Active learning is a mostly meaningless educational buzzword. It’s a feel-good, intuitively popular term that indicates concern for student learning and success, but at some point we must admit that it lacks any useful definition and is holding back progress on teaching.
Exit tickets are simple diagnostic assessments given to students at the end of a class. The “ticket” in the name refers to the fact that students originally needed to pass the assessment to get permission to leave, but now they are generally for instructors to
In one of the most memorable courtroom scenes in cinematic history, Tom Cruise is Lieutenant Junior Grade Kaffee questioning Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup. Jessup asks, “You want answers?” to which Kaffee responds, “ I want the truth!” Jessup prefaces an impressive, passionately delivered monologue with
Physical training involves two fundamental phases: a stress phase, where muscles are exercised to fatigue, and a rest phase, where the body repairs the damage of the stress to become stronger. A common mistake among athletes is to forgo the rest phase by working out
Students often underestimate how much study time is required to master course concepts for an exam (Chew, 2014). Weaker students in particular tend to be grossly overconfident about how quickly they can learn. As a result, many students wait too long to begin studying for
I didn’t always offer full-throated endorsements of audiobooks in my literature courses. Maybe that’s because I’m not really an audiobook person. Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve always preferred to engage in real reading than outsource the job to some random celebrity voice actor.
Do people learn in the same way or different ways? According to cognitive science, the answer is the former. There are general principles of learning that apply to everyone, such as the importance of attention and the value of good learning strategies like spacing and
A common piece of teaching advice—“Teach them like they are your own children”—takes on new meaning when a close friend’s children, one of your relatives, or your own children get ready to go to college. If you have tried giving your children advice, you, like
This semester I am teaching an undergraduate biology course on biofeedback, self-regulation, and intergenerational resilience. One of the books we read is Robert M. Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. The book’s thesis is that humans experience chronic stress in ways that animals like zebras
It’s hard to determine just how well students understand the concepts we teach. Our usual criterion for understanding is that students give a correct answer on an exam, but that leaves much to be desired (Uminski et al., 2024). In multiple-choice exams, the student may
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