Posts Tagged ‘improve student learning’
April 4 - ‘What Works’ in the Messy Landscape of Teaching and Learning
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies
The title is borrowed from text in an excellent article that challenges our use of the “what works” phrase in relationship to teaching and learning. Biology professor Kimberly Tanner writes, “… trying to determine ‘what works’ is problematic in many ways and belies the fundamental complexities of the teaching and learning process that have been acknowledged by scholars for thousands of years, from Socrates, to Piaget, to more recent authors and researchers.” (p. 329) She proceeds to identify six reasons why the phrase hinders rather than fosters an evidence-based approach to teaching reform (in biology, her field, but these reasons relate to all disciplines). “Language is powerful,” she notes. (p. 329) We use it to frame issues, and when we do, it guides our thinking.
February 27 - Crib Sheets Help Students Prioritize and Organize Course Content
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
Most faculty are familiar with the strategy: students are allowed to bring into the exam a card or sheet of paper that they’ve prepared beforehand and that contains information they think might help them answer exam questions. I became convinced of the strategy’s value when my husband was an undergraduate. He and his engineering study buddies convened at our place the night before an exam to decide what they should put on the 4 x 6 note card they were allowed to take into a mechanical engineering course. They spent hours in heated discussion. They thought they were just figuring out what went on the card, but in fact they were sorting out, prioritizing, organizing, and integrating the content of the course. Their discussion accomplished that way more effectively than any review session I had conducted. Of course, being engineers, they decided on what they needed and then reduced the size so that when they got it on the card they needed a magnifying glass to read it.
January 22 - Online Homework Systems Can Boost Student Achievement
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Instructional Design
Online homework has great appeal for instructors, especially those teaching large courses. By using online assignments, instructors don’t have to collect, grade, and promptly return large quantities of homework assignments. Online programs provide instructors with feedback on student performance that can be used to modify the presentation of material in class. Online homework is also beneficial to students. They get feedback promptly, even more promptly than that provided by very conscientious instructors. Online homework can also be designed so that it allows students to work on areas that frequently cause trouble and/or on areas where the individual student is having difficulty.
October 31 - Teaching Metacognition to Improve Student Learning
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
Metacognition can be a word that gets in the way of students’ understanding that this “thinking about thinking” is really about their awareness of themselves as learners. Most students don’t spend much time thinking about learning generally or how they learn specifically. In order to become independent, self-directed learners, they need to be able to “orchestrate” their learning. That’s the metaphor the National Research Council uses to describe planning for learning, monitoring it as it occurs, and then evaluating both what has been learned and how it was learned.
May 23 - Shining a Light on Your Assignments
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
Not so long ago I challenged us to consider how our collections of active learning activities fit together and that has gotten me thinking about the collection of assignments we have students complete in a course. How do they fit together? Why have we chosen that particular group?
March 5 - Getting Students to Act on Our Feedback
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
I’m still pondering why students don’t make better use of the feedback we provide on papers, projects, presentations, even the whole class feedback we offer after we’ve graded a set of exams. Yes, we do see improvement as we look back across a course, but we also see a lot of the same errors repeated throughout the course.
February 21 - The Challenge of Teaching Content When Test Stakes Are High
By: David Scott Trochtenberg in Teaching and Learning
As educators, we share the challenge of how to teach an overwhelming amount of content in a short period of time to a sometimes motivated but often bored and listless student population. I do believe that most students enter higher education with a true desire to master their subject area. Some are even interested in learning for the sake of learning. But lectures overloaded with PowerPoint slides quickly change the motivation to extrinsic. This is especially true in fields where high-stakes testing determines future career options.
October 12 - Seven Keys to Improving Teaching and Learning
By: Mary Bart in Teaching and Learning
Most students hate cumulative exams, largely because of the sheer volume of course material they need to study and demonstrate proficiency in. But there’s another reason, especially in courses where there are formulas or specific tools that need to be used, and it has to do with how well they truly understand the course material.
September 8 - Student Learning in Progress: Deciding When and How to Intervene
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
I’ve been a bit surprised as I continue to work on the new edition of my Learner-Centered Teaching book at the number of things I still haven’t figured out in the 10 years since I first wrote the book. There are some challenging conundrums associated with implementing these approaches.
July 21 - 7 Learner-Centered Principles to Improve Your Teaching
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
Most of us are being asked to do more—teach more, assess more, report more, publish more. This seminar will help you use your limited time wisely, because it’s done all the heavy lifting. You’ll not only gain new insights into how students learn but also learn about practical and effective teaching strategies that reflect the latest research.
