In This Issue Current Issue Archives

March, 2007

The Teaching Professor - March, 2007 - Full Issue mp3
…

The Teaching Professor - March, 2007 - Full Issue PDF
…

Assessing Class Participation: One Useful Strategy
By Denise D. Knight, SUNY Cortland, NY
One of the changes we have seen in academia in the last 30 years or so is the shift from lecture-based classes to courses that encourage a student-centered approach. Few instructors would quibble with the notion that promoting active participation helps students to think critically and to argue more effectively. However, even the most savvy instructors are still confounded about how to best evaluate participation, particularly when it is graded along with more traditional assessment measures, such as essays, exams, and oral presentations. Type the words “class participation” and “assessment” into www.google.com, and you will get close to 700,000 hits.

Helping Students Learn
Teachers do indeed aspire to help students learn, and most have lots of opinions as to how to accomplish that goal. In the study referenced below, researchers decided instead to start with students. They asked a cohort of teacher-education students to respond to this query: “What happens in my … classes that helps me to learn?” It’s a great question—one all of us could profitably ask our students.

Quizzes Are the Right Answer
By MaryAnn Byrnes, University of Massachusetts Boston and Joseph F. Byrnes, Bentley College, MA
How would you rather spend your class sessions—reviewing the readings for students or having students discussing readings with insight and enthusiasm? Too often, many of us resort to review because we suspect that students have not even looked at the readings. These lectures fill the silence of student noninvolvement. And the more we lecture, the more students are encouraged to stay uninvolved. Uninspired by this drudgery, we decided to try something very different, and we are delighted to report that it works. A weekly content quiz has dramatically increased student preparedness, involvement in class discussions, and collaborative learning—and has significantly reduced the need for us to lecture on assigned readings.

Making Cell Phones in the Class a Community Builder
By Alan Bloom, Valparaiso University, IN
The first time a student’s cell phone rang in my class, I was angry and frustrated. With their musical ringers, cell phones that go off in class are rude and distracting. But how to respond? I’ve never been very good at playing the heavy. Was there any way I could take this annoying occurrence and twist so that it would contribute to a more positive classroom environment?

Cell Phones Do Distract in Class
In case you ever had any doubts, research (reference below) now exists that verifies that both students and teachers find cell phones ringing in class distracting. The results also document strong support from students and faculty for policies against ringing cell phones. Although there was strong support against cell phones going off in class, the strength of that support was mediated by age. The younger cohort in the study was more tolerant of cell phones than the older cohort.

Views Presented in Class: Balanced?
Do some instructors use their classrooms to indoctrinate students? That has been the concern of some who have gone so far as to propose legislation designed to “take politics out of the university curriculum and to protect the rights of students to get an education rather than an indoctrination.” (p. 112) Students can now document their professors’ biases and experiences in class on a website: www.noindoctrination.org.

Preventing Cheating: Do Faculty Beliefs Make a Difference?
“We believe that student beliefs about their peers … can influence misconduct, while faculty beliefs about student academic misconduct can influence efforts to prevent and challenge the misconduct.” (p. 1059) Said another way, the researchers (citation below) are afraid that if students think that a lot of their peers are cheating, it will increase the likelihood that they will cheat. And, if faculty believe that lots of students are cheating, they will do more to prevent it. Conversely, if faculty don’t think academic dishonesty is much of a problem in their classes, they will do less to prevent it and make it easier for students to get away with it.

Large Classes: Approaches Taken in One Discipline
With some regularity in this newsletter, we summarize a research project with results directly relevant to only one discipline. In this case, it’s some exploratory descriptive work that seeks to establish the state of practice with respect to large class in the field of criminal justice. We summarize some of the findings of interest below because we don’t think that the way in which large courses are taught in criminal justice is all that different from how they are taught in lots of closely, and even in some not so closely, related fields. But even more important, we highlight the work because the article models an approach that could be profitably replicated across all academic disciplines.

Active Learning: A Perspective from Cognitive Psychology
By Suzanne M. Swiderski
In recent years, the phrase active learning has become commonplace across the academic disciplines of higher education. Indeed, most faculty members are familiar with definitions that go something like this: Active learning involves tasks that require students not only to do something, but also to think about what they have done. Moreover, many faculty have already incorporated into their teaching activities associated with active learning, such as interactive lectures, collaborative learning groups, and discussion-related writing tasks.

Take a Quote and Think about What We’re Doing
The book 50 Ways to Leave Your Lectern contains a collection of activities designed to get students active and involved in learning. In one activity, students sit in a circle or U, if possible. Each one draws or is given a quote which is placed face down in front of them. The first student turns over his or her quotation, reads it aloud and offers a one-minute commentary on it. The student may agree or disagree, but in either case is encouraged to draw support for that position from personal experience, course material, or other relevant sources. While one student is speaking, the next student may turn over his or her quotation and begin formulating the commentary.

Questions that Lead to Self Understanding
Questions are one of those mainstay teaching strategies used to accomplish all kinds of learning goals: questions help an instructor gauge levels of understanding; questions can pique flagging interest; questions lead the way deeper into content and questions challenge thinking. Adult educator Patricia Cranton identifies three kinds of questions especially effective at promoting critical self-reflection and self-knowledge.