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.
What is the best way for teachers to develop student expertise in a subject area? Currently, there are two competing schools of thought. One school, which I will refer to as inquiry-based instruction, believes that pedagogy should prioritize teaching conceptual understanding using complex problems so
In a world of deepfakes, it’s not uncommon to see videos of famous celebrities saying or doing things that the real celebrity did not say or do. Stories also abound of individuals turning to AI companions for support, company, and even raunchy love affairs (Hill,
What percentage of numbers contain the digit 3? You might guess 10 percent, but in reality, almost all numbers contain the it. If you want to know why, you’ll need to watch this excellent Numberphile video for an explanation.
Active learning is a mostly meaningless educational buzzword. It’s a feel-good, intuitively popular term that indicates concern for student learning and success, but at some point we must admit that it lacks any useful definition and is holding back progress on teaching.
