Effect of instructor’s actions and attitudes on student’s motivation and discussion process in TBL class for graduate students

Hokkaido University launched a new trans-graduate school education program “Nitobe School” in 2015 to develop students to achieve high-level transferable skills as well as to enhance their advanced specialty. In this paper, we report the case study of the effect of teaching actions and attitudes on student’s motivation and discussion for trans-graduate education in team-based-learning (TBL) style class. Since a TBL style class for graduate students who come from different faculties and departments is a new education style, the standard way of instruction needs to be established. Instructors are required to develop effective and efficient methods to educate students. To instruct interdisciplinary TBL class is considered as a faculty development for young instructors since it requires a new ability for applying their experience to supervise groups. We took place questionnaire surveys for both students and instructors to review their class organization and teaching approaches after each quarter. The questionnaire mainly follwed teacher’s actions during the class. From our study we concluded that the teacher’s actions and attitude had enough influence on the students. We further discuss a suitable number of assigned instructors in such TBL class according to the result and conclude at least two to supervise groups is better.