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 [...]

Teaching Tip: Looking back to move forward

At this point in the semester, I’m certainly not going to suggest that you try some new approach to your teaching.   Instead, I’d like to share an idea that could help you develop your own teaching tips. On my faculty developers’ listserv, we have been discussing the practice of writing an end of semester “case [...]

Teaching Tip: Why aren’t you teaching us?

If you are using active learning methods in your classes, you may have gotten negative comments from your students along the lines of  “s/he should do her job and teach instead of just making us (fill in whatever active learning methods you are using here).”   Helping students understand WHY you are asking them to engage [...]

Teaching Tip: Studying that works

Those beginning of the semester flutters have subsided for most of us; add-drop is over, rosters are correct (for now anyway), expectations clarified and routines established. This part of the semester always seems to me like the calm before the storm. Students also settle into their routines, but are they good ones for learning? For [...]

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 [...]

A Tip to Pass Along to Your Students

Their learning style and your teaching style might not make much difference, but research points to one variable that really does improve student learning: variety. As Benedict Carey reports in the New York Times,  students who study the same material in different locations, or who mix up the type of material they study in a [...]

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 [...]