Active learning is the new standard for teaching in higher education. As more faculty seek to expand their teaching practices by including active learning activities that promote higher levels of learning, many are doing so in small doses by temporarily postponing traditional lectures in favor of group activities. While there is evidence demonstrating that active learning practices can facilitate higher performance and information retention, our previous work showed that social personality differences can affect an individual’s performance in group-oriented active learning exercises. The results from this work indicated a possible dose-dependent effect driving the correlations observed between performance and social personality compared to passive lectures. This study builds on our previous work by analyzing if hosting comparatively few active learning classes is leading to a dose-dependent effect on student performance by personality type in the active learning setting. Our findings from this research demonstrate that social personality-based differences in performance on topics taught using active learning diminish with increased exposure to active learning. We also found that students of all personality types perform better on memorization-based questions than on higher-order questions in general, but that their performance on higher-order thinking questions improved after participating in active learning.

A common course activity used by emergency management faculty is the screening of Hollywood disaster films to provide students an opportunity to apply key disaster concepts learned in lecture. When college courses were abruptly moved online in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began in the United States, emergency management faculty had to quickly modify this assignment to meet the needs of the online format. This paper reports the experience of several faculty in modifying this pedagogical technique, as well as identifies unintended benefits including the opportunity for professional networking, science communication, and public engagement.