Improving Teaching and Learning / Teaching with Writing
Professors often complain about students’ writing but schools could do a better job of teaching students how to write, said John Warner in his new book, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. Warner, who is also a blogger for Inside Higher Ed, gave an interview recently on the website where he outlines […]
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Joan E. Strassmann (Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology) writes about her experience with integrating writing for Wikipedia into her Behavioral Ecology course on the Wikipedia Education blog. Strassmann argues that when students write for Wikipedia, they develop a keen sense of the elements of strong writing, and they work hard to produce well written and […]
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In a post called “Why I stopped Writing on My Students’ Papers” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Millner, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, discusses his decision to provide students’ feedback on their writing in a new way: through conferencing. In the post, Millner notes his shift […]
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This post is for anyone wishing to try peer review or for those who promise ourselves that we’ll take some time “next time” to perfect our peer-review processes. The effort to improve our implementation of peer review is well worth it. Research shows that student learning is not only improved through receiving thoughtful feedback but by learning […]
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Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, co-authored by Peter C. Brown and Washington University Psychology department professors Mark McDaniel and Henry “Roddy” Roediger, helped to kick-start a teaching experiment with surprising outcomes. With the intention of helping students to consolidate learning and clarify misconceptions, Professor Allison Vaillancourt of the University of Arizona applied McDaniel and Roediger’s […]
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Announcements / Resources for Teaching
Registration is now open for feedback sessions during Teaching Philosophy Statement (TPS) Reading Week. As we head towards the winter break, now is a great time to get feedback on your TPS! Graduate students and postdocs are invited to sign up for a time to get feedback and discuss plans to write, revise, or refine […]
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Unclear assignments can lead to unclear writing. It is sometimes only as you are grading papers or essay exams that you realize your assignment or prompt may not have been as clear as it could have been. For this reason, the end of a semester–when you are reviewing student work–can be an opportune time to revise your assignments. Whether you are revising […]
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Research on Teaching and Learning
A study published in Psychological Science shows that students who wrote lecture notes “longhand” scored better on conceptual questions in later testing on the lecture content than students who typed notes on a laptop. In this laboratory study, students at Princeton University and the University of California-Los Angeles were given either laptops or pen and […]
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