For Those Who Teach

Professor smiling, students hands raised

Humor in the Classroom

Humor is one of my favorite teaching tools. I rely on it—when the room feels tense, when I sense learner drift, if I aspire to make a point more memorable. Humor doesn’t cause learning, but it does help create conditions conducive to it. It doesn’t

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Professor helping student in lecture hall

Finding Signs of Progress When Learning is Slow

Slow learning—not to be confused with slow learners—is learning that happens gradually, where understanding deepens slowly and skills advance but without immediate noticeable change. Some learning occurs all at once; suddenly, there’s a performance breakthrough. Typically, fast learning feels easy, even if it was proceeded

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Professor in front of class.

Getting More out of Exam Debriefs

Brief—that pretty much describes exam debriefs in many courses. The teacher goes over the most commonly missed questions, and the students can ask about answers but generally don’t. These kinds of debriefs don’t take up a lot of class time, but that’s about all that

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students working in a lab

Are We Afraid to Let Students Make Mistakes?

We know students are afraid of making mistakes, often dreadfully so. And so we talk a good line about the learning potential inherent in mistakes.

But are we afraid to let students make mistakes? Is it just a problem with students not wanting to be

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Professor with students

Why We Teach

We’re at that time of the academic year when the daily details begin to pile up. Teach a class, grade assignments, schedule advisees, and prep for tomorrow. It may not feel like a grind just yet, but it does require lots of focused energy, which

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female student studying in library

The Questions We Should Be Asking Our Students

How much do you know about how your students study? I’ve been asking the question a lot lately and I’d have to say most of the answers I’ve heard aren’t all that impressive. They’re more about how the faculty member thinks students study, how they

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study group

What Happens When Students Study Together?

I’m a strong believer in the benefits of students studying together, even though students don’t always understand or even experience the benefits. Oftentimes the potential gains of group study sessions are compromised by student behaviors. Students will saunter into study sessions, mostly not on time,

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student taking notes in class

Note-Taking Strategies to Improve Learning

This post shares a couple of items that pertain to student note-taking.

I’m always on the lookout for strategies that develop students’ note-taking skills, and economics professor Mark Maier shares a good one in the recent issue of College Teaching. He assigns a “rotating note

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I have been doing some reading and thinking about hard courses. Courses need to be challenging, but when they become too hard, students stop trying and little learning results. So how do we find that sweet spot between hard and not too hard? More importantly, how do we create that sweet spot in our own courses through the decisions we make about content, assignments, and exams? Teaching Professor Blog Finding that perfect balance is not particularly easy or straightforward. Course and instructor reputations are linked to rigor and high standards. Nobody wants to be known for teaching an easy course. Fine. Courses should have rigor and high standards, but how much and how high? There’s a tacit assumption that rigor and standards can always go higher, as well as a concern that both have declined. There’s research on hard and easy courses that’s relevant here, most of which gives students more credit than many faculty do. Students do not prefer easy courses. Consider the findings of a study based on interviews with students in several STEM fields. The interview questions were straightforward: “What has been your favorite (least favorite) class?” “What makes a class easy?” “Do you prefer easy classes or hard classes?” Student comments were placed in one of four categories: 1) easy courses students disliked; 2) easy courses they liked; 3) hard courses they liked; and 4) hard courses they disliked. “By far the majority of participant responses…fell into the category of hard classes that students liked” (p. 107). They used adjectives like “challenging” and “difficult” to describe these courses, and were more likely to offer positive than negative comments (70 percent to 30 percent). However, “for each student there appeared to be a demarcation line…that professors could cross by making their courses too difficult” (p. 109). Once that line was crossed, opinions of the course and instructor quickly changed to dislike. The too-difficult courses had grading systems students perceived as unfair, tests that were too hard, homework that was graded harshly, and feedback that was difficult to interpret. Some of the student comments were revealing. When exam averages are very low, even when a student scores above that average, there’s a feeling that he or she is not doing well in the course and not understanding the content. A tough fact needs to be faced here. If students have made a good faith effort to study for the exam (granted, not all do) and teachers have made a good faith effort to teach the content, yet most exam scores are still less than 50 percent, there’s a problem. So how do we find that productive place between hard and not too hard? For starters, we need to look for it purposefully, not arrive there by accident. And then, wherever we think we might be on that hard–easy continuum, we need to find out if that is, in fact, where the course resides. The authors of the study recommend that we give students opportunities to work on content in class and then listen closely to their conversations. Are they working hard, experiencing some frustration, but finally figuring it out? How much effort are they expending? We also need to ask our students. This can be done informally when they show up during office hours or for help sessions: “Tell me about your learning experiences in this course.” “How many of them are positive?” “How challenging is this course?” “What’s your biggest frustration in learning this material?” “How confident do you feel about learning this material?” Feedback can also be solicited with a short series of questions attached to exams (sometimes called exam wrappers): “Rate the overall difficulty of this exam.” “Was it harder, easier, or just about what you expected?” “How long do you think you would have to study to get an A on a test like this?” “List any questions you thought were impossibly difficult.” “Predict your exam score.” Graded exams should be analyzed for the most frequently missed questions. How was that material covered in class and/or the text? Why was the question missed so often? We should also talk with colleagues, informally sharing with those who teach the same course and more formally in departmental discussions of standards and rigor. Do we need to be more consistent across courses? Reference Martin, J. H., Hands, K. B., Lancaster, S. M., Trytten, D. A., & Murphy, T. J. (2008). Hard but not too hard: Challenging courses and engineering students. College Teaching, 56(2), 107–113.

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