Teaching Students having Different Level of Prior Knowledge and Motivation

Abstract

Students have broad range of prior-knowledge, attitude and skills when they come to university and sometimes have misconceptions and beliefs that are very di cult to change. Teaching students with this diverse background is a challenging task and teacher has to come up with innovative ideas to handle this. A survey was conducted within Electrical and Information Technology (EIT) department at LTH to assess how teachers there see the prior knowledge issue, which showed some interesting results. Apart from prior knowledge students at university are motivated by either intrinsic or extrinsic factors and it is closely related to the approach they choose to learning. This report presents strategies that can be used in situations where students have dierent level of prior knowledge. Furthermore this report also outlines the role of a teacher in motivating the students.