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student learning

Five Steps to Improving Program-Level Assessment Practices

Student learning outcomes assessment can be defined in a lot of different ways, but Lisa R. Shibley, PhD., assistant vice president for Institutional Assessment and Planning at Millersville University, has a favorite definition. It’s from Assessment Clear and Simple: A Practical Guide for Institutions, Departments, and General Education by Barbara E. Walvoord and states that student learning outcomes assessment is “the systematic collection of information about student learning, using time, knowledge, expertise, and resources available in order to inform decisions about how to improve learning.”

Mary Bart September 1, 2010

The Benefits of Making the Shift to Student-Centered Teaching

Would you let your students decide when you hold office hours?

How about whether projects are worth more points than exams, or vice versa?

Would you let your students decide some of the topics that will be covered in the course?

Mary Bart August 23, 2010

Student Learning: Six Causes of Resistance

A lot of students just don’t seem all that interested in learning. Most faculty work hard to help students find that missing motivation. They try a wide range of active learning strategies, and those approaches are successful with a lot of students but not all students.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD July 20, 2010

Learning Goals: Faculty and Students Don’t Agree

The findings of a recent study documenting differences between the priorities that faculty and students give to various learning goals will not come as a surprise to many. Those differences are an undercurrent that flow through most classes.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD April 16, 2010

Learning from Experience: How Teaching is Like Golf

Management professor David A. Whetten, who now directs a faculty development center, admits with honesty that for some years he didn’t think there was much he could learn from people who “studied” education. After all, he was in the classroom doing education and had learned much from that experience. In a wonderful piece [see reference below] he explains how a conversation with his golf instructor resulted in an important insight about the nature of experiential learning.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD April 2, 2010

Metaphor for Teaching: The Teacher as Midwife

The midwife is still my favorite metaphor for teaching. I don’t think there’s a metaphor that more aptly captures the complexity, power, and richness of the dynamic relationship between teachers, students, and learning. The metaphor is not original with me, and although I have read some quibbles in the literature as to who first proposed it, I first encountered it in a 1986 Harvard Educational Review essay by William Ayers. Here’s some of my current thinking about how the midwife mirrors all that a good teacher should be.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD April 1, 2010

What Students Expect from Instructors, Other Students

Some years back The Teaching Professor featured an article highlighting Mano Singham’s wonderful piece describing how he moved away from a very authoritarian, rule-centered syllabus (reference below). It’s one of my very favorite articles—I reference it regularly in presentations, and it appears on almost every bibliography I distribute.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD March 23, 2010

Do Faculty Give up on Students?

Most faculty (especially those reading a publication like this) do care about students. We wouldn’t be doing all that we do if we didn’t. However, some semesters are long, some students are difficult, we get behind, we have too much on our plates, and we get stressed and tired. When that’s how we’re feeling we don’t always show that concern in tangible ways.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD March 11, 2010

Learning Spaces that Facilitate Student Learning

As a college student, I always liked it when I had a course that met in Edwards Hall – if for no other reason than a lot of the classrooms in that building had theater-style seating with chairs that swiveled. The fact that I would remember that after all of these years is an indication of the effect a more welcoming learning space can have on students.

Mary Bart February 15, 2010

Using Screen Capture Software to Help Reclaim Class Time

Think about how you teach. Now think about how students learn. What are some things you can do to ensure that there is congruence between your teaching style and students’ preferred way of retrieving and processing information?

Mary Bart January 27, 2010

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