University of Missouri

Aug. 10, 2020

Spotlight on Mizzou is your weekly spot on all things research at Mizzou. Every week, the MU News Bureau team speaks with a Mizzou researcher about a recent study or interesting line of research and how their research affects Columbians, Missourians and the world.

Transcript

Brian Consiglio: The world is becoming increasingly high-tech, including inside the classroom. One example is when college professors record their lectures and upload them online. But this still leaves students as just consumers of information and does not allow for student creativity. Mizzou College of Education Professor Isa Jahnke studied how professors in higher education used mobile technology in their classrooms. She found that the way in which professors use tech matters.

Isa Jahnke: “We wanted to do the study because we wanted to learn how teachers, professors and faculty at universities use mobile technologies, for example smartphones or iPads, to support student creativity in classrooms.”

Consiglio: Jahnke found that students who used technology in group settings to complete a project often had a better understanding of the content, along with exercising more creativity. For example, one group of students in a history class developed an app that teaches users about the history of the berlin wall. As a result, the students retained information about the events of the Berlin Wall better.

Jahnke: “The research is useful for professors to rethink how they design their existing courses. We can, for example, learn how to open up the existing courses, going away from pure lecturing where the students are just consumers of information to a meaningful learning approach with technologies where students are able to come up with creative and novel solutions on existingproblems that we have in society.”

Consiglio: I’m Brian Consiglio with a Spotlight on Mizzou.