In past essays, I’ve covered how students fool themselves into believing they have mastered concepts when they really haven’t and how faculty can fool themselves into thinking they have taught effectively when they haven’t. Now I want to focus on institutions of higher learning. I
One of the fundamental tenets of higher education is that students should take notes on what their instructor says in order to study from those notes later. But there are two problems with this method. First, note-taking requires focusing on what was said in the
Could doodles, sketches, and stick figures help to keep the college reading apocalypse at bay?
Ask any group of faculty whether they include critical thinking on their course learning objectives, and nearly every person will say that they do. This is not just because faculty were handed down a mandate or made to hew to some university policy. My many
In recent years, many of my students have told me they feel bored, anxious, and lonely. Some explain that they often reach for their phones and scroll just to fill the silence. Listening to them, I’ve learned that this habit is not really about killing
If you’ve taught for any length of time, you’ve probably heard this or gotten similar messages multiple times from students. The bottom line is that it’s easy for students to fool themselves into thinking they’ve learned effectively when they really haven’t. This is especially true
Higher education faculty work with a wide range of adults, from first-year undergraduates to advanced graduate students to faculty colleagues and other professionals. Since learning can happen anywhere, at any time, our roles vary as mentors, facilitators, and coaches. Ultimately, our students are all considered
Teachers focus on developing students’ conscious learning and understanding of concepts, but there is a whole other dimension of mental life that teachers also influence: implicit thought and memory. Psychologists distinguish between explicit and implicit mental processes.[1] We are consciously aware of explicit processes, as
I’ve taught a course in statistics for psychological research for almost 40 years. No student becomes a psych major because they get to take statistics, but it is a commonly required course for the major because it is fundamental to understanding and conducting research. Taking
I teach a lot of 100-level courses—the kind all students need to take from multiple disciplines to satisfy general education requirements. Often these courses are full of college first-years, but I’ve discovered that, whatever year they are, students harbor deep misconceptions about how learning works.
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