blog posts

• To Improve Learning, More Researchers Say Students Should Feel Like They Belong in the Classroom

  Sep 13, 2017 5:00 pm

  About a third of the students who started college in 2009 have since dropped out, joining the millions of young adults who never entered college in the first place. Several years into a massive push by both the federal government and states to increase postsecondary graduation rates, education policymakers across the country are asking what else they can do to get more students to and through college. There’s one seemingly simple solution according to David Yeager, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin: Tell students they belong in higher education. However, they caution, the oft-used term growth mindset – the self-belief that a student’s abilities can grow through hard work and effort – doesn’t mean just praising kids for trying. Here is a description of the important student toolkit that focuses on qualities like grit, persistence, and learning from mistakes.

• Does It Matter How Students Feel about a Course?

  Sep 13, 2017 4:00 pm

  A line of research (done mostly in Australia and Great Britain) has been exploring what prompts students to opt for deep or surface approaches to learning. So far this research has established strong links between the approaches taken to teaching and those taken to learning. If teachers are focused on covering large amounts of content and do so with few attempts to involve and engage students, students tend to learn the material by memorizing it, often without much understanding of it. The 18-item instrument these researchers developed contains three subscales: one with questions associated with positive emotions such as pride, hope, and confidence, and two that measure negative emotions, one associated with frustration, anger, and boredom and the second with anxiety and shame. All three of these analyses “show significant relations between students’ emotional experience, their approaches to learning and their learning outcomes.” (p. 816). The more pragmatic question involves what teachers can do to help student have positive emotional experiences in the course.

• First Impressions: Activities for the First Day of Class

  Aug 9, 2017 9:45 am

  The old expression that you never have a second chance to make a first impression is certainly true in the classroom. Early in my career, I tried several first-day-of-class strategies, ranging from briefly introducing the course and dismissing students early to spending the entire time reviewing policies and procedures, but I began to feel that I was missing an important opportunity. Students are never more attentive than they are on the first day of class, when they’re eager to determine what kind of professor they’re dealing with, and although it is tempting to delay the real work of teaching and learning until the class list has stabilized, it can be difficult to change even the subtle norms that are established during this initial class. Several years ago, I tried a new approach, and I’ve been using it with great success ever since. Here are some strategies to help students begin using the skills they need.

• First Day of Class Activities that Create a Climate for Learning

  Aug 9, 2017 9:45 am

  There’s no discounting the importance of the first day of class. What happens that day sets the tone for the rest of the course. Outlined below are a few novel activities for using that first day of class to emphasize the importance of learning and the responsibility students share for shaping the classroom environment.

• Preparing Your Students for Final Exams

  Apr 26, 2017 8:00 am

  Preparing Your Students for Final Exams. Final Exams are stressful to make, to give, to take, and to grade—not to mention, a critical element in the evaluation of students. Typically comprehensive, they carry more weight than mid-terms and other tests given throughout they semester, and provide that “final” opportunity for students to demonstrate what they’ve learned. But, as reported in an article in UC-Berkeley’s New Faculty Teaching Newsletter, students often complain that “final exams do not always test the kinds of knowledge…asked for in homework or quizzes or presented in lectures” (Tollefson, 2007). Whether this complaint is valid or not, it is important that we devote our best effort to creating good final exams. Here are nine helpful suggestions to prepare your students.

• Alternatives to Traditional Testing

  Apr 26, 2017 8:00 am

  Alternatives to Traditional Testing.  It is too late now to change, but you should keep this in mind for next semester when you think of diverse ways of assessing student learning. For many courses of varying format and size, across many disciplines, reasonable alternatives to traditional tests (i.e., paper-based T/F or Multiple Choice) exist. In fact, oftentimes the alternatives may even be advantageous to promote student learning and be more authentic means of students demonstrating what they have learned at the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy (synthesis, analysis, evaluation).  Here are some suggestions.

• Rubrics: An Undervalued Teaching Tool

  Apr 12, 2017 8:00 am

  Rubrics: An Undervalued Teaching Tool. English teachers know a few things about managing the paper load. But managing isn’t leading. We should do more than manage the load; we should lead our students through the writing process (invention, drafting, and revising) to help them become independent thinkers who can effectively present their ideas to an audience. Rubrics offer an effective way to guide thinking and learning in any course that requires a paper or writing-intensive project.
  

• Why Open-book Tests Deserve a Place in Your Courses

  Apr 12, 2017 8:00 am

  Why Open-book Tests Deserve a Place in Your Courses. With the proliferation of learning management systems (LMS), many instructors now incorporate web-based technologies into their courses. While posting slides and readings online are common practices, the LMS can also be leveraged for testing. Purely online courses typically employ some form of web-based testing tool, but they are also useful for hybrid and face-to-face (F2F) offerings. Some instructors, however, are reluctant to embrace online testing. Their concerns can be wide ranging, but chief among them is cheating. Instead of wasting valuable time to deter cheating, open-book tests shift the onus of responsibility onto the students themselves. They are the ones who must track down answers and page through online notes.

• Test Anxiety: Causes and Remedies

  Mar 23, 2017 8:00 am

  Test Anxiety: Causes and Remedies. There hasn’t been a lot written recently about test anxiety, but that doesn’t mean it’s no longer an issue for a significant number of students. Those of us who don’t suffer from test anxiety—and I’m betting that’s most faculty—can find it hard to be sympathetic. Life is full of tests, and students need to get over it. Besides, if students have studied and prepared, there’s no reason for them to feel excessively anxious about a test. Perhaps we should start by reestablishing that test anxiety is a legitimate problem. A significant amount of research says that it can affect students in kindergarten right on up through college and graduate school.  Teachers can’t cure test anxiety. But they can offer remedies that students should be encouraged to try. Information about good study strategies should be included in every course.

• Testing what you’re Teaching without Teaching to the Test

  Mar 23, 2017 8:00 am

  Testing what you’re Teaching without Teaching to the Test. Have your students ever told you that your tests are too hard? Tricky? Unfair? Many of us have heard these or similar comments. The conundrum is that, in some circumstances, those students may be right. Assessing student learning is a big responsibility.  Assessments (e.g., tests, quizzes, projects, and presentations) that are haphazardly constructed, even if unintentionally, can result in scores and grades that misrepresent the true extent of students’ knowledge and leave students confused about what they should have been learning. Fortunately, in three easy steps, test blueprinting can better ensure that we are testing what we’re teaching.