Faculty Focus

HIGHER ED TEACHING STRATEGIES FROM MAGNA PUBLICATIONS

Teaching and Learning

Rethinking Multiple Choice Tests for Assessing Student Learning

If you think multiple choice tests are only good to assess how well students memorized facts, it may be time to rethink your testing strategy. Although they are not appropriate for every situation, when properly developed, multiple choice tests can used to assess higher levels of thinking, including application and analysis.

Read More »

Top Teaching and Learning Challenges for 2009

EDUCAUSE, the association for information technology in higher education, released its list of Top Teaching and Learning Challenges for 2009. Voted on by the EDUCAUSE teaching and learning community, the top five challenges are:

Read More »

Helping First-semester Students Learn from Mistakes

Teaching first-semester students has its own special challenges. The students all start out optimistic, but soon, many start making poor decisions such as skipping class, not doing the reading, not participating or even paying attention, and missing small and not-so-small assignments. […]

Read More »

The Student Retention IQ Quiz

Are you among the thousands of professors being thrust into student success or retention duties and are still trying to learn the nomenclature? This 25-question quiz helps with some of the basic definitions and serves as a tool that can jumpstart campus discussions. […]

Read More »

Five Things College Professors Can Learn from K-12 Educators

Unlike their college-level counterparts, those who teach at the K-12 level spend a significant portion of their education studying the “how” of teaching. What they learn can be invaluable to college professors who enter classrooms with vast content knowledge but little (or no) background in teaching and learning. As those who teach these teachers, we’d like to showcase five teaching strategies college professors can learn from those who teach younger students. […]

Read More »

Should Instructors Provide Students with Complete Notes?

Course management software programs make it especially easy for instructors to provide students with a set of complete lecture notes. It seems that more instructors are doing this, as witnessed in the regularity with which students ask that the instructor’s notes be posted. But is giving students a complete set of notes a good idea?

Read More »