in the first year by means of class discussion, as experienced by a first-time postgraduate seminar tutor (Graduate Teaching Assistant) teaching in the field of International Relations. The importance of student class discussions, and how they facilitate learning, is highlighted. The paper also addresses a number of issues and challenges encountered by the author in relation to student engagement in class and its facilitation, as well as how those have been met, with greater or lesser success. The conclusion offers some ideas as to the betterment of the student discussion experience in the author's future practice.

The current pandemic has led schools and universities to turn to online meeting software solutions such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. The teaching experience can be enhanced via the use of breakout rooms for small group interaction. Over the course of a class (or over several classes), the class will be allocated to breakout groups multiple times over several rounds. It is desirable to mix the groups as much as possible, the ideal being that no two students appear in the same group in more than one round. In this paper, we discuss how the problem of scheduling balanced allocations of students to sequential breakout rooms directly corresponds to a novel variation of a well-known problem in combinatorics (the social golfer problem), which we call the social golfer problem with adjacent group sizes. We explain how solutions to this problem can be obtained using constructions from combinatorial design theory and how they can be used to obtain good, balanced breakout room allocation sched...