Motivating Students

Student-Generated Research Questions

Students and questions: it’s a topic written about with some regularity in this publication (and on the Teaching Professor Blog, for that matter). The concern starts with the quantity and quality of questions students ask in courses, but it goes beyond that, as Mara Brecht

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Assignments: How Students Perceive Them

Assignments are one of those ever-present but not-often-thought-about aspects of teaching and learning. Pretty much every course has them, and teachers grade them. The grade indicates how much the student learned by doing them. But is this learning something that students recognize? Too often students

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Developing Self-Regulated Learning Skills: A Unique Approach

New college students come to postsecondary education with some accurate expectations. They expect that college will be harder than high school. Most anticipate having to study more. But they also expect that those study approaches that served them well in high school will work equally

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Perceived and Actual Learning

Donald R. Bacon, editor of the Journal of Marketing Education and notable pedagogical scholar, points out in the journal’s Editor’s Corner that perceived learning and actual learning are “distinctly different constructs.” An accurate understanding of those differences needs to be part of our thinking.

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“Why Do I Need to Know This?”

The skills that students learn in our courses, such as organization, critical thinking, problem solving, and time management are essential.Do students ever ask you that question? As an assistant professor of mathematics at a community college, I regularly get the question. Most of my students

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Motivation: A Quick Review

Well-known cognitive psychologist Richard Mayer offers a succinct analysis of motivation in his excellent workbook monograph titled Applying the Science of Learning. He begins with a definition: “Motivation is an internal state that initiates and maintains goal-directed behavior.” (p. 39) This means that motivation is

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Ready for College?

Talk with almost any faculty member and they will tell you that many (sometimes it’s most) of their students are unprepared for college. They lack basic skills in reading, writing, and computation but also don’t have very effective study habits and techniques. Most teachers try

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In Praise of Failure

One of the biggest failures of higher education is punishing student failure. A bad performance on an assignment is preserved and carried all the way to the final grade. This makes students adverse to risk and obsessed with grades.

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