CURRENT ARTICLE • September 01

Properties of Thinking

I’m reading a great book. This probably won’t be the only blog entry about it. The title is long: Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. The cognitive scientist, Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, writes about how the mind works to an audience of basic educators. Even so, the book clearly and compellingly explains mental functions equally relevant in the college classroom. Here’s an example.

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OTHER RECENT ARTICLES

Problem-solving Exercises that Promote Intellectual Development

In a Journal of Engineering Education article (referenced below), Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent propose an instructional model that promotes the intellectual development of science and engineering students.

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Do Learning Styles Matter?

By: Mary Bart

There’s been a lot written about learning styles. More than 650 books published in the United States and Canada alone. Do a Google search on “learning styles” and you get over 2,000,000 results. Most people know if they’re a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner, and instructors often try to design their courses to accommodate the different learning styles so as to ensure that each student’s strongest modality is represented in some fashion.

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Should Senior Faculty Teach More Introductory Courses? Boomers and Millennials Have More in Common Than You Might Think

By: Rob Kelly

After years of service and moving up through the faculty ranks, senior faculty members often feel they have earned the privilege of concentrating their teaching efforts on upper-division courses, leaving the introductory courses to younger faculty members. It seems fair enough: If you stick around long enough, you will be able to teach the courses you enjoy most. But is it the best arrangement for students?

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Objections to Active Learning

If you think everybody’s pretty much on board with the idea of active learning, think again. I was surprised to find an article that in its opening paragraph describes active learning as “a philosophy and movement that portends trouble for the future of higher education and the American professoriate.” (p. 23)

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Understanding Learning Styles Research and Instruments

Research on learning styles now spans four decades and occurs across a wide spectrum of disciplines, including many quite removed from psychology, the disciplinary home of many of the central concepts and theories that ground notions of learning style.

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The ECHO Model of Experiential Learning

As educators we hear and heed Peter McLaren’s warning, “You can't teach people anything … You have to create a context in which they can analyze themselves and their social formations and lives.” 1 We believe the creation of this context must be our aim as educators, and this context must be balanced between theory and practice. In our pursuit to strike this balance, we believe that experiential education has the potential to assist our fellow educators in transforming their pedagogical practices to more deeply engage their students and improve learning outcomes.

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Strategies for Increasing Student Learning and Performance

By: Mary Bart

When it comes to course design, is the goal to help your students understand concepts, enable future retrieval of concepts, or enable future retrieval of concepts and apply them in real-world situations?

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Concept Mapping Improves Student Learning

By: Mary Bart

Donna Saulsberry was in a bind. As an associate professor of computer and information technology at Doña Ana Community College, one of her jobs is to prepare her networking students for the Microsoft® Certified Systems Engineer certification test. Having survived a Microsoft certification boot camp herself, she began instructing her students in much the same way as she was taught: lecture, practice, and multiple choice tests.

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Nine Tips for Creating a Hybrid Course

By: Rob Kelly

Most instructors supplement their face-to-face courses with some online learning materials such as online syllabi, handouts, PowerPoint slides, and course-related Web links. All of these can add to the learning experience, but they are merely a start to making full use of the learning potential of the online learning environment in either a hybrid or totally online course. Although there is no standard definition of a hybrid course, one characteristic that makes a course a hybrid is the use of the Web for interaction rather than merely as a means of posting materials, says LaTonya Motley, instructional technology specialist at El Camino Community College in California.

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