On a recent family hike, we tried out a new trail. Winding four miles through forests of Douglas firs, oaks, and ponderosa pines, it switchbacked, climbed, descended, and wove through verdant vistas. Not all in the party were enthralled by the natural splendor, and I
One of the most frustrating things that can happen in higher education is that we assign students a reading that is really interesting and important for an upcoming class discussion. We then go on to design the day’s activities around the reading so that students
When I was in graduate school, I had to pass four written preliminary exams over various subject areas in psychology. Each exam was three hours long, closed book, and composed of essay and short answer questions. The questions could cover any topic in the subject
It happens almost every time: I’ll be running a workshop on assignment design, or on curricular reform, or on day-to-day instruction. Someone will raise their hand and say they teach chemistry or sociology or art history. They’ll look bashful, or angry, or curmudgeonly. “I can’t
While there has been considerable interest in cognitive science in education, limited numbers of educators are using this information to inform teaching and learning. That’s according to Weinstein et al. (2018), who identify six effective cognitive learning strategies: spaced or distributed practice, interleaving, retrieval practice,
Over the past few years, there has been a lot of discussion about student persistence in online education and how to improve it (Lakhal et al., 2021). While exit interviews show that the most common reasons that students leave are ones they cannot directly control,
“Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams wrote over 250 years ago. He was right in more ways than one—for our field of history and probably for yours too.
Despite all the manufactured uproar over the teaching of “divisive concepts” like critical race theory (Waxman 2021),
Memory is a bread-and-butter topic in my academic field of cognitive psychology—something that we’ve been systematically researching for over a half century now and where important discoveries continue to happen. As many of my disciplinary colleagues have pointed out, memory theory is also an incredibly
Multiple-choice questions get a bad rap, and it is easy to see why. Most do not assess higher-order thinking—you either know the answer or you don’t. And if you do know the correct choice, it does not reveal depth of knowledge. So how can we
In the very first article I ever wrote for The Teaching Professor, I quoted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities: “A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory
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