Can you recall . . .

Standing at the copy machine five minutes before your class begins, having just discovered a reading you’d like to get to your students today. There are three people ahead of you in line to use the copier—which just ran out of paper.

Watching television on a Friday night when a preview comes on for a program, airing on Sunday, that relates to topics you will discuss in class Monday morning. You would like your students to know about it so they may watch it.

Reading student papers with a strong suspicion that some...

Attempting to get information to students between classes can be time-consuming and ineffective. One simple strategy is to post information in a main hallway, on a classroom door, or in a commons area. If students learn to check the board regularly, physical posting can be useful in getting the word out. There are limitations to this strategy:

students must travel to the posting place (which may be problematic if students live off campus or if the posting place is locked when you are trying to convey the information—like over a weekend);

someone may remove the message if it is...

A new semester means updating, copying, and disseminating your syllabus. Each semester you find better ways to organize your courses and their learning objectives. But the additional pages add guilt as you send a lengthening file to the copiers, so you try to revise, squeezing in the vitals without wasting paper. You make enough copies to hand it out on the first day of class and also bring a few spare copies. You hand out the copies the first day of class and spend most of the session reviewing the syllabus.

You are probably already using a word-processing program to...

Research on the importance of social interaction and collaboration in learning has a long history. Dewey and Piaget both argued that social interaction is central to learning.¹

Recent studies (Slavin, Evans, Topping, Nichols and Miller, Newstead and Evans, Vye et al., and Tang,² among others) have found that students working in groups on projects and problems can learn more, produce better work, and spend more of their time in Higher-Order Learning Activities than can comparable students working by themselves. In particular, it has been found that students working alone spend their time gathering and organizing information on the basic issues...

John Dewey is usually credited with establishing the importance of experience in formal education, asserting that “there is an intimate and necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education.”² Over the past twenty-five years research in this area has been building, and experience has become an ever-growing part of curricula in the forms of internships, service learning, and, most recently, computer-generated environments that allow students “virtual” experiences within disciplines being studied. Many strands of the recent research on the importance of experience in learning have been pulled together in a publication from the National Research Council, in which...

Students are often so used to missing the forest for the trees—moving from one activity or concept to another without seeing how they relate to each other or fit into the big picture—that their knee-jerk reaction when confronted with new material is not to ask, “Where does this fit into what I already know?” or “What am I learning from this?” but “Will this be on the test?” A variety of technology tools are helpful in clarifying these linkages, none more than Hypertext . The ability to allow students to Hyperlink to more detail (a definition, a picture,...

Most professors acknowledge that writing can be a powerful tool. Writing is a means by which students take responsibility for their thoughts. It forces the writer to move more slowly over new ideas, contextualizing information and testing assumptions in a way that is not done when he or she simply thinks through the information. So it would stand to reason that writing is an important link—in any discipline—for moving students toward better, deeper thinking.

Invariably, however, when we hear “more writing opportunities,” we think “more time correcting and discussing student writing.” Beneficial though it is, writing often loses...

Many of the traditional solutions employed to address poor source review are applicable to this scenario as well. Reviewing student work, both in and out of class, helps students understand the instructor’s expectations. Discussing a student’s working bibliography with the student can help the student understand how to build research on past work, ferreting out key words and connections. Selecting a bibliography or two for class discussion can help mired students see new opportunities or even validate their confidence.

Another solution has been to devote more class time to discussing research. As students’ responses become more frustrating, instructors will spend...

Assessment has become a dominant force in education over the past twenty years, as

Various published studies have indicated the need for reform in education,

The Total Quality Management ideas of Edwards Deming have spread,

A growing body of research has focused on the value and strategies of assessment in education, and

Most accrediting bodies and state legislatures have begun requiring increasingly rigorous assessment.

A good overview of the history, research, and strategies of assessment is provided in Huba and Freed.¹

In this chapter we deal with several assessment-related scenarios in which faculty increasingly find themselves, and with strategies for...

While the terminology varies—active learning, learner-centered learning, problembased inquiry—research has shown that student-centered approaches to teaching have considerable merit (Bonk and Cunningham, 1998; Brown, Collins, and Duguid, 1989). One of the challenges to incorporating a more individualized environment for students has been logistical—how do you provide authenticity and multiple perspectives imbued with personal responsibility over learning? Increasingly, technology can play an important role in this process (Wilson, 1996; Cunningham, Duffy, and Knuth, 1993; Knuth and Cunningham, 1993). The technology available to you through many applications you already use can be helpful.

Before you can offer material and...