Making Exams More about Learning
We give exams to assess mastery of material—are students learning the course content? With so much emphasis on scores and grades, it’s easy to forget that the process of preparing for, taking, and getting feedback about an exam can also be learning experiences. The learning that results from these processes can be tacit, or teachers can design activities associated with exam events that can result in better content learning and heightened student awareness of the learning skills associated with demonstrating knowledge. The good news is that these activities don’t have to be all that creative and innovative, as Thomas Smith discovered.
Making the Most of Fieldwork Learning Experiences
Fieldwork refers to any component of the curriculum that involves leaving the classroom and learning through firsthand experience. It includes activities as diverse as measuring trees for an ecology course, interviewing a leader for a religious studies course, or conducting ethnography for a sociology course. The field experience may extend across an entire semester or be the last 10 minutes of the period. Depending on past experiences, the announcement, “OK, let’s head out to the field,” may generate terror or excitement in students. To accomplish the latter, I recommend a set of simple strategies that enhance learning and improve student experiences in the field.
Revisiting the Purpose of PowerPoint
The university teaching/learning center I direct offers to collect midterm student feedback for instructors. We interview the students in a course without the instructor present and create a report describing what students think does and doesn’t help them learn. We also ask them to suggest what might improve instruction in the course. In the majority of these interviews, students comment on the use of PowerPoint slides. And frequently, their opinions are mixed.
Student Entitlement
It’s a term much bandied about—perhaps the best place to start is with a definition. Authors of the study referenced below define it as “an attitude marked by students’ beliefs that they are owed something in the educational experience apart from what they might earn from their effort.” (p. 343) The student cohort to whom the term is most often applied is the “millennial students,” those born between 1982 and 2002. And there’s lots of evidence that the sense of entitlement has grown. One interesting bit included in the article noted that the combined search terms “sense of entitlement” and “students” yielded 16 references in 1996 in the LexisNexis database; the same terms yielded 102 references in 2006.
Teaching Circles: A Low-Cost, High-Benefit Way to Engage Faculty
For the past three years I have directed a small program that has produced big results at Tusculum College. For as little as $3,000 per year, our college has increased its sense of campus community, helped with current faculty development, more quickly integrated new faculty, and modeled scholarly discussions for students. Officially the program goes by the name “The Teaching and Learning Initiative,” but it has acquired the nickname “teaching circles.”
The Power of Questions
Good questions are treasure troves in life as in teaching because they so effectively open new vistas, provide new perspectives, and challenge our most basic assumptions. Good questions are those that the questioner cannot answer. They are used to initiate a dialogue where answers, even short and partial ones, begin to crystallize and shape themselves, provoking still other questions and answers, like waves rippling onto waves, interminably. In teaching, the questions raised across a course may say more about it than the answers they elicit.
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