How well a class functions is the result of both what the teacher does and what the students do. The way we solicit course evaluation feedback reinforces students’ tendency to see the teacher as the one who’s responsible for whether it was a good class.
Most college faculty are terribly well-intentioned. We care about student success. The material in our courses is important; we want students to learn it. And so, we go out of our way, bend over backwards, and give students everything they need to do well in
To remediate the exam preparation study skills that beginning (and other) students are missing, most of us respond by telling students about those skills that make for good exam performance. “Come to class.” “Take notes.” “Keep up with reading.” “See me during office hours if
Interest in and use of peer assessment has grown in recent years. Teachers are using it for a variety of reasons. It’s an activity that can be designed so that it engages students, and if it’s well designed, it can also be an approach that
The reasons we should be letting students learn from and with each other continue to accumulate. Here are highlights from a large cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional study that explored the relationship between psychological well-being and peer learning experiences.
Two articles in this issue explore students learning from and with each other—one deals with peer feedback on writing and the other with the relationship between peer learning experiences and psychological well-being. Both contribute to the now voluminous literature on how and why students can
Student peer reviewers can provide feedback that improves writing. Lots of research can be cited in support of that statement. The problem, as Kimberly Baker sees it, is there’s “substantially less research available on the process of structuring the peer review to maximize these benefits”
Given the predilection of students to check devices of various sorts during class, even when there’s a prohibitive policy supported by regular teacher admonitions, it’s not surprising that students do it when they are studying, even when their study is focused on preparing for an
If you asked students to tell you what makes a course hard, what would they say? Would their answers be the same as yours? Would it be a problem if they weren’t?
When it comes to class notes, we all know that students would much rather get the teacher’s notes or PowerPoints than write their own for lots of reasons. They’re getting the content straight from the expert. It makes note-taking less work, and they don’t have
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