Increasing Student Engagement and Retention Using Classroom Technologies ─ Classroom Response Systems and Mediated Discourse Technologies

The eleven chapters presented by the editors (both of St. John's U.) in this collection examine adoption principles and applications of classroom-mediated discourse technologies in higher education, which are defined as a set of technologies that facilitate student participation in learning activities in the classroom. The chapters on adoption discuss the ways in which these technologies should be considered a means to foster social-learning communities and participatory systems in which inquiry is fostered at all levels as a means to assess knowledge, query student perspectives, solve problems and promote critical and collaborative thinking while fostering a greater sense of belonging, interactivity, and group cohesiveness among students. The chapters on application discuss the use of these technologies for non-obtrusive classroom monitoring, real-time queries and responses for identifying problem areas in the topic being covered, audience-paced instruction and peer-based instruction for collaborative and social learning, anonymity of responses to provide a non-threatening means of student assessment, and collection and analysis of responses over longer terms in order to summatively and longitudinally assess group progress. Distributed in North America by Turpin Distribution. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)