Evidence shows what many faculty already know: that many students are not doing the assigned readings for their classes. The numbers are striking. Today’s college student spends an average of six to seven hours per week on assigned readings, down from 24 hours in
Infographics have become a nearly ubiquitous accompaniment to written reports and presentations. For today’s students, visual communication skills are as important as written and verbal ones. Plus, adding an infographic to a text assignment gets students to think about the central message they are
Most instructors know the value of YouTube videos for supplementing instructional material. YouTube has a wealth of instructor- and expert-created content that can vividly illustrate course concepts. But instructors can use YouTube for more than just instructional content. They can also use it as
Assigned short papers with research and application components expose students to the analytical process of research and writing; too often, however, students turn in papers without any appropriate or reliable sources. We have noted in recent years that college students’ abilities to distinguish appropriate academic
We all do it. The semester is drawing to a close, the students are tired, we’re tired. There’s one more assignment to hand out, that major project that’s supposed to somehow capture from the entirety of students’ learning from the past semester. Back in week
Most academic courses require learners to do some amount of reading to provide background in core concepts, to demonstrate applications and use cases, and to elaborate intriguing new applications and directions—or maybe just to navigate the various prompts and guidelines. But reading is a skill,
What do you want your students to learn? What really matters to you?
I’ll give you an example. William Carlos Williams once wrote,
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
Student assignments and course materials turning up on the internet is an ongoing problem for instructors as it facilitates cheating. After finding our quiz questions in decks of “flash cards” on Chegg and our students’ assignments on Course Hero, we began investigating creative solutions.
As faculty we tend to chalk up students’ failure on assessments to lack of effort or lack of understanding of the material. But often that failure is due instead to the gap between instruction and performance, where misunderstandings intervene to undermine performance. Guided evaluation of
A lot of professors assign readings as follows: students read a piece of text, respond to it in some way, and come prepared to discuss it in class. Yet over half of students don’t do the assigned readings, and often it’s because professors assign too
Magna Publications © 2024 All rights reserved