I write regularly about the value of making mistakes and the potential of learning from them. No, I’m not advocating making mistakes on purpose; most of us slip up plenty without prior planning. The problem ...
Any list of best practices has great appeal—sometimes immense popularity. And for good reason. Like prepackaged food, they’re ready to go. For busy faculty who aspire to teach well, they provide time-saving instructional sustenance. There’s ...
Getting a handle on the effectiveness of widely used instructional strategies is a challenge. They’re used in different fields and with broadly divergent design details. Moreover, studying the effects of strategy as it’s being used ...
Where do you stand on extra credit? All but one of the more than 20 faculty who shared their views with us endorsed it. By contrast, in a 1989 survey of faculty across a range ...
Cases have a long tradition in business education, with a robust body of scholarship supporting their use. They been used for years as part of medical education’s problem-based learning approaches and more recently in undergraduate ...
These extra credit assignments were submitted in response to our request for samples. We’ve organized them by the goals they seek to advance. In some cases, they are condensed versions of the assignment descriptions submitted, ...
It’s not often I write a column and then continue to wonder about the arguments it sets forth, but that’s been happening with my recent “Fair Grading Policies” column. Author Daryl Close, a philosophy professor, ...
Exchanging ideas, sharing information, and voicing opinions in an online course isn’t the same as doing so when the class meets face-to-face. Even so, some of the same problems emerge: not all students participate, and ...
Quiet and talkative students find their places on opposites sides of a continuum. At the ends are students who never speak and students who never miss an opportunity to speak. Most talkative students aren’t at ...
In most courses the quiet students outnumber the talkative ones. And although some quiet students occasionally speak, there are others who make their way through the course silently. Quite appropriately, with publication of Susan Cain’s ...