Teaching Tip: The past is always with us.

This week’s principle from the Lifelong learning at Work and at Home website focuses on prior knowledge: New information learned depends heavily upon prior knowledge and experience. This principle stresses the importance of getting to know our students so we can help them learn more effectively.  From infancy onward, learning is based on building new [...]

Teaching Tip: Variety is the spice of learning

This week’s post summarizes and comments on two closely related principles from the Life Long Learning at Work and at Home website. Principle 2: Varying learning conditions makes learning more effortful but results in enhanced long-term retrieval. Principle 3:  Learning is generally enhanced when learners are required to take information that is presented in one [...]

Use Cognitive Research to Enhance Teaching: Practice at Retrieval

Welcome back!  One of my New Year’s resolutions is to get the blog up and running again, so I hope this post will be the first of several this semester. As scholars, we are always looking for high quality research related to our disciplines and the courses we teach.  Why not apply that lens to [...]

Going multimodal

Multimodal teaching was a hot topic on one of my listservs recently.  The question there was:  is there evidence that multimodal presentation is really helpful for student learning?  The answer:  yes. What do I mean by multimodal teaching?  In a multimodal teaching segment, students encounter the same material in different ways.  Research from cognitive psychology [...]

Teaching Tip: Research on learning, or why we have two hands

Making sense of learning research is not for the faint of heart.  This week as I was reviewing the article “25 learning principles to guide pedagogy and the design of learning environments” to find some helpful hints, I realized that some of the principles on that list seemed to be contradicting others on the same [...]

Teaching Tip: Testing..testing..testing

I’ve never been a huge fan of tests, preferring more “real world” tasks like projects and papers.  My attitude probably stems from too many memories of cramming for tests and then forgetting most of what I “learned”.  But research in learning and cognition suggests that tests can be very effective learning tools (not just assessment [...]