Tomorrow's Professor Blog

Folks:

The posting below looks at the challenges of teaching English language learners..  It is #46 in the monthly series called Carnegie Foundation Perspectives [http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives] and is an interview with Professor of Education at Stanford University, Stanford, California. The Foundation invites your response at: CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org. © 2009 The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 51 Vista Lane, Stanford, CA 94305 Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT:  Demystifying Dissertation Writing

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

A Different Way to Think About Teaching English Language Learners

Guadalupe Valdes [2] is a senior partner in the Carnegie Network, advising the Foundation in its new work, especially on issues around students who are English language learners. She has written that “as American educators we have a choice, we can isolate English-language learners in our educational institutions or we can choose to develop the full intellectual potential of all our citizens and future citizens.”

As Carnegie begins its work on increasing the success of developmental mathematics students in community colleges, understanding the characteristics of the students is an important component. The Foundation recruited Valdes, who is one of the most eminent experts on Spanish-English bilingualism in the United States, to shed light on the teaching and learning challenges with this segment of the student population. She is currently the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford University.

Valdes was interviewed by Carnegie Communications Director Gay Clyburn.

Clyburn: You are collecting information for us on “non-English-background” students in community colleges. Why?

Valdes: It is a population of students that we can’t overlook. I want to make the point that there is no typical ELL student. I’m using the term “non-English-background students.” These are:

* U.S.-born students who grew up in homes where a non-English language was spoken

* Foreign-born students who grew up in the U.S., who were educated in this country, and who also

grew up in homes where a non-English language was spoken

* Newly arrived immigrant students who were schooled in other countries

* International students

This category of students includes students of many ethnic backgrounds with various linguistic backgrounds and proficiencies, making it difficult to design courses or programs for any one student. These are students who speak only English (although members of their family may speak a non-English language), students who speak English and their home language, and students who are in the process of learning English.

Clyburn: This sounds complicated.

Valdes: Linguistic proficiencies are very complicated. Some students who are monolingual in English may speak heavily accented English. This often results in their being characterized as English-language learners. Some students who speak both English and their home language may still exhibit some limitations in listening, speaking, reading and writing English. Other students are clearly English language learners who are in the process of acquiring the language.

Clyburn: Do these students represent a large percentage of the community college student population?

Valdes: They do. The American Association of Community Colleges reports that minority students constitute 30 percent of community college enrollments nationally, with Latino students representing the fastest-growing racial/ethnic population. Think about these statistics alongside the fact that community colleges serve almost half the nation’s undergraduates. These are gateway institutions. And the completion statistics are tragic. In a 1988-2000 sample of students who entered higher education through a community college with the expectation of completing a B.A., only 15 percent of Hispanics (compared to 26 percent of whites and 9 percent of blacks) had completed the degree by the year 2000.

Clyburn: What is the scope of the mathematics and language project you’re doing for Carnegie?

Valdes: I’m examining the ways in which language proficiency is related to mathematics achievement. I’m initially looking at the literature and I am collecting data from three California community colleges. I hope that this information will provide a snapshot of non-English-background students and the broader challenges they face in community colleges.

Clyburn: Are you finding that there is a lot of information available.

Valdes: Not really. Most of the work on math and language has not focused on community college students and has not disentangled language proficiency from ethnicity, socioeconomic status, use of non-standard dialects and other social and cultural variables.

Clyburn: So, what’s missing? What do we need to think about as we look at teaching developmental math in community colleges to non-English learners?

Valdes: We need to be aware of the role of language limitations in the study of mathematics. We need to look at instructional delivery systems, both face-to-face and online. We need to look at text materials, classroom activities and assessment systems. Little information has been collected on students’ language characteristics and on the relationship between these characteristics and their success and/or failure in particular academic departments and courses.

Clyburn: How are you getting at this information in your study?

Valdes: We’re talking to administrators, faculty and students. We’re asking administrators to talk to us about their perception of Latino students, policies that might impact the students and factors that might affect student success. We’re asking instructors to tell us about the classes they teach, about Latino students and their performance in their classes, factors that account for that performance, the language proficiencies of Latino students, and particular topics that they consider “language laden.” And we’re talking to students about their experiences in studying math and in a typical math class, their performance in math classes, their use of support services, their experience with assessments and the placement process, the language background, and the impact of their language proficiencies on the learning of mathematics.

Clyburn: What are you finding?

Valdes: We’ll know more when the study is completed, but initially we’re finding that administrators and faculty have little awareness about how ESL policies and developmental math policies might interact. Two colleges have multi-level ESL course sequences required before students can enroll in the regular English multi-level developmental sequences. That’s asking students to do a lot of work before they can even take a college credit-level course. We’re also finding that administrators, faculty and students have different explanations for students’ low achievement in developmental math-none of them related to instruction. And not surprisingly, students express doubt and concerns about their English. Word problems in mathematics are especially challenging for ESL students.

Clyburn: Based on what you know now, what needs to happen to reverse the statistics, to ensure success in mathematics classes for non-English background students in community colleges? What do we need to do differently?

Valdes: There are no easy answers to this problem. And there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. The first thing we have to do is to have more accurate information about students’ backgrounds, both educational and linguistic. We need to press for the use of better assessment and placement procedures. We also need to press for more communication between academic departments (e.g. mathematics departments) and faculty and staff who are knowledgeable about language development. We need to be particularly sensitive to the ways in which computer mediated materials might interact with the reading and writing abilities of English language learners.

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Folks:

The posting below looks at the educational use Twitter in the classroom and is from the October, 2009 issue of ASEE Prism and is by  by David Zax is a freelance writer specializing in science..  http://www.asee.org/prism/. © Copyright 2009 American Society for Engineering Education 1818 N Street, N.W., Suite 600 Washington, DC 20036-2479 Web: www.asee.org Telephone: (202) 331-3500.  All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: Hiring Right – Sample Interview Questions

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

Learning in 140 – Character Bites

Twitter can improve teacher-student communication, in and out of class.

In most respects, Prof. Natasha Neogi’s aerospace engineering class is like any other. It’s a large, hour-long lecture-style course at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. But at the halfway mark, Neogi’s class takes on a new twist. She invites her students to log on to Twitter – the “micro-blogging” service that limits messages to 140 characters – and write in with questions. Neogi sifts through the “tweets,” in Twitter-speak, addressing the most common sticking point at the end of class.

Once widely dismissed as an instrument of vanity, Twitter is now showing up in serious places. Its citizen-journalistic role after last June’s Iranian election was much celebrated; in May, a NASA astronaut became the first to tweet from space (”From orbit: Launch was awesome!!”). Bit by bit, Twitter is finding a role in education.

Of course, plenty of professors – engineering and otherwise – have long been using Twitter. They tweet about interesting links they’ve come across; they complain about their flight delays; they keep us updated on their cats. But there are also professors who, like Neogi, have begun to bring Twitter into the lecture hall or seminar room. And not simply to write, “I’m teaching a class right now.” Rather, they’ve moved beyond the tweet-as-status model to harness the organizational, aggregating, and social possibilities of the technology, recognizing it as a potent educational tool.

In the spring of 2008, well before Twitter acquired its current prominence, Scott McDonald and Cole Camplese of Pennsylvania State University at University Park co-taught a course called “Disruptive Technologies in Teaching and Learning.” They decided to experiment with the relatively new social networking tool, instructing class members to carry on a Twitter conversation – “essentially asking students to pass notes during class,” as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it. Soon, the professors found the Twitter feed had emerged as a rich “back channel” where students discussed what interested them or puzzled them. The professors, meanwhile, kept an eye on the feed, getting a read of what concepts needed further explication.

Gordon Snyder, who directs the National Center for Information and Communications Technologies at Springfield Technical Community College in Massachusetts, has also experimented with the back channel. He assigned his class a “hashtag”, Twitter-parlance for label to include in your tweets to make them easily searchable (they begin with the hash mark #). Students could thereby keep tabs on their neighbor’s notes and thoughts and even revisit them using Twitter’s search engine after class.

He also has found Twitter useful for getting a read on a room. Professors are familiar with the inscrutable sight of a lecture hall full of mute students. Are they listening? Understanding? Many professors have adopted “clickers,” polling devices used to quiz students on a topic recently covered or to gauge students’ opinions when venturing into politically sensitive subject matter. Snyder, whose center is funded by the National Science Foundation, considers Twitter a “modern and much more effective” clicker.

Of course, skepticism in academia remains the norm (”You mean as part of a class? Instead of students just wasting time?” a Massachusetts Institute of Technology official responded when asked for her take on Twitter). But Twitter evangelists have ready answers for skeptics. Does it erase a necessary distance between professor and student, eroding professional authority? That depends on your view, says McDonald: If you think, “‘Well, I’m the teacher, and people just need to listen to what I have to say’… then Twitter is not useful for you.” Does Twitter distract students? “I see it as a way to keep students engaged,” says Snyder. Besides, some argue, students often are already using these technologies in class; professors are simply co-opting a tool that would otherwise serve as a distraction. “If you can’t beat ‘em, might as well join ‘em,” sums up Kathy Schmidt, director of the Faculty Innovation Center for the College of Engineering at the University of Texas – Austin.

Still, Schmidt is the first to acknowledge that “sometimes turning our classroom into an experiment, per se, is risky business.” Professors should carefully consider what Twitter contributes before bringing it in, she says: “The pedagogy has to drive the reason for using the technology.”

Danger of ‘Parallel Discussions’

Punya Mishra, associate professor of educational psychology and technology at Michigan State University, notes that – despite his title – there is “no such thing as an educational technology.” Rather, “there are various technologies, and instructors need to repurpose them for their own needs.” Last year, Mishra tried integrating a micro-blogging service similar to Twitter into a graduate seminar, but “I felt two parallel discussions were going on, but they didn’t pull together productively at the end.” He spent the week considering what went wrong and then designated a block of time near the end of class for students to catch up on the contents of the micro-blogging feed. Afterward, the class reconvened to continue a newly enriched discussion. With this bit of thoughtful tinkering, micro-blogging proved useful.

Mishra followed that experiment with a more ambitious one: using Twitter to join students from different continents. MSU is located in Lansing, Mich., but also offers a master’s degree for students in Plymouth, England. Mishra’s online “distance” course has content similar to the one in Michigan, so his local class and its British counterpart have recently been Twittering using a shared hashtag. He praises Twitter for “this ability to connect people… The sense of community can be very useful and powerful.”

But just because Twitter has found success in some classrooms doesn’t mean it’s right for all engineering educators. After all, most of the experiments have thus far been led by professors of educational technology or social media itself – hardly a neutral or representative sample.

One common concern is that Twitter currently isn’t equipped to deal with engineering’s lingua franca: mathematics. “It’s hard to type funny symbols in Twitter,” says Michael Webber, a UT Austin engineering professor. Though an advocate for new classroom technologies, he doesn’t foresee using Twitter in courses heavy in equations and scientific formulas. “There’s something organic about a concept flowing from your brain to your hand to the board, and from the board to their hand and their brain,” he says. “Something about that process seems very valuable.”

Should engineering educators shun Twitter as a teaching tool, there are still other uses. MIT’s Nextlab, for one, has become a model of innovative Twitter use. By coupling micro-messaging with mapping technology, Nextlab has enabled Indian villagers to warn one other about floods and helped citizens of Caracas, Venezuela, to document crimes, locate them on a map, and share that information immediately with others.

If such innovative applications fail to interest engineers, Webber suggests that Twitter’s social networking still might come in handy. For some tech-savvy but shy engineers, Webber notes wryly, it’s “easier to get a date through e-mail or Twitter rather than normal mechanisms that humanity has developed over millennia.”

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Folks:

The posting below reminds us of the impact a good mentoring program can have on first-time college students. It is by Jennifer Epstein and is from the September 29, 2009 issue of INSIDE HIGHER ED, an excellent – and free – online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education.  You can subscribe by going to: http://insidehighered.com/.  Also for a free daily update from Inside Higher  Ed, e-mail [scott.jaschik@insidehighered.com]. Copyright © 2009 Inside Higher Ed Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: When Should Intolerance Replace Tolerance?

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

Mentoring, Texas-Style

Before Justin Jefferson got to college, the only kinds of doctors he or his parents had ever heard of were physicians and preachers. Not many researchers and teachers with doctorates live amid the gunshots of east San Antonio’s housing projects, the only world that he and his parents — both manual laborers — knew.

He arrived at the University of Texas at Austin a biology major, hoping to fulfill pre-med requirements, go on to medical school and become a physician, working toward a career goal his family could understand and respect. It was also the only career trajectory he knew of that would allow him to pursue his love of the natural sciences.

But, in the fall of 2007, during his sophomore year, Jefferson noticed a flier for the Pre-Graduate School Internship, a program created in 2004 to help undergraduates figure out their academic and career goals by pairing them with graduate students or faculty members. Though he didn’t really know what the program was, he signed up anyway and was paired with Deena Walker, a neuroscience graduate student in UT’s College of Pharmacy.

When they met, Walker says, Jefferson “didn’t think there was anything he could do with an interest in science other than becoming a medical doctor.” Now, though, after two years of working in Walker’s lab, studying how the brain controls reproductive physiology, “he really likes research and is seriously considering a career that includes research in some way,” she says.

Richard A. Cherwitz, founder and director of the Intellectual Entrepreneurship Consortium [http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/03/09/cherwitz1%20 ] that runs the program, says Jefferson’s experience isn’t uncommon. “Students come to us not knowing the options available to them. They may know a few options like med school or law school, but they are often unfamiliar with research and the academy.”

Cherwitz is working to raise $50 million to establish an endowment for the consortium as part of UT’s $2 billion capital campaign. Though the program received about $165,000 in funding in 2007, it’s getting just $90,000 this year from UT’s undergraduate colleges and the office of the vice president for diversity and community engagement. He uses that money to pay a graduate student to support him in administering the internship program and to provide stipends for a quarter of the program’s mentors.

Enrollment in the program, which students can use to earn one, two or three credit hours per semester, is open to all undergraduates. More than 700 students have gone through the program over the last five years, and another 140 are enrolled this fall.

Half of students who complete the program and graduate from UT go on to graduate school, which was just what Cherwitz hoped for. Former associate dean of UT’s graduate school, he says he hoped to “increase the applicant pool to grad programs by developing initiatives for undergraduates.”

Though it was never his expressed intention to attract underrepresented minorities or first generation college students specifically, Cherwitz says “it’s really not a surprise” that, from semester to semester, about 50 percent of the students who enroll in the internship program fit those categories. “They don’t know the rules of the game, the politics of the academy,” he says. “It gives them ways to integrate what they’re thinking about in terms of academics, careers and serving their communities, all with the help of someone who has gone through the same kinds of experiences.”

Gregory J. Vincent, vice president for diversity and community engagement, says he thinks the internship program’s “emphasis on giving back to communities, of figuring out ways to make your work matter, is what attracts first generation students and underrepresented minorities.”

He adds: “It’s hard to know whether if we had designed a diversity initiative it would work as well as this program has. This is getting hundreds of students to graduate school who might not have gone. There aren’t many programs out there like this, expanding the number of students of all kinds who are applying to grad school.”

Mentors and Mentees

When Jessica Kemp arrived at UT, she joined Student Leaders Pursuing Law, a pre-law group aimed at bringing diversity to the profession. She “hadn’t definitely decided to go to law school” when she joined the organization but was strongly considering it. Though her parents were “always here to support me,” she says, “they weren’t really there to provide me with information” when it came to educational and career plans. When the IE internship program approached the group offering current law students as mentors, Kemp jumped at the chance to develop a personal relationship with someone who knew the ins and outs of applying to law school and being a law student.

As she got to know her mentor and the law school at UT, Kemp says she realized she “really wanted to go to law school and really wanted to become a lawyer.” She took an LSAT preparation class and scored well on the exam.

When it came time to apply to law school, she sat in on her mentor’s classes and attended law school events to figure out whether she wanted to go to UT’s law school. “I had this top-ranked law school right here,” she says, “so I had to see if it was the right place for me; I decided it was.”

Kemp is in her third year there and now mentors pre-law undergraduates and works part time as an assistant director for the internship program, matching students with mentors. “I’m able to see things from their perspective,” she says. “I know what it’s like to be going through the process. I tell my students all the things my mentor told me — what they should be doing, how best to prepare for the LSAT — and all the things I’ve learned on my own that I wish someone else would’ve told me.”

She’s looking ahead to a legal career in which she can advocate for educational or health care issues. Whether in her job or through volunteer work, she says, she wants to “continue helping minority students, first generation college students figure out if law school is what they want to do,” she says. “I want people to be cognizant of the fact we need more minorities to attend law school and practice law so that there are lawyers out there who can represent the people they’re serving.”

Devin Ruthstrom, who this fall began a master’s program in interpersonal communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was paired up with Gary Beck, a graduate student in communication studies.

Ruthstrom says he had “thrown around the idea of grad school in my mind but had no idea what it really meant.” His parents had gone to an unaccredited three-year bible college and “weren’t really able to inform me first, about college in general and second, about graduate school.” But Beck could show him what it was like to be a graduate student and help him figure out whether it was the right direction for him.

Together, they worked on a literature review, attended the National Communication Association’s 2008 convention in San Diego, and visited several graduate-level communications classes at UT and elsewhere. “My mentor gave me a better view of what graduate student life was like over all,” Ruthstrom says. “The biggest question I wanted to answer was if graduate school was something I wanted to do and I found it was.”

Starting Early

Daniel Conroy-Beam graduated from San Antonio’s Health Careers High School in the spring of 2008 and started classes at UT that summer, determined to fulfill pre-med requirements and go on to medical school. Though he knew other options were out there — his father has a master’s degree and his mother is working on a Ph.D. — medicine seemed right. Then, he says, “I completely lucked into a field that I absolutely love.”

He signed up for Introduction to Psychology on a whim, looking for an extra three credit hours to round out the semester. He found himself fascinated by the subject area and developed a connection with David M. Lewis, an evolutionary psychology graduate student teaching the course. After a successful semester in the class, Lewis asked Conroy-Beam to work with him and together they found the credit-granting IE internship program.

“This mentorship thing has cemented my interest in evolutionary psychology,” Conroy-Beam says. “My mentor’s not just a guy I work for, he’s a guy I work with, learn from, get to help.” Getting to see Lewis’s life as a graduate student has “led to me deciding I definitely want to go to graduate school,” the undergraduate says. “I know I want to study this subject, to do research in it and to eventually find a professorship somewhere.”

Because he was a freshman, Conroy-Beam didn’t have much difficulty in switching his major, from a pre-med subject area to, briefly, rhetoric to, now, psychology.

It’s the kind of flexibility and unexpected focus and passion Cherwitz wants to be able to give to more freshmen and sophomores than just those few who find the Pre-Graduate School Internship.

He’s applying for grants to create the IE Academic-Community Mentorship Program, which would match first and second semester freshmen with graduate student mentors and community liaisons — people in the Austin area working in the public and private sectors. He wants to help these students, many in their late teens, “figure out what they want to do with their lives,” he says. “They’ll be able to create entrepreneurial plans for their futures, with a plan, a backup plan and so on, for their academic and non-academic futures.”

- Jennifer Epstein

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Folks;

This posting below, by Anne Colby, Elizabeth Beaumont, Thomas Ehrlich, and Josh Corngold,  looks at how “structured reflection” can help students see alternative ways of interpreting a given educational experience.

It is from Chapter 12, Learning Through Structured Reflection, in the book,   Educating for Democracy : Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement, published by Published by Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741-www.josseybass.com. Copyright © The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 51 Vista Lane, Stanford, CA 94305. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: Mentoring Texas Style

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

Learning Through Structured Reflection

Reflection is widely considered to be the core of higher education, especially liberal education, which was once playfully described as teaching students to analyze Freud from a Marxian perspective and Marx from a Freudian perspective. Our central question in this chapter is how to use structured reflection to help students consider their experiences through lenses that bring the political dimensions into focus. This kind of reflection plays a pivotal role in helping them understand and navigate the real world of political possibility, conflict, and uncertainty.

Structured reflection requires students to step back from their immediate experience to make sense of it in new ways. The object of their reflection could be a newspaper story or scholarly article, their observations while working in a government office or private nonprofit, some kind of political action, or some combination of these and other experiences. Making experiences into objects of reflection means simultaneously heightening their impact while attempting to understand them in connection with any number of other thing: concepts, issues, or experiences arising from other course components; one’s past academic learning or personal history, one’s values, assumptions, and convictions; theoretical or other conceptual or analytic lenses, and the like. In the process, students observe, analyze, examine, and consider their political experiences from multiple points of view.

Of course, one can imagine an almost endless number of frames, lenses, or filters through which to reflect on a given experience, and the choice of frames helps determine the character of the meaning derived from reflection. Different aspects of the experience become salient and take shape. Considering the perceptual and cognitive power of alternative interpretive schemes underscores how important it is for faculty to help students consider their political experiences in terms that contribute to the overall purposes and goals of the course or program.

Reflection has the power to reframe experiences and events in new terms. As a result, even when some course or program experiences, such as working in a direct service environment, are not explicitly political in nature, guided reflection can help students recast them in political terms by connecting their direct service with relevant policy environments or systemic analyses of the needs the organization addresses. A Duke University student, for example, talked about how structured reflection on her internship at the refugee resettlement branch of the Catholic Charities of New Mexico led her to study immigration policy and the process of seeking refugee status.

A widespread misconception about structured reflection is that it entails simply sharing feelings or voicing opinions. Many people mistakenly see reflection as a “feel-good” experience that may be useful for building community but does not contribute to intellectual development. In fact, poor quality reflective activities do sometimes fit this description. In contrast, in well-conceived reflective activities, emotional responses and initial opinions may serve as starting points but not as ends. High-quality reflection calls for well-developed intellectual skill and perceptiveness richly grounded in knowledge and expertise. Although undergraduate students are not experts in the process of reflection any more than they are experts in the subject matter they are studying, well-conceived and well-structured assignments can help them develop greater expertise in the intellectual processes of reflection, analysis, and interpretation as they work toward greater subject matter expertise.

The importance of structured reflection is not simply an article of faith. Extensive research on community service learning shows that the quantity and quality of reflection is consistently associated with both academic and civic learning. Engaging regularly in structured reflection leads students to deeper understanding and better application of subject matter knowledge and increased knowledge of social agencies, increased complexity of problem and solution analysis, and greater use of subject matter knowledge in analyzing problems (Eyler and Giles, 1999). Reflective practices in the classroom have also been shown to help learners connect earlier experiences to new content in order to achieve better understanding of the new material (Lee and Sabatino, 1998).

References

Lee, D., and Sabatino, K. “Evaluating Guided Reflections: A U.S. Case Study.” International Journal of Training and Development 1998, 2(3), 162-170.

Eyleer, J., and Giles, D.E. Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.

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Folks:

The posting below looks at how to help students manage their learning time.  It is by Michael Theall, Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio  and is IDEA Item #3 from POD-IDEA Center Notes on Instruction series. POD is the Professional and Organizational Development Network [http://www.podnetwork.org/] and the IDEA Center is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to serve colleges and universities committed to improving learning, teaching, and leadership performance. [http://www.theideacenter.org/] ©2005. The IDEA Center. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: Will I Drown in Committee Work?

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

Scheduling Course Work in Ways Which Encourage Students to Stay Up-to-date in Their Work

Background

Faculty often express interest in having students learn basic knowledge, understand major concepts, develop problem solving and critical thinking skills, acquire professional habits and attitudes, and become committed to lifetime learning. One thing that is less frequently mentioned is the need to create conditions under which these objectives can be most effectively achieved. Within this general category, lies an important practical skill: time management, which is one component of “self regulation” (1). While teachers put careful thought into how to fill the available time in a course, they sometimes do not consider or accurately estimate the amount of time that students will need to complete the assigned work. For many students the ability to manage coursework and balance it against other activities is the difference between success and failure. In fact, a major review of research on the effects of college (2) considered the impact of working (holding a job) on academic performance. Interestingly, the finding was that while working reduced the time available to do coursework, there was no significant difference in academic performance between those who worked and those who did not. The authors attribute this lack of difference to the possibility that, “…employment provides a context in which they (students) acquire efficient organizational skills and work habits” (p.

133). Thus, the critical issue seems to be how well one manages one’s time rather than how much time is available. It seems important then, that teachers provide structures and models of effective work that encourage students to carefully balance their course work and other obligations. To use the common expression, teachers should help students to “work smart, not just work hard.”

IDEA Item #3, “Scheduled course work (class activities, tests, projects) in ways which encouraged students to stay up-to-date in their work” is directly connected with time management. It is unique in that it correlates with many other IDEA items touching on several dimensions of successful teaching (3). For example, item #3 is related to items as diverse as #1 (Displayed personal interest in students), #8 (Stimulated students to intellectual effort), #10 (Explained course material clearly), and #17 (Provided timely and frequent feedback). Although these items represent different teaching methods, their inter-relatedness suggests that they have in common a genuine commitment to the student and his/her educational welfare. Item #3 is also correlated with IDEA objectives at several taxonomic levels, and with developing professional skills and competencies (IDEA items 21-24). These correlations directly reflect the goals many teachers list as critically important. They also reflect new descriptions of “significant learning” as described by Fink (4, p. 9 and p. 30). In Fink’s terms, learning is “significant” when students are engaged and

energetic and when the outcomes of that learning are lasting change and continued value in life. Acquiring effective time management and self- regulatory skills is particularly important with respect to academic success, and developing these skills can be built into course design.

Helpful Hints

Research on the dimensions of college teaching (3) provides powerful evidence of the importance of helping students to organize their time. With respect to student achievement, the most strongly correlated teaching dimensions are organization and clarity. When teachers make clear how topics fit and how the assigned work can be efficiently carried out, they help students to construct accurate schemas and clarify the structure of the discipline. The result is better student learning and increased student satisfaction because that learning becomes more apparent. Provide an organizational structure that helps students plan and carry out coursework. This not only keeps students on task, but it is also motivational in that it demonstrates that the teacher wants to promote deep learning rather than busy work and surface learning (5). For example, break work down into manageable chunks and suggest progress benchmarks so that students have the greatest chance for consistent success. In Keller’s (6) description of a motivational design of instruction, key elements involve creating conditions that promote positive expectations and provide opportunities for success. Helping students to stay organized and on task are two such conditions.

A complete syllabus with clear timelines is a solid beginning. Reinforcing the syllabus with regular checkpoints via class dialogue, e-mail, or other communications will help. Personal contact with students who are lagging behind is absolutely necessary. Using collaborative or group work provides a way for students to help each other (as long as the group work is itself organized and supervised). A very useful technique is to ask students, from early in the course, how they plan to organize their time and what they will do to most efficiently carry out the work. An early exploration of these issues will enhance students’ investments in the course and raise issues that might otherwise be

missed.

Assessment Issues

Assessments addressing this item are somewhat different than those used to determine more typical cognitive or affective outcomes. Angelo and Cross (7) offer some methods for determining the success of assignments (pp. 343-361), but other options more specifically addressing workload, currency of work, and the extent to which students understand the “why” and “how” as well as the “what” of assignments can be very useful. Some research (8) has demonstrated that when students understand the rationale for assignments and when they see value in doing the work, they are more motivated to do the work carefully. As this understanding increases, so do students’ positive opinions about the course and the teacher. Three techniques can be helpful. First, an adaptation of the Small Group Instructional Diagnosis (SGID) process (9) can assess the degree to which students are keeping up. Second, the use of electronic communications

available in course management systems can provide a way for students to report difficulties and for the teacher to monitor progress. Third, and most important, conduct regular dialogues with individuals and the class about progress. The instructor’s personal involvement (in casual conversations, e-mail, or class dialogue) in keeping students on track demonstrates both concern for student progress and the importance of the work. It is necessary for students to “learn the material,” but often it is equally important to provide guidelines for “learning how to learn,” that demonstrate how to best manage course workload and meet deadlines.

References

(1) Pintrich, P. R. (Ed.). (1995). Understanding self-regulated learning. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 63. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

(2) Pascarella, E. J., & Terenzini, P. (2005). How college affects students: A third decade of research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

(3) Feldman, K. A. (1989). The association between student ratings of specific instructional dimensions and student achievement: Refining and extending the synthesis of data from multisection validity studies. Research in Higher Education, 30, 583-645.

(4) Fink, L. D. (2003). Creating significant learning experiences. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

(5) Entwistle, N., & Tait, H. (1994). Approaches to studying and perceptions of the learning environment across disciplines. In N. Hativa & M. Marincovich (Eds.), “Disciplinary differences in teaching and learning: Implications for practice.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 64. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

(6) Keller, J. M. (1983). Motivational design of instruction.  In C. M. Riegeluth (Ed.) Instructional design theories and models: An overview of their current status.  Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

(7) Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K. P. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college

teachers  (2nd ed.).  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass.

(8) Franklin, J., & Theall, M. (1995). The relationship of disciplinary differences and the value of class preparation time to student ratings of instruction.  In N. Hativa & M. Marincovich, (Eds.)  “Disciplinary differences in teaching and learning: Implications for practice. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 64.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

(9) Clark, D. J., & Bekey, J. (1979). Use of small groups in instructional evaluation. Insight Into Teaching Excellence. 7(1), 2-5. Arlington, TX: University of Texas at Arlington.

IDEA Paper No. 40: Getting Students to Read: Fourteen Tips, Hobson

IDEA Paper No. 41: Student Goal Orientation, Motivation, and Learning, Svinicki

IDEA Paper No. 42: Integrated Course Design, Fink

IDEA Paper No. 27: Writing a Syllabus, Altman and Cashin

©2005 The IDEA Center This document may be reproduced for educational/training activities.

Reproduction for publication or sale may be done only with prior written permission of The IDEA Center.

This document may be reproduced for educational/training activities. Reproduction for publication or sale may be done only with prior written permission of The IDEA Center.

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Folks:

The posting below looks at the integration of the liberal arts into a business curriculum at the undergraduate level.  . It is by Lynn S. Arenella, associate professor of natural and applied sciences, Angelique M. Davi, assistant professor of English, Cyrus R. Veeser, associate professor of history and director of the Jeanne and Dan Valente Center for Arts and Sciences, and Roy A. Wiggins III,  professor and chair of finance, all at Bentley College. The article is from the Winter, 2009 issue of Liberal Education, Volume 95, Number 1. Liberal Education is a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities [http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/index.cfm] Copyright © 2009, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: How to Succeed in the Academy: A Chair’s Advice to Junior Faculty

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

The Best of Both Worlds: Infusing Liberal Learning into a Business Curriculum

At Bentley College, a four-year private institution located in Waltham, Massachusetts, over 90 percent of students major in business disciplines. For decades, Bentley’s strong arts and sciences departments have battled for a place within an overwhelmingly career-focused curriculum, and great strides have been made to change the traditional relationship between business and the arts and sciences. Recently, for example, students gained the opportunity to pursue a double major comprising a business discipline and an interdisciplinary liberal studies program. And over two recent summers, in an effort designed to facilitate the integration of liberal learning principles across the curriculum, the college has offered weeklong workshops to faculty in both business and the arts and sciences.

The value of liberal learning

Bentley’s desire to integrate liberal learning principles across the curriculum is based on the belief that business and the arts and sciences are complementary, rather than competitive, elements of a complete education. A genuinely rich education should be the basis for both professional success and a more meaningful life. The ability to deal with ambiguity, for example, or to integrate seemingly unrelated ideas and perspectives helps young women and men succeed in their chosen fields. This notion is echoed by the former chief executive officer of General Motors, Roger Smith (1987), who believes that “the Liberal Arts may ultimately prove to be the most relevant learning model. People trained in the Liberal Arts learn to tolerate ambiguity and to bring order out of apparent confusion. They have the kind of sideways thinking and cross-classifying habit of mind that comes from learning, among other things, the many different ways of looking at literary works, social systems, chemical processes, or languages.”

Fostering such “sideways thinking” is one aim of the liberal arts. Getting business students to recognize that they, too, can benefit from such a background is essential to their success in industry. Employers are asking for a broader set of skills and attitudes that include more effective communication and quantitative skills as well as familiarity with and grounding in issues related to innovation, diversity, and global cultures (Schneider 2005). According to Roberts T. Jones (2005, 35), “virtually all occupational endeavors require a working appreciation of the historical, cultural, ethical, and global environments that surround the application of skilled work.”

Given the economic effects of globalization, institutions of higher education need to reexamine their approaches to teaching and learning in order to ensure that they are preparing their students for the ever-changing nature of “the world of work” (Schneider 2005, 3). As Thomas L. Friedman (2006, 302) observes, “the first, and most important, ability you can develop in a flat world is the ability to ‘learn how to learn’-to constantly absorb, and teach yourself, new ways of doing old things or new ways of doing new things.” Such an approach is the basis of a liberal education.

Liberal learning workshops

In 2004, Bentley College received a grant from the Davis Foundation to integrate liberal learning with professional training. Recognizing the overlap between the two traditional approaches and enhancing some of those approaches was one goal of the workshops supported by the Davis Foundation. “Our goal,” the grant application explained, “is to reshape the curriculum in such a way that our students will encounter core liberal arts skill sets and perspectives in all their courses, and will be able to make meaningful and productive links between and among seemingly vastly different learning contexts. The priorities of liberal education will then be ‘marbled’ throughout the curriculum.” In addition, we set out to “marble” these perspectives and skill sets into the curriculum so thoroughly that students will repeatedly encounter and practice these elements in a multitude of courses and contexts well beyond the general education core. Ideally, students will be exposed to these ideas, concepts, and complexities over four years in their general education, arts and sciences, and business programs of study.

Following a collegewide search, the dean of arts and sciences appointed the chair of the finance department as the program director for the Davis grant. In conjunction with the dean, the director, in turn, appointed three liberal arts faculty members to serve as both organizers and facilitators of the workshops. These faculty members were chosen from the history, natural and applied sciences, and English departments. During the fall and spring semesters of the first year, they met to assess current liberal learning initiatives on campus, to discuss the needs of the faculty, and to design a faculty workshop. They determined that the workshop should encourage faculty to examine the limitations of discipline-based thinking and practices, to consider interdisciplinary approaches to current assignments, and to infuse their courses with materials that highlight the five strategic areas of the grant: ethics and social responsibility; technology and effective communication; creative thinking and critical analysis; service to the community; and diversity and global citizenship.

Throughout the first year, the Davis group worked to develop a workshop that would provide the support, forum, and resources to help faculty consider their syllabi, cases, and course projects in light of the strategic priorities and perspectives; explore productive ways of integrating some dimension of these priorities into what they already do in the classroom; and present their new ideas to and get feedback from workshop colleagues. Faculty were then invited to apply for a place in one of two weeklong workshops to be held during the summer. As part of the application process, each described an aspect of a course he or she was interested in revising (e.g., modifying an existing assignment, revising a course syllabus, rethinking an approach to classroom lectures or discussions, or designing a new module). Once accepted, faculty were encouraged to come to the workshop having thought through the ways in which they might already be incorporating these liberal arts perspectives into their courses or to consider ways in which they might begin to infuse their courses with these perspectives or skill sets.

In addition to enhancing the classroom experience for students, the workshops enabled participants to hone their teaching craft. Bentley already provides faculty with a variety of resources for creating dynamic classrooms, such as technologically advanced classrooms and seminars on topics like ethics and diversity. The workshops supported by the Davis Foundation grant supplemented those programs by providing participating faculty with the opportunity to infuse their courses with liberal learning principles.

Modeling one approach

In designing and leading the workshops, the facilitators were committed to modeling liberal learning principles in the modules offered. For example, facilitators designed sessions that allowed workshop participants to give input on the direction of a session. Recognizing that faculty might attend the sessions with some reservations about being able to implement all of the demonstrated liberal learning strategies in their courses, the first day’s module, entitled “Obstacles and Impediments,” gave faculty an opportunity to voice their concerns. These included worries about teaching in areas outside of their expertise and sacrificing course content in order to include themes like diversity or ethics. Participants also discussed their anxieties about whether they could rely upon institutional support for innovative approaches as well as about the potential downside to innovation.

The overall approach of the workshop was to break down preconceptions of how faculty from different disciplines and divisions teach. During the first two days of the weeklong session, faculty participants deconstructed what currently goes on in classrooms across the college. In order to free them of any disciplinary constraints, modules asked faculty to create assignments, syllabi, and business cases for courses other than their own. In one module, for example, faculty were asked to create a syllabus for a course on Southeast Asia. They were given no other particulars or parameters. The resulting syllabi emerged from collaborations among faculty from a range of departments, including economics, philosophy, finance, and English. Faculty collaborated across disciplines and, by doing so, came up with creative solutions to the many “obstacles” they had listed on that first day. In one case, faculty from history, English, and finance created a transdisciplinary course that included a two-week embedded travel component.

The experience of designing “someone else’s syllabus,” along with kindred exercises, largely succeeded in liberating faculty participants from their devotion to narrow, rigid disciplinary paradigms. The transdisciplinary collaborations proved beneficial as faculty moved into a “reconstruction” phase toward the end of the week and were asked to concentrate their efforts on changes they wanted to make to their own course materials. This was performed in concentrated personal time called “mini-sabbaticals,” which were used to finalize independent work. Following these focused efforts, faculty were asked to pair up with another participant from a different discipline in order to present their ideas. Then, each person presented his or her partner’s plans to the larger group.

These paired presentations turned out to be among the most powerful experiences of the workshop. In each case, participants made a special effort to understand and accurately articulate what their partners had developed. For example, in one presentation, a faculty member from the finance department reviewed the proposed changes of a faculty member from the English department. Together, they collaborated on ways the literature professor could “marbleize” the themes throughout her Shakespearean film course. In return, the literature professor helped the finance professor think through the integration of ethical issues into his corporate finance course. In another pairing, a faculty member from the taxation department helped a historian create Great Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, an ambitious course that incorporates material usually fenced off within philosophy and literature and that was later submitted to the college’s curriculum committee for consideration as a future undergraduate offering.

Unexpected benefits

While facilitators planned numerous activities and exercises for the workshop participants, some of the benefits of the workshops derived from experiences outside the classroom setting. Faculty who had often seen each other only at full faculty meetings or during committee work spent one week together from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. each day. The lunch hour, often a break from workshop modules, gave participants a chance to become acquainted and to learn about each other’s areas of specialization. The discussions generated during these open periods resulted in arts and sciences faculty and business faculty disabusing each other of misunderstandings about their pedagogies, curricula, and disciplines. Many faculty expressed delight at being officially encouraged, for the first time in their careers, to think in unorthodox and even subversive ways about the content of their courses and their classroom methods.

The Davis Workshops have been an extraordinary success for Bentley College and have influenced pedagogy and thinking across departments and disciplines. Over the course of two summers of workshops, seventy-four of approximately 250 full-time faculty members took part, including thirty-five tenured faculty and twenty-four tenure-track faculty. In all, sixty syllabi in undergraduate and graduate courses were in some way reshaped by the workshops. But the Davis Workshops were also at the core of a broader redefinition and realignment of the role of the arts and sciences in the culture of Bentley. They served as the intellectual inspiration for innovative arts and sciences initiatives at the core of the college’s mission. In retrospect this makes perfect sense, since the workshops encouraged critical reflection about the limitations imposed by our disciplines and promoted creative connections across disciplines around shared values and perspectives. But the degree to which interdisciplinary collaboration has grown is quite astounding.

References

Friedman, T. 2006. The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Jones, R. T. 2005. Liberal Education for the twenty-first century: Business expectations. Liberal Education 91 (2): 32-7.

Schneider, C. G. 2005. President’s message: Liberal Education and America’s Promise. Liberal Education 91 (1): 2-3.

Smith, R. B. 1987. The liberal arts and the art of management. In Educating managers: Executive effectiveness through liberal learning, ed. Johnston et al., 21-33. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

To respond to this article, e-mail liberaled@aacu.org, with the authors’ names on the subject line.

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Folks:

The posting below looks at the non-technical factors necessary for effective online learning. It is by Roxanne Cullen & Michael Harris of Ferris State University, in Big Rapids, Michigan. and is #46 in a series of selected excerpts from the NT&LF newsletter reproduced here as part of our “Shared Mission Partnership.” NT&LF has a wealth of information on all aspects of teaching and learning. If you are not already a subscriber, you can check it out at [http://www.ntlf.com/] The on-line edition of the Forum–like the printed version – offers subscribers insight from colleagues eager to share new ways of helping students reach the highest levels of learning. National Teaching and Learning Forum Newsletter, Volume 18, Number 5, September 2009.© Copyright 1996-2009. Published by James Rhem & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: The Best of Both Worlds: Infusing Liberal Learning  into a Business Curriculum

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

Online Learning: More Than Technical Savvy

Too often student convenience or institutional profitability drives the decisions regarding what courses become part of the online curriculum and what prerequisites, if any, prepare students for the experience rather than goals for student learning. The notion that students emerging from the K-12 system today, the generation dubbed the millenials, have such technologically savvy that they can handle the rigors of fully online learning is unfounded. Admittedly, today’s students are, as Julie Evans of the Project Tomorrow Speak Up Survey on education and technology puts it, digitally “native” while their teachers, parents, and the rest of us appear to them as “immigrants” in their technology- rich world. She writes that students are functioning as a “digital advance team for the rest of us, adopting and adapting new technologies for increasing productivity beyond our expectations” (5). She calls on K-12 educators to rethink their hesitancy to embrace technology because of its potential as a means of promoting cheating, and to begin to consider new forms of learning and assessment in this digital era.

Evans’ views are based on data collected over the past six years reporting on the responses of over 1.5 million students, teachers, parents, and administrators about their use of technology. The interesting question that this raises, however, in relation to online learning is why it is, then, that adult learners, the “immigrants” of the technological world, tend to perform better in fully online learning environments than their younger, “native” counterparts?

Tweet, Yes, But Think?

We posit that readiness for online learning has less to do with students’ knowledge of technology and digital dexterity and more to do with their knowledge of how to learn and their motivation to engage fully in the process. Therefore, we submit that the introduction of online experiences for students should be consciously engineered to best capitalize on their readiness for independent learning, and that the progression into the online learning environment be intentionally built into the undergraduate curriculum rather than simply offering students an open menu of face-to-face, hybrid, or fully online courses.

The model of curriculum revision we envision is based on types of learning rather than on units of knowledge, with the goal being to integrate different types of learning as appropriate to the readiness of the learner. Placing types of learning at the center of curriculum review rather than types of knowledge (for example, hours of general education as opposed to hours in the major) provides new insight to the task of revising curricula. A variety of learning opportunities enriches any curriculum by accommodating individual learners and approaching learning outcomes from multiple perspectives.

Miller & Seller (1990) define three types of learning according to the role of the learner. The first is transmissive, sometimes called assimilative learning, which assumes knowledge is content, a transferrable commodity to be gained by demonstration, telling, and modeling. Transmissive learning is the hallmark of the instructional paradigm. The second type, transactional learning, assumes knowledge is constructed by learners and is characterized by experiential activities, student-to- student collaboration, and acts of discovery through active learning and team-based projects. In this learner-centered approach, the educator is designer, one who facilitates learning. The third type, transformative learning, asks the learner to assess new knowledge in relation to existing knowledge, requiring considerable reflection upon the assumptions and biases that the learner has accepted as part of his or her existing knowledge.

Building Toward Androgogy

While these three types of learning cannot be fully integrated as they arise from opposing philosophies of learning, it is possible to build a curriculum that progressively shifts from transmissive or instructional-based pedagogy to the transactive and transformational learning that characterizes the active learning pedagogy of the learner-centered paradigm. This conception is consistent with the shift that Knowles (1984) identified between teaching children (pedagogy) and teaching adults (androgogy), defining pedagogy as the art and science of teaching and androgogy as the art and science of helping others learn. Androgogy assumes that adults are self-directed learners and that their life experiences affect their learning both in regard to preconceptions as well as resources for future learning. Adults also have a strong sense of immediacy and require relevance to motivate their learning. Traditional-aged college students are in a transitional phase between pedagogy and androgogy, for while in some respects they can be considered adult learners, unlike the adult learner who has a wealth of life experience and workplace knowledge to draw upon, traditional-aged students emerging from high school do not have a substantial network of previous knowledge from which to draw (Harris & Cullen, 2009). In other words, there is still a need for some transmissive learning opportunities, particularly in light of the fact that less mature students tend to favor surface learning and memorization.

New Scaffolding

We propose a model of curriculum review that attempts to infuse the three learning types, progressively reducing the opportunities for transmissive learning in favor of transactive and transformational experiences. In this more holistic approach, curricula are organized according to broad concepts and types of learning opportunities as opposed to a sequence of units of knowledge. Redefining curriculum in terms of depth of knowledge as opposed to information transfer holds the promise of transforming the undergraduate curriculum into an educational experience that focuses on the student’s self-conscious attention to the process of learning, a curriculum that is intentional and learner-centered.

Can online learning support this kind of learning? A considerable body of research suggests that it can. Teaching online, whether web supported, hybrid, or fully online supports a learner-centered approach for the teacher. The teacher in the learner-centered class is a designer of learning opportunities, one who sets the stage and then steps aside while the students engage in knowledge constructing activities. Particularly in asynchronous fully online delivery, the teacher has to assume the role of designer and create the avenues for students to actively engage with course material and their peers in order to learn, because there is no single point of contact between students and teacher that allows for the teacher to remain front and center, so to speak. Weigel’s 2002 book, Deep Learning for a Digital Age, offers a thorough examination of how online tools can be used to foster constructivist pedagogy and learner- centered teaching, though he does not advocate fully online courses for most institutions.

New Tools

The tools available for online learning lend themselves to community building, sharing information, seeking information outside the confines of the course. Simulations, group research projects, discussion forums, chat and group functions, and wikis are the kinds of activities that foster deep learning and transactive learning experiences. Online learning by its very nature requires active participation on the part of the student and a great degree of learner discipline, motivation, and control. All of these facets of the online experience foster engagement, reflection, and create an environment where deep learning is possible.

But we must also acknowledge that online learning, whether fully online or blended/hybrid, presents challenges and even barriers for learners. While, of course, the online venue itself does not preclude courses designed around the memorization and regurgitation of facts, the tools that are avail- able for online teaching are just that: tools. It is their use that makes a course learner-centered. For example, the assessment function can be used in a traditional manner or it can be used to automatically generate self tests for students in order for them to begin to regulate their own learning. Discussions can fall flat face-to-face or online, but in the online environment it is much easier for the teacher to get full participation because of the ease of tracking and also the ease of privately encouraging individuals who need help, which is not always easy in the face-to-face format. Tools like wikis are great for collaboration and the individual webpages for students foster self-expression and engagement in the online community. The online environment also makes it very easy for students to contribute material in addition to that provided by the teacher, which presents opportunities to examine the quality of information that is so readily available to them. Some suggest that teachers in the online environment resist the temptation to create a multitude of links for students and instead encourage students to discover the information outside the course as an active learning strategy.

If we are to revise curricula based on types of learning rather than types of knowledge, the issue of online learning must be addressed as part of that discussion, for the opportunities that online learning in its various formats can offer the learning environments are too robust to be left to chance. We need to keep in mind that not all students are ready for many learner-centered practices, so learner-centered strategies need to be introduced incrementally so that students are prepared for them. The same holds true for online learning. We need to prepare our students to engage in their learning using these tools, keeping in mind that independent learning is a learned behavior that develops over time. Reviewing curriculum comprehensively with a focus on types of learning holds the promise of creating an undergraduate experience that is transformational and prepares students for the challenges of today’s workforce as well as a life of continuous learning.

Contact

Roxanne Cullen, Ph.D.

Professor of English

Prakken 120

Ferris State University

Big Rapids, MI 49307

Telephone: (231) 591-2713

E-mail: Roxanne_Cullen@ferris.edu

References

*  Evans, Julie. 2009. “High-Tech Cheating? Students See It Differently.” Retrieved July 18, 2009, from http://www.eschoolnews.com/ news/top-news/index.cfm?print&print&i=59609.

*  Harris, Michael & Cullen, Roxanne. 2009. “A Model for Curricular Revision: The Case of Engineering.” Innovative Higher Education 34/1:51-63.

*  Knowles, Malcolm S. 1984. Andragogy in Action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

*  Miller, John P. & Seller, Wayne. 1990. Curriculum: Perspectives and Practice. Toronto: CoppClark Pitman.

*  Weigel, Van B. 2002. Deep Learning for a Digital Age: Technology’s Untapped Potential to Enrich Higher Education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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Folks:

The posting below looks at an approach that gets students much more involved in grading outcomes. It is by Scott Jaschik and is from the August 3, 2009 issue of INSIDE HIGHER ED, an excellent – and free – online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education.  You can subscribe by going to: http://insidehighered.com/.  Also for a free daily update from Inside Higher  Ed, e-mail [scott.jaschik@insidehighered.com]. Copyright © 2009 Inside Higher Ed Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: Online Learning: More Than  Technical Savvy

————————————————————-

Getting Out of Grading

Few parts of their jobs seem to annoy professors more than grading. The topic consumes gripe sessions, blog posts and creates plenty of professorial angst (not to mention student angst).

Cathy Davidson has decided that the best way to change grading is to take herself out of it. Davidson, a Duke University English professor, announced on her blog last week that she was going to give students the power to earn A’s or some other grade based on a simple formula in which she wouldn’t play much of a role.

“I loved returning to teaching last year after several years in administration … except for the grading,” she wrote on her blog. “I can’t think of a more meaningless, superficial, cynical way to evaluate learning than by assigning a grade. It turns learning (which should be a deep pleasure, setting up for a lifetime of curiosity) into a crass competition: how do I snag the highest grade for the least amount of work? how do I give the prof what she wants so I can get the A that I need for med school? That’s the opposite of learning and curiosity, the opposite of everything I believe as a teacher, and is, quite frankly, a waste of my time and the students’ time. There has to be a better way….”

Her approach? “So, this year, when I teach ‘This Is Your Brain on the Internet,’ I’m trying out a new point system. Do all the work, you get an A. Don’t need an A? Don’t have time to do all the work? No problem. You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart. You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points. Add up the points, there’s your grade. Clearcut. No guesswork. No second-guessing ‘what the prof wants.’ No gaming the system. Clearcut. Student is responsible.”

That still leaves the question of determining whether students have done the work. Here again, Davidson plans to rely on students. “Since I already have structured my seminar (it worked brilliantly last year) so that two students lead us in every class, they can now also read all the class blogs (as they used to) and pass judgment on whether they are satisfactory. Thumbs up, thumbs down,” she writes.

“If not, any student who wishes can revise. If you revise, you get the credit. End of story. Or, if you are too busy and want to skip it, no problem. It just means you’ll have fewer ticks on the chart and will probably get the lower grade. No whining. It’s clearcut and everyone knows the system from day one. (btw, every study of peer review among students shows that students perform at a higher level, and with more care, when they know they are being evaluated by their peers than when they know only the teacher and the TA will be grading).”

Several of those posting comments on Davidson’s blog expressed support for her approach or outlined similar strategies they had tried or wanted to try.

One post, “Never underestimate grade orientation,” noted a caution. “I can see this working with a small course. I tried something similar several years ago at Buffalo. My mistake was to make it a ‘curved’ class (though only a positive curve). Two ‘gangs’ (one a group of fraternity brothers, the other just people who met and formed up) reached an agreement that they would vote up each others’ work no matter what, and non-members’ work down, no matter what, in order to increase their own grade in the class favorably, and hurt others’ grades. I wrote it up a little here. When I intervened, I got complaints: I had set up the rules, several said, if I didn’t like the outcome, how was it their fault.”

Another posting describes a more successful attempt of a similar approach: “I’ve done something like this with my big undergrad class, ‘Intersections: Race, Gender & Sexuality in US History,’ for years now. They do all the work, at a ‘good faith’ level of quality (earning a check from their TA), show up on time to all classes and participate in discussion sections — they get an A. Grades scale down from there. The greatest thing about it is that many students without previous educational privilege *love* it and often do extremely well when not being judged in the usual way — reading a book a week, writing response papers every week, and ultimately participating at grad student level. Entitled students who try to skate by on a good prose style do not like it at all.”

In an e-mail interview, Davidson said her announcement represents more than her personal distaste for grading as we know it. Rather, her views relate to ideas she explores in her forthcoming book (from Viking Press next year), The Rewired Brain: The Deep Structure of Thinking for the Information Age.

“Many of us are frustrated with grading as presently, historically constructed and are finding a mismatch between the kinds of learning happening on the Internet (from a 5-year-old customizing her Pokemon onward) and the rigid forms of assessment that has become the hallmark of formal education, K-12 and beyond, in the late 20th and now the 21st century. In an era when customizing, process, collaboration, and learning from mistakes are hallmark, when we are all having to revise how we think about the human desire to work together towards a goal — whether a Wikipedia entry or a Netflix software competition — we are saddled with a Machine Age model of assessment which is as rigid, reductive, uncreative, and uncollaborative as we can imagine. We know from early childhood studies that if you tell an American toddler ‘here comes the teacher,’ he sits up straight, looks up, shuts up, and stops smiling. That is not the kind of teacher I want to be. But by the time young people enter college, they have cordoned off ‘education’ into ‘grading.’ ”

Her approach to grading, Davidson said, “encourages students to rethink everything they’ve learned about grading within higher education and encourages them to think about how you evaluate quality and performance — not for a grade but for the respect of one’s peers and one’s own self-respect. This is one of the important skills of the 21st century.”

She stressed that she’s not abandoning the role of grading, but having students take ownership of the task in a way that shows that “evaluation, in a serious way, is part of collaborative, interactive creativity. Right now, we have an educational system that encourages ‘teaching to the test.’ That’s appalling as a learning philosophy and a total waste of precious learning time and opportunities in the digital age.”

Whatever the results of her grading approach, Davidson is in a secure position — as a highly regarded, tenured professor at a leading university — to try something new. She acknowledged that there would be additional issues for a junior professor or non-tenure-track instructor taking this idea, but said that they shouldn’t rule it out. And she noted problems with continuing with the status quo.

“One never knows what one can get away with pre-tenure and that is why I tell all of my students to make their department chairs partners in anything they do, from the most traditional to the most experimental — and to keep a paper trail. That is, write to set up a meeting to explain one’s pedagogical philosophy in a case like this, send it to your chair, ask to meet with the chair, discuss it, and then write a follow-up note thanking the chair for the meeting, recapping it, and giving her or him credit for any changes you’ve made in the syllabus (for example) and then send a copy of the revised syllabus. That is a helpful process for everyone involved as well as a wonderful addition to one’s tenure portfolio,” she said.

“Who wouldn’t want a teacher who thinks seriously and deeply about what teaching means? I don’t believe anything is risky if it is well thought out and well communicated. I happen to believe that just about everything is risky (including playing by the rules) without careful intention and careful communication.”

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Folks:

The posting below looks at the challenges of infusing public health education across the undergraduate curriculum. It is by Kathleen Roe, professor of community health and chair of the health science department, San José State University, San José, California. The article is from the Summer, 2009 issue of Peer Review, Volume 11, Number 3. Peer Review is a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities [www.aacu.org/peerreview] Copyright © 2009, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: Getting Out of Grading

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Infusing Public Health Education in the Undergraduate Curriculum:

The Experience of a Comprehensive University

The Institute of Medicine’s 2003 call to introduce all undergraduate students to public health education has stimulated the imaginations of faculty across the curriculum and across the country (Gebbie, Rosenstock, and Hernandez 2003; Riegelman, Albertine, and Persily 2007). The subsequent Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) initiative, the Educated Citizen and Public Health, brought forward the potential contributions of a public health perspective to liberal arts programs, particularly in smaller institutions with strong commitment to integrative learning and transdisciplinary inquiry (Albertine, Persily, and Riegelman 2007).

My colleagues and I, faculty at a large comprehensive university, watched these developments with both delight and revelation. Our delight was that of any academic specialists when the intellectual area about which they have been passionate for a lifetime is suddenly discovered by others. The revelation was a bit more complicated. “How are they able to do it?” we asked in wonder and a little envy, as we learned of new public health minors and complex courses initiated without being overly concerned about headcounts or resources. Compared to these nimble actors, we felt locked in bureaucracy and unable to contribute to the increasingly interesting discourse on the value of the “public health imagination” to the future of our world. So imagine our surprise when, participating in the 2008 AAC&U Undergraduate Public Health Faculty Development Institute, we realized that many of the challenges the liberal arts faculty were now encountering were areas in which we had been nimble and creative, both in and in spite of our very different institutional context.

Three of those challenges are addressed below: (1) engaging health-related academic units in public health general education, (2) working collaboratively across units to create public health learning opportunities, and (3) establishing undergraduate public health education in institutions with and without graduate public health programs. Examples and reflections are drawn from our experience in the Health Science Department at San José State University (SJSU), a large, urban, diverse, and complex comprehensive university. Our department has had a graduate public health program since 1970 and, since 2000, a stealth strategy to infuse public health values and perspectives throughout the university.

Engaging allied health units in public health and general education

We realized long ago that general education was an effective pathway for introducing public health inquiry to undergraduates across the curriculum. Over the years, we have also found it to be a strategic way to interest students in the range of majors that can both utilize and inform the population health perspective. In addition to the humanities and arts, general education through the public health lens can intrigue students with the community-based aspects of nursing, medicine, dentistry, and health science; quantitative fields such as statistics and demography; applied disciplines such as environmental studies and communications, and the biological and social sciences (Albertine 2008). This broad-based appeal helps champions of undergraduate public health education engage diverse academic partners in teaching or supporting general education. Ironically, some of the hardest units to engage can be those that offer health professions degree programs.

Academic units offering health-related programs must often address rigorous professional accreditation requirements, frequently leaving few resources or incentives for being involved in general education. Powerful incentives for our department included a university mandate to increase enrollments and the national visibility of the AAC&U public health and liberal education initiative. As an under-enrolled “discovery” major, community-based health science could certainly grow and thus meet the mandate. This possibility fueled our interest in accelerating the moment of public health “discovery.” Around the same time, the AAC&U initiative sparked new intellectual interest in general education among some of our graduate public health faculty. The initiative also helped legitimize our subsequent move into general education (GE) areas traditionally “off limits” to an applied health unit (”What qualifies public health to teach core math?” was one of the first questions from the university committee that governs the quantitative reasoning area of SJSU’s general education). Early success provided a third incentive for our department’s venture into public health-oriented general education. Indeed, the positive response to our public health-infused courses contributed to a 300 percent increase in our GE enrollments and the health science major in just four years.

Despite our departmental success, the timing was not right for a larger university-wide public health curricular initiative. However, our newly invested faculty developed a twofold strategy for expanding the public health presence in the university’s general education offerings. In some cases, we worked from the inside, introducing public health examples and principles throughout existing curricula. For example, we more explicitly centered the social ecological model as the conceptual foundation of our popular lower-division general education course, Understanding Your Health. This expanded the personal health focus to include social determinants of health and broader level actions, such as policy advocacy and organizational change. We also infused public health examples into our sections of the university’s required junior-level writing course. Anecdotal and course evaluation data consistently demonstrate that students from a broad range of backgrounds enjoy the learning activities that introduce, within the required course template, the 1918 flu pandemic and its community-level impact, social determinants of contemporary health and health disparities, and the scholarly public health literature. Other departments, including nutrition, anthropology, and business, have used these learning activities in their own sections with excellent results, even when the instructor has no public health background.

Our second general education strategy was to design new general education courses that were explicitly framed by the public health perspective. A new course, Health Statistics, was designed to meet all of the institutional requirements of the lower-level quantitative reasoning area through student work with population health data sets. This strategy also builds in faculty flexibility, since the course instructor need not be a public health expert. We are using this approach to a new upper-level course in the earth and environment area, designing the course to meet the required transdisciplinary and integrative student learning outcomes using exploration of environmental health through the public health lens. As recommended by the Consensus Report on Public Health and Undergraduate Education (Riegelman, Albertine, and Persily 2007), other public health areas particularly well suited to general education include epidemiology, global health, and critical issues in public health (Public Health 101).

Working collaboratively across units for community-based public health experiences

Graduate public health curricula draw heavily on practical experience (Council on Education for Public Health 2005); the initiatives for undergraduate public health education make the same commitment, most often through internships and integrative service learning (Cashman and Seifer 2008). However, this ideal can present a challenge when new public health curricula are developed in institutions without public health units and the attendant cadre of faculty, field sites, and community contacts. Such settings call for creative collaboration, itself a hallmark of the public health way of knowing, being, and acting. Two examples from our experience may stimulate ideas about creative collaboration across diverse academic units for a public health experience.

Collaboration for Neighborhood Change.

A technology grant from a local computer company facilitated a unique collaboration between engineering, health science, and urban planning students. The engineering students developed software for handheld computers that allowed GPS mapping, real-time notes, audio recording, and data entry for community observations. Students in our introductory major course, Community Health Promotion, then worked in teams to use the software and handheld computers to document the risk and protective factors in a low-income neighborhood near the university. The next semester, the health science students’ data were used by urban planning students to advocate for neighborhood safety improvements. Each “hand off” from one discipline to another was integrated into the curriculum, making the process of interdisciplinary collaboration for public health a part of the learning experience. The resulting environmental changes-speed bumps, lights, and neighborhood clean-up-were convincing evidence of the power of collaboration for students and faculty alike.

The Family Science Fair-La Feria de Ciencias Familiar

A Health Disparities Service Learning Collaborative grant and support from Community-Campus Partnerships for Health facilitated another public health collaboration across diverse academic units. Working as an interdisciplinary team, undergraduate students from health science, Mexican American studies, education, and biology work together with a local elementary school to plan, host, and evaluate annual Family Science Fair Workshops. The immediate goals of the project are to demystify the districtwide fifth-grade science fair assignment for parents, most of whom are recent immigrants from Mexico or Central America, and to provide technical assistance to parents who then help their children with experiments and poster presentations. The project’s broader public health goal is to address disparities in access to information, participation, and civic engagement that are associated with well-documented health and health care disparities in that neighborhood. Framing the activity as a public health intervention directs student reflection to the relationships among information, confidence, behavior, and community health, particularly for new immigrants, and the ways in which people are included or marginalized from the organizations and institutions of their communities. Working side by side and in the community, students experience the interface and reciprocity of their own disciplines and the public health.

Opportunities for smaller-scale collaboration on public health issues abound in any university or community setting, particularly through fieldwork, internships, or service learning. For example, English or graphic arts majors might work on communications material for the local diabetes coalition; Spanish or Chinese majors might help translate outreach or education messages for the county environmental health program. Kinesiology students might lead physical activity classes at after-school programs designed to address the obesity epidemic; anthropology students might develop oral histories of people living with HIV; political science students might intern with a local politician working on public health issues. Business students might assist community-based organizations with business plans or marketing materials. The possibilities are endless and exciting.

Establishing Undergraduate Public Health Curricula with or without a Graduate Program

It may seem easier to introduce opportunities for undergraduate public health education in institutions with graduate public health schools or programs. Certainly, such settings have faculty with professional expertise, library resources that support public health inquiry, and the required network of community partners and field sites. They also have local alumni who work in the field and graduate students who can support both faculty and students. However, these units may struggle with faculty bias against undergraduate instruction, lack of experience with undergraduate students, low tolerance for the administrative bureaucracy of undergraduate education, and resources restricted to activities that support their accredited graduate programs.

Entering the world of undergraduate instruction can be daunting, enlivening, and everything in between. In our experience, we needed an intellectual hook (the AAC&U initiative), professional legitimacy (the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research’s leadership), an administrative nudge (the mandate to increase enrollments), and resource support (small grants to facilitate collaboration). What we gained were new colleagues across the campus, new opportunities for collaborative research, greater visibility within our institution, and the energy, talents, and twenty-first-century sensibilities of undergraduate students.

Institutions without graduate public health programs have a different set of challenges and opportunities when seeking to introduce undergraduate public health curricula. However, national, professional, and local resources can support the work of campus visionaries who see the possibilities and simply need partners.

The material developed from the consensus conference, particularly the curriculum guides, offer rationale, intellectual structure, and practical tools for establishing general education courses, minors, and certificate programs that center the values and intellectual rigor of public health inquiry. The resources available at www.teachpublichealth.org and the Community-Campus Partnership for Health (www.ccph.org) provide additional tools and resources that seamlessly interface between professional practice and undergraduate education.

Local public health departments, community-based organizations, and foundations similarly provide opportunities to focus student learning on real-world application while offering possibilities for guest speakers, advisory board members, and internship preceptors. It will be important for universities without public health programs to make sure that their libraries have the key public health journals, that faculty are members of the key public health professional organizations, and that students have opportunities to participate in the conferences, scholarships, mentoring, exchange, and networking that occur at regional and national meetings.

Closing Thoughts

Our efforts to introduce and then infuse the public health imagination beyond our masters in public health program have shown us that this perspective is rich with the dualities that enliven liberal education. The public health perspective also speaks to the concerns and sensibilities of today’s undergraduate students. Private troubles and public issues (Mills 1959), urgency and patience, individual and social responsibility, risk and investment, local action and global impact, sustainability and innovation, outrage and hope-these are all recurring themes in the history of public health and the very twenty-first-century concerns of our undergraduate students. Whether in a small college or comprehensive university, public health inquiry embedded in liberal education is rich with lively and important possibilities.

References

Albertine, S. 2008. Undergraduate public health: Preparing engaged citizens as future health professionals. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 35(3): 253-257.

Albertine, S., N. A. Persily, and R. Riegelman. 2007. Back to the pump handle: Public health and the future of undergraduate education. Liberal Education 93 (4): 32-39.

Cashman, S.B., and S. D. Seifer. 2008. Service-learning: An integral part of undergraduate public health. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 35(3): 273-278.

Council on Education for Public Health. 2005. Accreditation criteria for schools of public health and graduate public health programs. Washington DC: Council on Education for Public Health.

Gebbie K, L. Rosenstock, and L. M. Hernandez. 2003. Who will keep the public healthy? Educating public health professionals for the 21st century. Washington, DC: National Academics Press, 144.

Mills, C.W. 1959. The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

Riegelman, R.K., S. Albertine, and N. A. Persily. 2007. The educated citizen and public health: A consensus report on public health and undergraduate education. Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences.

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Folks:

The posting below looks at some ways to help students ask and answer their own questions about a particular topic.  It is by Nancy McClure  of Fairmont State College , Fairmont, West Virgina., and is from POD-IDEA Center Notes on Instruction series. POD is the Professional and Organizational Development Network [http://www.podnetwork.org/] and the IDEA Center is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to serve colleges and universities committed to improving learning, teaching, and leadership performance. [http://www.theideacenter.org/] ©2005. The IDEA Center. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT:  Shadowed by the Past: Outmoded Soviet-era practices still hamper teaching  and innovation in Eastern Europe

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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Finding Ways to Help Students Answer Their Own Questions

IDEA Item #2:

Background

Teachers who find ways to help their students answer their own questions are teachers who are helping their students become more metacognitive–or knowledgeable about and in control of their cognitive resources. Research on metacognition has focused on what students know about their thinking processes, what students do when trying to solve problems, and the development and use of compensatory strategies (1). The ability to reflect on one’s cognitive processes and to be aware of one’s activities while reading, listening, or solving problems has important implications for the student’s effectiveness as an active, planful learner. As an expert learner yourself, you automatically monitor your understanding and adjust by filtering irrelevant information and pursuing additional information as needed.

One strategy you use is to ask questions; as the expert learner, you know the kinds of questions to ask to get the information you need. Students’ question generation is a comprehension- monitoring device and helps them focus on content and main ideas. In addition, student questioning at higher cognitive levels is a necessary component of problem solving (2). Thus, in your role as an expert learner, teaching students to answer their own questions by asking the right questions is vital. Note that item #2 is correlated with eleven of the other “instructor method” items at .70 or higher.  The strongest relationships are with item #1 (displayed personal interest in students), item #4 (demonstrated the importance of the subject), item #6 (made clear how topics fit), item #10 (explained clearly), item #13 (introduced stimulating ideas), and item #15 (inspired students to set and achieve goals).

Helping students answer their own questions is also related to eight of the IDEA learning objectives items at levels higher than .60. Look for similarities in ratings on these items to assess your success in helping your students to develop metacognitive and problem-solving skills.

Helpful Hints

To help students answer their own questions, you need to first teach students to ask the right kinds of questions for the right purposes. Show students that questions can be structured around the types of information sought. For example, Bloom’s Taxonomy (3) of the cognitive domain provides a categorization of thought processes from least to most complex; a good framework for posing questions at increasingly higher levels of understanding. Providing students with question stems (4) will help them with this process. Another categorization of questions (5) describes questions as input (requiring recall of facts or derivations from sensory data); processing (requiring the drawing of relationships among data); or output (requiring students to hypothesize, speculate, create, generalize, evaluate). Once students understand that they need to identify what it is they want to know, they can then select the appropriate questions to ask.

Because generating their own questions will be new to most students, they will need encouragement. You can help students feel comfortable asking questions if you create an environment in which inquiry is not only accepted but fostered. By modeling the questioning process and scaffolding student discourse you can mold students’ actions, interactions, and thought processes (6). One way to begin would be to have students write questions prior to studying a new topic, performing a new task, or taking part in a new activity. Ask them to use the question stems to write a question at each level of thought. Use the students’ questions to quide investigations, activities, or discussions. During these, have students think about particular questions and seek answers through their interactions with the teacher and other students. Afterwards, have students reflect upon the questions they asked to determine if the questions helped them learn. At this time, too, have students write new questions based on their prior questions and the teaching/learning activities.

A third way to help students answer their own questions is to use teaching techniques that promote active learning (7). These are often inquiry-based methods and include, but are not limited to, the case-study approach, debates, role- playing activities, simulations, and problem-solving activities. Through participation in these and other active-learning activities, students learn to assume responsibility for their learning by identifying issues, asking questions, seeking information, and developing answers or creative solutions.

As the preceding hints indicate, finding ways to help students answer their own questions means becoming the type of teacher who structures the teaching/learning process to facilitate students’ assuming a more active role in their learning. Students who learn to ask the right questions will get answers that satisfy them.

Assessment Issues

To assess students’ ability to answer their own questions, you need to consider several aspects of the teaching/learning experience. First, you and the students must be clear on the objective of the learning activity. In addition, the teaching strategy you use will contribute to your choice of assessment technique. You and the students should also agree that learning to ask and answer their own questions is an ongoing and formative process. Because you are helping students become more metacognitive, you should have students engage in self-assessment. Make sure that students are learning to ask questions within the context of the content. Use checklists, learning logs, and dialogue journals to track students’ acquisition of self-assessment and questioning skills (8). For maximum benefit, couple these with other assessments of students’ learning to demonstrate the relationships of their questions to acquisition of new knowledge and skills. When students see that asking and answering their own questions is directly connected to more and better learning, their motivation and persistence will increase.

References and Resources

(1) Baker, L., & Brown, A. L. (1984). Metacognitive skills and reading. In P. D. Pearson (ed.) Handbook of Reading Research. New York: Longman.

(2) Zoller, U. (1987). The fostering of question- asking capability: A meaningful aspect of problem-solving in chemistry. Journal of Chemical Education, 64, 510-512.

(3) Bloom, B. S., Engelhart, J. B., Furst, E. J., Hill, W. H., & Krathwohl, D. R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goal (Handbook 1: cognitive domain). New York: Longmans Green.

(4) Fowler, B. (1996). Bloom’s taxonomy and critical thinking. Longview Community College: Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum Project. Retrieved June 29, 2004, from http://www.kcmetro.cc.mo.us/longview/ctac/blooms.htm

(5) Pizzini, E. L., & Shepardson, D. P. (1991). Student questioning in the presence of the teacher during problem solving in science. School Science and Mathematics, 91, 348-352.

(6) Chin, C., Brown, D. E., & Bruce, B. C. (2002). Student-generated questions: A meaningful aspect of learning in science. International Journal of Science Education, 24(5), 521-549.

(7) Myers, C., & Jones, T. B. (1993). Promoting active learning: Strategies for the college classroom. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

(8) North Central Regional Educational Laboratory. (1997). Critical issue: Ensuring equity with alternative assessment. Retrieved June 29, 2004, from http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/assment/as800.htm

IDEA Paper No. 31: Answering and Asking Questions, Cashin IDEA Paper No. 39: Establishing Rapport: Personal Interaction and Learning, Fleming IDEA Paper No. 34: Focusing On Active, Meaningful Learning, Stalheim-Smith

©2005 The IDEA Center This document may be reproduced for educational/training activities.

Reproduction for publication or sale may be done only with prior written permission of The IDEA Center.

This document may be reproduced for educational/training activities. Reproduction for publication or sale may be done only with prior written permission of The IDEA Center.

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