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
It has been said that experience is the best teacher, and for this reason, many instructors and educational programs are adding experiential components to their curriculum. One form of experiential learning is service learning, where students apply what they are studying to improving their local
How can a popular party game help students become better evaluators of the credibility of the information they find on the internet?
Two Truths and a Lie involves making three statements about yourself, one of them a lie; the challenge for the rest of the
The pandemic’s effects on higher education are giving us the chance to rethink, reexamine, and redesign our teaching efforts. From objectives to tech use to assignment choices, opportunities abound. I want to include the time factor in this process—not the time we put into course
I often wonder what students think about the assignments we create. In my experience, they frequently see assignments as having a limited and somewhat task-oriented relationship with their course work. Their concern about what counts for a grade is frequently one-dimensional and often usurps the
One of my primary objectives in my upper-level history classes is for students to develop their research skills. This involves the long, laborious task of sifting through primary and secondary sources to identify patterns and make discoveries.
We’ve chosen to finish up our series on assignments with information on learning logs. Like the innovative and interesting assignments we plan to continue highlighting, learning logs are versatile and can be used to accomplish a range of learning out comes.
Our March installment in the collection of materials on assignments included an assignment template we proposed could be used as part of the assignment design process. We used the template to describe an assignment in which students read the syllabus and responded to it in
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