How can we engage students who are enrolled in large courses so they become active learners? I used four activities designed to get students involved, support their efforts to learn, and personalize the material in an introductory psychology course. How well did they work? For
The life of a faculty member is filled with noisy busyness—planning class sessions, grading, meeting with students, advising, committee work, research, scholarship, and publications. We are consumed by the swirl of activities and the need to juggle all these responsibilities without dropping one of the
Most teachers consider Wikipedia the devil’s realm, a place where rumor and misinformation are spread. But in reality, studies have found that Wikipedia has an accuracy of a regular encyclopedia. Inaccurate information is quickly corrected by volunteer editors, and there are strict standards for entering
Students will naturally start losing motivation in a college course over time. This is an even bigger problem in online courses, where students can easily feel distanced from the instructor and each other. As an instructor, I notice this as a steadily deteriorating quality of
The flipped classroom (or “blended learning”) has become a hot topic in education over the past few years. The concept makes perfect sense. Traditional courses are set up to “push” content out to students during the face-to-face meeting, and then have them apply that content
When final projects are submitted, no one likes to believe that their students haven’t “tried,” but sometimes it’s hard to draw any other conclusion. Most of us work with at least a few (sometimes more) students whose papers are littered with errors. When we are
A central goal of education is teaching critical-thinking skills. Inquiry-based teaching is an excellent path to this goal. Based partly on the philosophy that “humans are born inquirers,” the method focuses on student discovery over pushing information from the instructor. Along the way, the students
For many years now, highlights from individual research studies that compare the effects of various active-learning strategies with lecture approaches have appeared in The Teaching Professor. Consistently, the results have favored active learning. But beyond a couple of small integrative analyses, what we’ve had so
Frequently, in our beginning accounting course, some of our students find a topic or procedure completely incomprehensible. Since these topics are discussed and illustrated in the textbook, our initial reaction was that these students simply weren’t doing the assigned reading. In some cases this was
A “flipped exam” is how the authors describe this unique group exam activity. The students, all enrolled in a post-baccalaureate program at Wayne State University School of Medicine, had applied to the medical school and not been accepted, but showed promise. This 10-month program helps
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