One of my favorite assignments is having students discus the role of belief in day-to-day life. What we believe influences our behavior in many ways. If you believe God exists, you’ll act in a certain way. Likewise, if you believe there’s a devil. While I
Can you work when you’re being watched? In the 1920s, workers at the Hawthorne Works plant in Cicero, Illinois, took part in a novel study of productivity. To change habits in the workplace, researchers decided to give them more light. Researchers changed the light bulbs
What does it mean to succeed without learning? That is a question I have wrestled with since last spring, when students in an introductory programming course I teach submitted assignments with computer code that was unusually advanced, well-structured, efficient, and carefully annotated. But when faced
Faculty know that today’s students require different levels of support to be successful. Not all college students have experience planning a research paper, taking lecture notes, or creating a class presentation from scratch. A student’s weak executive functioning or time management skills may prohibit them
An abundance of literature exists indicating that students are disengaged, unmotivated, and potentially downright bored in classes. Part of this disengagement may come from the seemingly unending essays and presentations students must complete to demonstrate their achievement of course and program learning outcomes. Incorporating fun
While many academics are still focused on keeping students away from artificial intelligence, others are preparing students to use AI in their current and future work. This means thinking about how IA is and will be used by our students, and crafting assignments that teach
Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Google Bard, are in our classrooms whether we are aware of them or not—whether we like it or not. Unless we adapt to this reality, a large number of learning and assessment activities traditionally used in college
The first summer job I ever had was mowing lawns. Back then (this was the ’70s), I would start the power mower, and the blade kept spinning until I turned the mower off. I learned quickly to pull the mower up a slope and not
As students, I think we all had moments when we questioned the point of certain assignments. They might’ve been simple ones—posters, diagrams, or short stories meant to be completed quickly, graded, and never discussed again. You may have even told yourself that you didn’t have
We all do it. The semester is drawing to a close, the students are tired, we’re tired. There’s one more assignment to hand out, that major project that’s supposed to somehow capture from the entirety of students’ learning from the past semester. Back in week
