New Pedagogies in Teaching and Learning

Visualization is the creation of a mental image of a given concept (Kosslyn, 1996 cited in Rahim, M. H. & Siddo, R. 2009) and it is widely utilized to enhance students’ understanding of a variety of science concepts. As advocated by cognitive science, we learn to see and we create what we see (Hoffmann, 1998); visualization therefore is an effective teaching pedagogy for developing students' visual senses to enhance learning and engage their interest. A comprehensive set of visualizations clearly communicate the ideas and concepts to students is important to support the teaching and improve the learning process.
In the learning of clinical sciences, students are required to understand the pathogenesis of a disease and the relevance of the specific diagnostic markers for the disease diagnosis. Disease mechanisms often is complex requiring detailed explanation. Students are either distracted, or lost their interest midway during the lesson or having difficulty understanding the whole process. The teaching and learning of the topics become challenging when students are unable to follow the whole mechanisms of the disease and therefore unable to relate the significance of the diagnostic markers to the diseases. This study is perform to evaluate the effectiveness of visualization in enhancing the learning of the students.
Flow diagrams illustrating the stages of disease mechanisms are created to scaffold the explanation. The association of the diagnostic markers to the different diseases are also shown and linked to the different mechanism stages on the diagrams. Part of the mechanisms are left out and students are required to fill up the information. At the end of the semester, student’s feedbacks on the effectiveness of the flow diagram is evaluated.
Students felt engaged and interested for the learning of the disease mechanisms. Student’s feedback was encouraging stating that the flow diagrams helped them to understand the disease mechanism better and provided a good platforms for them to learn.
Visualizations play an effective role in teaching and learning of disease mechanism. It has a prevailing complementary role in supporting the illustration of essential disease mechanisms and as a way to help to uncover the conceptual underpinnings each disease mechanism.

The effectiveness of using Project Based Learning in STEM (science technology engineering and mathematics) courses is a major concern among academics and researchers. The empirical evidence is required to examine how different students’ experiences on project-based learning (PBL) in STEM courses of Bangladesh. In order to achieve this aim, a phenomenographic research approach was used to examine different student conceptions on PBL. Ten students from two universities in Bangladesh participated in semi-structured in-depth interviews. The interviews were analyzed using five steps of phenomenographic data analysis. The findings identified that, PBL in STEM courses is conceived in four qualitatively different ways: understanding, acquisition and use of knowledge, collaborative learning style, student engagement in learning process, and application of knowledge in to practice. The findings reveal that, PBL is a pedagogical technique that provides deeper understanding of STEM courses. It also provides students from STEM with the opportunity to developed new knowledge and how to apply this newly developed knowledge into real practice. Therefore, this study will provide empirical study to understand the present pedagogical application of PBL in STEM education of Bangladesh particularly and other countries generally.

Misconceptions pose a great barrier to learning and often lead to frustration with the subject. Students are usually either unaware of the misconceptions or have difficulties dismissing preconceived notions and ingrained nonscientific beliefs. Socratic questioning is widely used in law and humanities training to uncover assumptions and explore complex ideas but rarely used in engineering classroom. This project explores the use of socratic questioning to help Year 2 chemical engineering students identify and confront misconceptions they may have while studying Heat & Mass Transfer module. 
In this project, students were taught socratic questioning technique. Dedicated time were given to them to use socratic questioning during lecture to discuss in groups so that they can challenge each other’s explanations, consider alternate explanations and delve deeper for clarification. Comparisons were made between the control group and the treatment group in terms of their scores for the calculation and conceptual questions. In general, both control and treatment groups of students were able to answer calculation questions. However, there was a significant gap in the two groups’ abilities to answer questions which required conceptual understanding. The control group did not perform as well in answering conceptual questions even though they were able to perform the calculations correctly. The result was consistent to what was reported by Mazur (1997) that students in his physics class memorized equations and problem solving skills, but performed poorly on tests of conceptual understanding.
Students often focus on completing the calculation problems and seldom spend time on making sure that they can connect new knowledge meaningfully and apply their learning with deep understanding. The project also highlighted the importance in helping students to challenge their misconceptions before any new material is introduced and to facilitate conceptual change, time must be set aside for students to be engaged in inquiry.
Students reported in the survey that they found socratic questioning useful in helping them to clear their misconceptions. The focus group discussion with the students revealed that as the students were used to rote learning, they needed time and training to be comfortable with using questioning for metacognitive learning.