Call me crazy, but undergraduate courses should be qualitatively different from their high school antecedents. One key change? At the college level, students should be moving toward understanding things instead of just knowing them. How can we introduce and reinforce the difference?
Please show me innovative teaching strategies I can actually use!
As educators, we are often seeking new and exciting ways to engage our students, only to find that our teaching load leaves little time for focusing on the more innovative approaches. This dilemma is compounded
Self-assessment is important for effective learning. Students who are skilled at examining their own thought processes can use the resulting information to learn and perform well in testing situations. In addition, those who effectively use feedback from exams can raise their level of learning. I
Students can learn from and with each other—that’s supported by multitudes of research and maybe in your own experience as well. The learning doesn’t happen automatically, and the group study doesn’t rule out the necessity of individual study. But study groups can improve exam scores
Do you see the same problems in student assignments time after time? Do you find that your students don’t act on the feedback that you have spent so much time providing?
Most teachers already spend time regularly reviewing course content. What’s different with these approaches is that they get students doing the reviewing and they do so with activities that model evidence-based exam preparation strategies.
We know a lot about study strategies—how they can be used to improve exam performance and promote a deeper understanding of the material. We also know that many students are attempting to learn course content without particularly strong study skills. They procrastinate and have short
How much do your students know about effective study strategies? Most students think they know what works, but their knowledge is anecdotal and experience based. Much research has been conducted on study strategies, with some strategies proven more effective than others. Wouldn’t students benefit from
As instructors, we often assume that students must learn from us and no others. But feedback on performance is one of the most important factors to learning, and peer feedback can fill in the gaps in instructor feedback or preempt instructor feedback to improve student
Consider this scenario: Two sections of an art history course taught by two different instructors. Both professors show slides of paintings—six paintings each by 12 different painters, a total of 72 paintings. Professor A shows all six paintings by the artist, one after the other.
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