ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. STEM Education
Applied Active Learning in STEM Using a Strategic Session in an Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Course
Provisionally accepted
- School of Master and Professional Development Program, BAU International University Batumi, Batumi, Georgia
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Strategic sessions, widely used in business and public administration to address open-ended problems, remain underexplored as a teaching method in higher education. This study reports a pedagogical experiment adapting this format as a reproducible active learning approach in an undergraduate Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) course, representing a STEM-related field. The activity was implemented as a team-based online session involving 36 undergraduate students. Working in assigned teams, students progressed through predefined stages of information gathering, brainstorming, problem analysis, and stakeholder negotiation, designed to support structured discussion of applied OHS problems. Engagement and learning-related perceptions were collected through student surveys, moderator observations, and measures of participation, and analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods. Results showed that 89% of students reported high or maximum engagement of their peers, consistent with moderator evaluations. The structured design and role allocation supported collaborative discussion and the application of theoretical OHS concepts to practice-oriented problems. Students reported perceived gains in discipline-specific knowledge—such as understanding occupational risks, regulatory requirements, and preventive strategies—and transferable competencies, including teamwork, problem-solving, and argumentation. Strategic sessions are presented as a reproducible active learning format for STEM-related courses.
Keywords: active learning2, occupationalhealth and safety5, STEM education6, strategic session1, student engagement3, Teamwork4
Received: 06 Oct 2025; Accepted: 26 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Mikhailidi and Tskhvediani. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Aleksandra Mikhailidi
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