In This Issue Current Issue Archives

March 2005

The Teaching Professor March 2005 full issue PDF
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A Self-Grading Case Study
To most faculty, undergraduates assigning their course grades sounds preposterous. But that’s exactly what happened in a large (240 student) general education class. Now, the content of course was hardly conventional: History of Creativity in the Arts, Science, and Technology, a course with the principle objective of developing student creativity. It was the content and goal of the course that motivated its instructors to opt for an equally creative approach to grading.

Students Conceptions of Teaching and Learning
A large study of students enrolled in geography courses at multiple universities in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States looked at their conceptions of geography, teaching, and learning. Each was considered separately.

Finding the Discussion Question That Works
By Joe Reese, Ohio University, Zanesville Campus
I’ve been teaching literature for more than 30 years, and nothing has struck me more during that time than the difficulty of finding just the right discussion question. It’s easy to give out information, which students dutifully take down in notebooks and throw away after the test. It’s not even that hard to do a kind of modified Socratic dialogue, in which you stand in the middle of the classroom and elicit one- or two-sentence responses (you pretty much know these responses beforehand) from select, eager students that you continually call on.

Does It Really Matter Where Students Sit?
Do better students sit in front, or does seat selection contribute to better grades? A recent study examines this question.

A Participation Rubric
By Adam Chapnick, University of Toronto
After years of stating my expectations for tutorial participation orally, I have developed a rubric that I think both improves my accountability as an assessor and provides my students with a clear sense of my expectations for class discussions. It also makes clear my focus in the small group setting: creating a “learners-centered,” as opposed to a “learner-centered,” environment.

Participation Rubric PDF

Peer-Led Team Learning, Fewer Lectures: More Learning
Faculty reluctance to use student-centered approaches often stems from the fear that with less content being covered, less learning will occur. Some empirical studies addressing that issue have results some will find surprising.

Teacher’s Pet
By Larry Spence, School of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State
Many years of research shows that students who spend more time in contact with faculty learn the best. That just confirms that students learn when they get one-on-one attention. They are the students we like and with whom we spend time. They pay attention to us and we alas are drawn to them. They are sources of joy. Even in the darkest semesters of uncaring students determined not to learn they shine like mercury-vapor lights on a soggy highway.

Strategies for Large Classes
Increasing class size continues to be a reality on many campuses. The two articles highlighted here both provide specific and detailed accounts of how instructors are managing to maintain robust active learner components in large courses.

Scholarship of Teaching: Now Too Defined?
When Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered was first published, it generated waves of interest, most of which settled on his proposal for a scholarship of teaching. The idea that the definition of scholarship as the advancement of knowledge could be broadened was interesting, but the notion of a scholarship of teaching resonated with almost everybody. It quickly became the latest trendy idea in higher education. Everybody jumped on board and soon the scholarship of teaching meant everything and anything that advanced teaching and learning causes.