November, 2005

The Teaching Professor - November, 2005 - Full issue
…

Chapter Essays as a Teaching Tool
By David A. Locher
A few years ago I added a simple assignment to my introductory sociology classes, and it has paid off in more ways than I expected. Each student writes an essay for each chapter we cover. In the essay, prepared outside of class, the student identifies what they consider the single most important concept from the chapter unit (anything in the textbook or class lecture and discussion) and then explains why they think it is important. Each student must give an example from their own life experiences that illustrates the idea and establishes its importance, and then relate it to the topic.

The Connection between Teaching and Research
For many years it’s been teaching versus research—the relationship between the two being fundamentally adversarial. Many thought (and some still believe) that excellence in research meant lesser instructional effectiveness and that excellence in teaching often predicted little or no research productivity. Extensive research (much of it summarized in previous issues of this newsletter) disavows this negative correlation, establishing instead that excellence in research and excellence in teaching are not related.

Student Projects: Working for Clients
The learning potential of hands-on, experience-based projects is enormous—as the increased use of service learning and internship programs attests. A bit less involved but equally promising is the learning afforded by projects that give students opportunities to do work for clients. But like all hands-on learning experiences, the logistics can be daunting for teachers, if not downright overwhelming. Many faculty decide not to include projects like these because they require too much time and effort to manage effectively.

First-Generation Student Persistence
Students whose parents have had no postsecondary educational experience disproportionately belong to races other than white, often come from low-income families, and are more likely to be female than male. Persistence to completion is important for any student in college, but for these students it can be a life-transforming experience. Research has documented that first-generation college graduates go on to occupy the same positions as and earn salaries comparable to their counterparts with college-educated parents.

Teaching and Everything Else in Those Mid-Career Years
Like much else, faculty careers are often divided into three phases: the beginning, the middle, and the end. New faculty have been studied in some detail—probably because of the great influx of them—and likewise, so have senior faculty, although they have been studied less than new faculty. But what about that expanse in the middle? Researchers Baldwin, Lunceford, and Vanderlinden (reference below) quote sources describing this career stage as “perhaps the least studied and most ill-defined period in life.”

Reduce Test Anxiety to Improve Student Performance
Test anxiety has been formally defined as “the set of phenomenological, physiological, and behavioral responses that accompany concern about possible negative consequences or failure on an exam or similar evaluative situation.” (p. 268) But most teachers don’t need a formal description: they’ve seen test anxiety firsthand.

What Do We Know about Where the Scholarship of Teaching’s Being Done?
As has been regularly reported in this publication, scholarly work on teaching and learning continues to gain recognition and if the number of submissions received by this (and other pedagogical sources) is any indication, more faculty are doing this kind of work. (The article by Whittington in this issue chronicles how one faculty member got started and become convinced of the value of this kind of scholarship.) But what do we know about where the work’s being done?