Group items tagged

"based on the collective experience, over many years, of CUR members who have engaged undergraduate students in research, .... Roger Rowlett, Linda Blockus, and Susan Larson have drawn on this extensive knowledge base to design an instrument to assist institutions to self- assess the maturity of their undergraduate research programs. The instrument aspires to present the best practices in undergraduate research."

Designed for economics, a number of these modules in areas like service learning and just-in-time teaching are also adaptable to other disciplines.

Three good suggestions for classroom activities which get groups of students interacting deeply with course content. Notice how these would work whether your "flipped" classroom relies on videos or more traditional out-of-class reading.

There's a basic point here that it's useful to have a set of quick prepared remarks to encourage students to buy in to a new teaching approach. And perhaps some of Dr. Felder's specific language might be useful to you.

This testimonial brings up a crucial aspect of course design--making sure that you have reasonable expectations for your own workload when developing activities that require significant amounts of direction and feedback from the instructor.

Active learning in the classroom can increase student engagement and improve learning outcomes but how can instructors be sure to include introverts in an environment that tends to favor extroverts? The article outlines a framework for thinking about engaging all learners without leaving introverts behind and details some simple techniques for doing so.

Self-awareness is a central component to the Liberal Arts mission and this article lays out simple strategies to promote metacognitive awareness without setting aside class time for it.

A report of a conference session in which a philosophy professor at John Carroll University presented her use of thought experiments as a signature pedagogy in her classes. (Also note the use of flipped classroom approaches to make the class time for the students to engage in the thought experiments.)

The idea of "project-based learning" is appealing to many people, but open-ended group inquiry also carries a number of risks. This article makes a number of suggestions for ways PBL can be improved.

Active Learning is a "buzz word-y" kind of thing, but the concept actually makes perfectly good sense. As with anything in your life: moderation is key. Heck, you may already be employing some of these strategies.

Here are some rather simple guidelines for developing online videos for your courses, pushing these to your students, and maximizing their pedagogical impact.

Instructors of introductory science classes at Kenyon face the dual challenge of historically large class sizes and the nationally low number of minority and first-gen students completing science programs. This article reviews research that makes a strong case for active learning as a more effective way to engage students in larger classes and to significantly improve the performance of disadvantaged students in those classes.

An interesting description of the "peer instruction" model used to achieve active learning in large lecture classes by Eric Mazur.

The "special pedagogical challenge" of a course - or, Jay Howard argues here, a discipline - is the key concept or skill which must be unlocked to truly enable thinking like a member of the discipline. (Sometimes it's actually disabusing students of their incorrect beliefs about the subject.) This article focuses on finding that skill in sociology. What's your discipline's special challenge?

Shelly Wright argues that Bloom's taxonomy of learning domains is most effective when considered in reverse order.

The article reports on a meta-analysis of 225 studies on the effectiveness of active learning techniques in undergraduate STEM classrooms. If anybody needs more evidence that techniques to actively engage students are more effective than the traditional passive lecture and listen classrooms, this report offers compelling numbers. Students in those traditional classes are found to be 1.5 times more likely to fail than those in classes with active learning components. Students in active learning classes earn grades that are, on average, 6% better than their counterparts in traditional classes.

Another article on Active Learning.

I've spoken with faculty who are using Problem-Based Learning effectively in their classrooms but were not aware the practice had a name, nor that it had a substantial body of research literature. Here's a sample that outlines the reasons it is an effective practice, best practices, and practical examples plus a brief discussion of the constructivist principles at work. It comes to us at Kenyon through JSTOR.

We talk a lot about the value of "active learning"; this essay makes some interesting points about what that looks like in practice. There are some obvious differences in what "active learning" looks like in large schools like the author's and small schools like Kenyon, but the principles are worth considering.

"For years, the term has filled a gap for us. It has functioned rhetorically as a way to contrast evidence-based teaching practices (a much better term, by the way) with more traditional methodologies, but ultimately the wide-ranging utility of this classification is also its drawback."