Traditional versus Interactive Teaching: Out with the Old, in with the New?

Interactive teaching environments help students transition from a 'consumer' of information to a generator of knowledge and help to create an educational setting that inspires and supports student engagement, while developing high-order skills and a deeper level of knowledge and understanding. To develop an interactive teaching condition, the author utilised the 'Citizen Scientist' approach. Citizen Science is defined as, 'scientific activities in which non-professional scientists volunteer to participate in data collection, analysis and dissemination of a scientific project.' The author hypothesised that this approach would be beneficial in a tertiary education setting with undergraduate students serving as the Citizen Scientists. In order to advance an understanding of the benefits of interactive teaching and to shape her own teaching practice using an evidence base, the author employed a repeated-measures counterbalanced mixed design to assess and compare the Traditional and Citizen Science teaching approaches. The author's results show that sometimes teachers simply cannot predict the success of a teaching practice, no matter the teaching experience they may have, nor the body of literature that may exist on the topic. The findings show that students are unlikely to be disadvantaged by the teaching style adopted. This gives teachers the scope to choose the style that they feel most confident using or to consider using a mix of the two approaches within their teaching.