January 2005

Full January 2005 issue of The Teaching Professor in PDF format
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A Global Perspective on Responding to Student Writing
By Kathy Gehr
To make student writing a rich and enriching component of a course, it must be embedded in the course’s design and classroom activities. We must think of designing assignments, working with drafts, and grading final drafts as an interconnected process. The following strategies make grading shortcuts on final drafts more likely to work for everyone.

Designing Assignments to Minimize Cyber-Cheating
Take the plethora of information available online, add the cut-and-paste feature, throw in lots of pressure to get good grades, and plagiarism becomes an appealing option to almost any student. Arthur Sterngold (citation below) holds students accountable, but he doesn’t place all the blame there.

An Update on Learning Styles/Cognitive Styles Research
Research on learning styles now spans four decades. The amount of work ebbs and flows with more flowing recently. Interestingly, work on learning styles continues to occur across a wide spectrum of disciplines, including many quite removed from psychology, the disciplinary home of many of the central concepts and theories that ground notions of learning style.

Why I Like Freshmen
By Barbara Mezeske
In my college, there are some who look upon classes filled with first-year students as the penance they must pay in order to qualify for the real business of education: teaching juniors and seniors. Freshman composition is the assignment you must bear in order to teach critical theory; intro chemistry is how you pay your dues before you are assigned research students of your own; general math goes to the part-timers, the pros teach calculus. But I would like to suggest that this sort of academic snobbery is misguided. Freshmen students are one of the delights of a teaching career.

Student Recommendations for Encouraging Participation
We regularly revisit topics in the newsletter, especially those that represent perplexing instructional problems, and getting students participating in class is certainly one of those. Across the years we highlighted work of various kinds that analyze the issues and propose solutions, all of it pertaining to the undergraduate classroom. Are there significant differences in the graduate classroom?

A Viable Literature for College Teaching
I am just finishing up a book on pedagogical scholarship, more specifically a review of previously published work on teaching and learning authored by faculty in disciplines other than education and its related fields. I have no quarrels with folks in education. In fact they are the pros — the folks trained to study teaching and learning and advance of our knowledge of both. But this book is devoted to the the scholarship of practitioners — the work that is written by college teachers for college teachers. Up to this point, I don’t think anybody has looked at it as a body of applied scholarship and asked what we might learn from it.

Using Popular Game and Reality Show Formats to Review for Exams
By Gundars Kaupins
To review exams, professors often provide basic outlines, review difficult materials, and answer student questions. Students also may practice some exam questions. As an alternative to these traditional exam reviews, professors can create games based on popular television shows, particularly game and reality shows.