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I'D Like To Use Essay Tests, But..., Marilla Svinicki

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

The "Writing Across the Curriculum" movement of several years ago urged instructors in all departments to help their students learn to write more coherent prose, whether it be in papers or essay tests, not just to improve student writing but to encourage more complex thinking. Having to explain an answer in prose format requires more from the student in the way of deep processing of the material than is usually the case on objectively scorable exam questions.

Many instructors across campus subscribed to these ideas enthusiastically, but were stymied when it came to putting them into practice in their classes. …

What Did I Do Right In One Freshman Seminar? What Did I Do Wrong In Another? What Will I Do Next Time?, Richard L. Schoenwald

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

An essay from a university instructor answering the questions: What did I do right in one freshman seminar? What did I do wrong in another? What will I do next time?

Emerging Trends In College Teaching For The 21st Century, Milton D. Cox

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

After national calls for the reform of undergraduate education were made a decade ago, students, parents, and legislators began to apply pressure to reestablish the importance of student learning. More recently, central administrators have begun to change reward structures. University-wide community is beginning to be built around teaching. New disciplinary journals that publish the scholarship of teaching are being started, and established ones are gaining respect. National teaching conferences and journals that provide a forum for the scholarship of teaching are expanding. With these emerging opportunities, faculty are going public about their interest in teaching and learning. Over the last …

Mentorship In The Classroom: Making The Implicit Explicit, Deanna Martin, Robert Blanc, David Arendale

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

The "under-prepared student" once something of an oddity on American campuses, now seems omnipresent. And not only in undergraduate institutions, not only in America. The government of Great Britain ordered a 25% increase in university enrollment. Black South Africans will occupy a majority of the places in previously white and apartheid universities. The Association of American Medical College will triple minority representation in medical schools in their 3000 x 2000 campaign, drawing heavily on the urban areas that have been on the receiving end of the wrenching body blows of poverty, unemployment, and despair, the areas that have provided many …

Helping First-Year Students Study: Part Ii, Better Lasere Erickson

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Few freshmen can keep pace with their courses if they study only an hour between classes and if their only study activities are reading, highlighting, and copying over notes. Faculty expect more, and those who teach freshmen play an important role both in making expectations about college work explicit and in helping freshmen develop their study skills. What, then, might we do to get students to spend more time studying and to study in more productive ways?

In The Name Of The Student... What Is Fairness In College Teaching?, Rita Rodabaugh

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

If we remember our own college days, most of us can think of at least one professor who was less than ideal. All of us have had professors who fit one or more of the following descriptions: dull, boring lecturer; confusing and hard to follow; too easy and presents no challenge; and so on. Yet if you describe your worst experience as a student, more than likely it was one in which you were treated unfairly.

For the past two years, much of my research has focused on college students' perceptions of fair practices in the classroom. From this research, …

Mistakes And Other Classroom Techniques, Harriet C. Edwards

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

As teachers, we wish to do more than present to our students the established ideas and facts of our fields. We want to give them a sense of how one thinks and creates within the discipline, to impart the tools of scholarship. In my field, mathematics, this concern has led to an increased focus on the teaching and learning of problem solving. Researchers have directed much attention to the executive functions and metacognition involved in problem solving, that is, the solver's awareness of thinking processes and of progress toward a solution (Schoenfeld, 1985). In addition to these procedural matters, attitudes …

Helping First-Year Students Study: Part I, Bette Lasere Erickson

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

In preparing to write Teaching College Freshmen, we heard negative sentiments echoed many times. Faculty complained about students' lack of motivation, their neglect of their studies, and their refusal to assume any responsibility for their learning. At the same time, freshmen told us the pace in most courses was far beyond them, it was not humanly possible to do all the work, they frequently felt overwhelmed, and their professors seemed neither to notice nor to care whether or not they learned.

What sense are we to make of these conflicting stories? For starters, freshman descriptions of "humanly impossible" work loads …