I am thankful for Jennifer Trainor’s insightful “Assignment Details: What if You Provide Too Many?” She raises what should be a real concern for teaching professors: Am I doing too much for my students? In other words, are teachers compromising student learning when we compose
This installment of our continuing series on assignments is devoted to assignment clarity. We believe that many good assignments fall short of achieving what faculty expect because students struggle to understand what they are to do and why they are doing it. The assignment description
We’re interested in assignments. To us, they seem like a vital aspect of instruction that goes largely unexamined. What sparked our interest was the way students so often respond to written assignments: “What do you want?” or “I don’t understand what you want in this
One of the luxuries of this online format that we didn’t have when The Teaching Professor was a print publication is the ability to pursue topics more thoroughly, to come at them from different directions, and to assemble collections of resources related to them. We
In education, transparency is typically described as making teaching and learning visible. “Transparent teaching involves making the implicit explicit for students so they understand why they are engaged in certain tasks and what role the course plays in their learning journey,” according to a recent
When I was an undergraduate, I distinctly remember my political science professor informing the class, “If you take one thing away from your education, learn how to think critically by the time you leave here.” At that point in my life, his sage wisdom went
In most courses with some sort of research writing assignment, there’s a strongly worded prohibition against using Wikipedia. IT’S NOT A RELIABLE SOURCE! And measured by academic standards, it’s not. But faculty members Frances Di Lauro and Rebecca Johinke at the University of Sydney see
When the topic is critical thinking skills, the assumption is that everybody knows what it is, but when asked to define it, there’s usually some hesitation and the definitions don’t all agree. If pushed on the strategies used to develop these skills that everyone agrees
As a longstanding psychology faculty member at my institution, I routinely teach junior-level classes on research methods in the social sciences. Successful completion of an undergraduate course in research methods is vital not only in my field but in many others where, if not expected
As teachers, we see value in what we assign students, but students don’t always appreciate the relevance or understand the purpose of their assignments. Required readings are a great example of this disconnect. However, when students have some input into their learning, their response to
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