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December, 2005

The Teaching Professor - December 2005 - Full Issue
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How to Prevent Paper Recycling
By Steve Broskoske
Although recycling paper in the community may be a valued practice, the recycling of term papers by students is a highly unethical action and a problem that is growing to epidemic proportions. The Internet has taken the old term paper mills to a new level of convenience, now tempting both low achievers and the academically gifted. A teacher who is aware of the problem can help prevent this crime by making it more difficult for a student to commit.

To Call or Not to Call: That Continues to Be the Question
Ask a question and no one volunteers: should you call on a student? You have a quiet but capable student who rarely or never participates: should you call on that student?

Putting the Participation Puzzle Together
Participation continues to be the most common method faculty use to get students involved and active in their learning. As previous research has documented, faculty use participation strategies with limited success. On average only 25 percent of students in a course participate, and half of the group who make contributions in class do so to the extent that they dominate the discussion.

Differences Between Student and Faculty Perceptions of Learning Strategies
By Douglas J. Lynch
One of the continual challenges of college teaching involves helping students adapt to academic demands that differ from those of high school. My interest in this problem led to a research project that compared the learning and study strategies used by students in a college course with the learning and study strategies their professors believe to be most important for success in the course.

Principles That Make Improvement a Positive Process
Editor's note: The following principles don't propose breathtakingly new insights, but they offer a context for imporovment that should make efforts to teach better more successful.

Exams and American Idol
By Todd M. Hamilton
I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. After 10 years of teaching, I finally realize why students get so nervous about exams. It’s because taking an exam is a performance.

Writing to Reflect and Improve
I grow ever more convinced of the power of writing to improve instructional practice. The process of putting ideas, feelings, and reactions into words slows the mind and permanently captures the thought. Even though these thoughts may be imprecise, even inaccurate, writing puts them in a place where they can be looked at, analyzed more completely, and refined further.

Looking Both Ways
I just don’t see faculty and students as being all that different, and I wonder if we might not learn something about our students by looking at ourselves.

Student Engagement in Courses
At this point, it’s a well-established fact that student engagement in college makes a big difference in important things like persistence and performance. The measures most often used to ascertain the level of engagement are global ones. They measure how well a student is connected to the college experience overall. A group of researchers at the University of Colorado at Denver thought it might be useful to assess engagement at the course level as well. At this micro level instructors have options for increasing student engagement.