It’s time we started exploring some of the tough questions on texting. The May issue of The Teaching Professor newsletter contains highlights from a survey of almost 300 marketing majors about their texting in class. The results confirm what I’m guessing many of us already
“What did you think about the reading?” can serve as an acceptable discussion prompt if your class is reading a novel, but a question like that doesn’t generate much response when the assigned chapter is in an engineering mechanics book or a principles of accounting
I have been known to berate the quality of classroom discussions—student-teacher exchanges that occur in the presence of mostly uninvolved others. Perhaps instead of berating I ought to be trying to help faculty improve how they lead discussions, and that has gotten me thinking about
I always hesitate to do posts on student ratings. Every teacher has opinions, a lot of which aren’t supported by the research. But this post is on a topic about which there is little disagreement. Students don’t take the process all that seriously, especially now
How much instructional advice have you heard over the years? How often when you talk about an instructional issue are you given advice, whether you ask for it or not? Let’s say you’re a new teacher or you’re teaching a class you haven’t taught before
Is that possible? At first pass, it doesn’t seem likely, but the study referenced below contains 10 years’ worth of data confirming that student learning increased with less content and more inquiry. Let’s explore the context and detail the findings.
Remember that article in the March issue describing how a sociologist used reflective writing to improve his teaching? Here’s another short testimony to add to that one. Matthew Liberatore explains in Chemical Engineering Education that a laboratory notebook holds an invaluable collection of procedures, measurements,
Here’s the scenario: Students are taking a chemical thermodynamics course. The instructor solicits clicker responses to a conceptually based multiple-choice question. Students answer individually, write a brief explanation in support of their answer, and indicate how confident they are that their answer is correct. They
The benefits of concept maps are well established. They encourage students to organize knowledge and do so in ways meaningful to them. They help students sort out, prioritize, and understand relationships between terms, concepts, and ideas. Students can also use concept maps to forge relationships
Almost 800 business, engineering, education, and health services students completed a fairly typical plagiarism survey. They were asked how strongly they agreed with a statement defining plagiarism as copying text and inserting it in a paper without citing the source. They were asked how often
