Did you know that the average attention span in the year 2000 was 12 seconds? And 12 years later, in the year 2012, the average attention span had gone down to eight seconds. So by my calculations, in the year 2036, the attention span will
In higher education, we often think about how we can improve our teaching and learning. If you are like me, you wrestle with this question after a well-prepared lecture does not go as expected, or as you are trying to make sense of your student
Some tips to be more creative, optimistic, enthusiastic, approachable, and humorous.
“At a superficial level, everyone ‘knows’ what mentoring is. But closer examination indicates [such wide variation . . .] that the concept is devalued, because everyone is using it loosely, without precision, and it may become a short-term fad” (p. 3). That observation was made
After teaching statistics classes for more than twenty-five years and seeing so many students struggling to be successful, I became increasingly frustrated by the fact that no matter how much I believed myself to be approachable, available, and willing to help students outside of class,
Most of the talk in courses is about content, but there is also talk about noncontent matters. We may try to create a sense of community in the course; we may try to motivate students, before or after exams; we may try to explain why
These behaviors, studied at length in the Communication Education research, “refer to any instructor classroom behavior that interferes with instruction and learning.” (p. 133). They were first identified in research published in 1991and have in subsequent studies been shown to compromise students’ affective learning, their
That’s not a new finding, and it’s something most instructors already know, but it’s the size of the difference that’s often underestimated. Two recent studies, both asking different research questions and using different methodologies, offer still more evidence that the relationship between teachers and students
Being flexible is one of those ongoing challenges for teachers. There’s the desire to be responsive to student needs—life does happen—but then students have been known to take advantage of teachers and granting the request of one student opens the door and makes it difficult
Faculty are urged to turn classrooms into activity centers where lively discussion serves as an antidote to bored students zoning out of class lectures and zoning into images and words appearing on their screens of various sorts. Eliminating boredom in my classrooms is welcomed, but
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