Why do students come to class unprepared? Because teachers tend to lecture on the material, and students find it most efficient to let them lecture first and then read later. But if your students came to class prepared, would they acquire a deeper understanding of
When I first began working with teachers who represented different disciplines, I learned that a lot of college professors are very stuck on their own content. And they believe that it, along with the pedagogy that they use for presenting it to students, is what
When final paper time looms, students become increasingly anxious about the grammatical errors they believe lurk in their writing. That belief is so strong it can undermine their drafts. Even worse, students have come to expect that their professors will point out errors—and make corrections—that
It’s time to hand back the exams, and no one has done well. You’re as disappointed as your students will be when they see their grades. How do you get the class back on track? Offering extra credit assignments is one approach, but will that
This assignment gets students thinking about and revealing questions and issues of importance to them.
Students in a general psychology course completed weekly surveys on various aspects of the class. They reported their attendance, and if they used laptops during class for things other than note taking (like checking email, instant messaging, surfing the net, playing games). They also rated
It’s jargon, and in this case “knowledge decay” refers to how fast students forget what they have learned for a test. There’s a general sense among faculty that they forget a lot, quickly. Research would respond to our general impressions with answers that clearly support
Many students don’t pay much attention in class. They come to class, but most of the time, only their bodies are present. When they study, that demanding task occurs as they attend to a host of other, often more engaging mental activities. It is a
Students and questions: it’s a topic written about with some regularity in this publication (and on the Teaching Professor Blog, for that matter). The concern starts with the quantity and quality of questions students ask in courses, but it goes beyond that, as Mara Brecht
Assignments are one of those ever-present but not-often-thought-about aspects of teaching and learning. Pretty much every course has them, and teachers grade them. The grade indicates how much the student learned by doing them. But is this learning something that students recognize? Too often students
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