Posts Tagged ‘Teaching and Learning’
January 11 - How Students Learn: Thoughts from a Favorite Author
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
We all have our favorite authors … of course, most of mine write about teaching and learning. I read everything I can find written by my favorites and they remain favorites because their writing seldom disappoints. Peter J. Frederick, a history professor at Wabash College—he may be retired by now—is one of my favorite authors.
December 12 - Our Top 11 Most Popular Articles for 2011, part 1
By: Mary Bart in Trends in Higher Education
As another year draws to a close, the editorial team at Faculty Focus looks back on some of the top articles of the past year. Throughout 2011, we published nearly 250 articles. The articles covered a wide range of topics – from academic integrity to online course design. In a two-part series, which will run today and Wednesday, we’re revealing the top 11 articles for 2011. Each article’s popularity ranking is based on a combination of the number of comments and shares, e-newsletter open and click-thru rates, and other reader engagement metrics.
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.
March 2 - Great Expectations: Helping Students Take Responsibility for Learning
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
This week I’ve been reading up on a variety of group structures now being used, mainly in the sciences, to get students working together on understanding and mastering course material. As I read about these interesting models, I keep hearing faculty respond: “Great, but I teach content that must be covered in this course.” And that excuse prevents them from considering any strategy that diminishes the amount of content they can get through in a class period, even though most are wise enough to know that just because it’s been covered doesn’t mean it’s been learned.
December 20 - Helping Students See Correlation Between Effort and Performance
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning
One of the student engagement techniques described in Elizabeth F. Barkley’s Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty has students predicting and reflecting on their exam preparation and performance. It’s a technique that helps students see the correlation between their efforts and their exam scores, as well as one that helps them assess the effectiveness of the study strategies they use.
December 16 - Four Characteristics of Outstanding Teachers
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies
The quest to identify the ingredients, components, and qualities of effective instruction has been a long one. Starting in the 1930s, researchers sought to identify the common characteristics of good teachers. Since then, virtually everybody who might have an opinion has been asked, surveyed, or interviewed.
August 19 - The Three Big Questions Faculty Need to Ask
By: Mary Bart in Curriculum Development
The growth of knowledge within your discipline is what makes being a professor so exciting, but it also presents new challenges–particularly when it comes to teaching. Because the time allotted for each course remains constant and the content that could be included in any course continues to grow, you may find it difficult to try to cram all this information into a course.
May 20 - Inquiry into the College Classroom
By: Paul Savory, PhD, and Amy Goodburn, PhD in Teaching and Learning
Are our students learning? Are they developing? Are we having an impact? These questions are only a small sample of those that faculty ask before, during, and after each course that they teach. Faculty often attempt to answer such questions using the evidence they have—student remarks during class and office hours, student performance on examinations or homework assignments, student comments solicited via teaching evaluations, and their own classroom observations. While these forms of evidence can be useful, such informal assessments also can be misleading, particularly because they are generally not systematic or fully representative.
November 18 - Can Clickers Enhance Student Learning?
By: Mary Bart in Effective Teaching Strategies
Dr. Peter M. Saunders, director of Oregon State University’s Center for Teaching and Learning, has heard the horror stories, and understands why faculty were hesitant to use clickers in the early years.
November 6 - Tips for Managing Large Online Classes
By: Rob Kelly in Online Education
The following tips from Susan Ko, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland University College, will help you maintain course quality and interaction in large online courses:
