There are several reasons why students may not keep up with assigned readings in your course. Students might lack: either the general or the discipline-specific skills necessary to focus on the relevant aspects of the reading. background knowledge to fully comprehend readings. OR Students might not perceive: a sufficient payoff for keeping up with the… Read more »
Entries by akesha
Rigor in Assessments
Rigor is defined by the U.S. Department of Education as the cognitive complexity of a skill within a standard or of an assessment item. While the working definition of rigor contains references to the “cognitive complexity,” we can simply think of this in terms of the verbs in the standard. Bloom Taxonomy Bloom’s Wheel is probably the “gold… Read more »
DEIJ Book Recommendations
Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People By Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald 272 pages http://blindspot.fas.harvard.edu/Book In Blindspot, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald explore hidden biases that we all carry from a lifetime of experiences with social groups – age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, or nationality. “Blindspot” is a metaphor… Read more »
In Class Small Group Activities
The following resources were compiled by Maryellen Weimer to address questions related to the essential components of effective small-group activities and experiences. A list of common group activities can be found in this conversation around active learning: https://blogs.iu.edu/luddyteach/2022/02/22/helping-students-engage-in-active-learning-during-class/ Group formation Should teachers form the groups or let students form their own? If teachers form the… Read more »
2022 Horizon Report Teaching and Learning with Technology
Each year EDUCAUSE produces a Horizon Report which discusses the trends and key technologies and practices shaping the future of teaching and learning, plus several scenarios and implications on the horizon. This year’s report starts with a look at how COVID has impacted institutions, and the shift from “emergency” to “long-term” planning for new technologies… Read more »
Ways to Reflectively Conclude the Semester
Student reflections can take many forms: an individual five-minute writing activity, a full-class discussion, or somewhere in-between. (From https://learning.northeastern.edu/reflecting-on-the-last-day-of-class/) Below is a set of possible prompts that you might use or adapt, based on a four-question reflective learning technique that has been shown to increase students’ retention of material (Boucquey, 2014; Dietz-Uhler & Lanter, 2009): Can… Read more »
Practical Example of Mastery Grading in a Data Science Class
In a paper from the 2022 Proceedings of Machine Learning Researchhttps://proceedings.mlr.press/v170/brown22a/brown22a.pdf, Sarah Brown discusses revisions she made in her Programming for Data Science course aimed at making it student centered. The course is designed as a programming intensive data science course and serves approximately 30 students. This paper summarizes the design overall and provides practical… Read more »
Tips to help discouraging procrastination in students (4-5 minute read)
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), anywhere from “80 percent to 95 percent of college students procrastinate, particularly when it comes to doing their coursework.” Even at its conservative end, this estimate range is shocking, representing at an absolute minimum, four out of every five students in college. In a 2017 article by Maryellen Weimer, she… Read more »
A couple of tips to help students with study/text anxiety
Howie Hua, a lecturer in the Mathemetics Department at Fresno State University, recently shared a few tips he uses to help students reduce their anxiety when preparing for test. One is called “Friends without Pens” and gives students time to chat about the exam before it starts in two rounds with the following structure: Students are… Read more »
Curricular approaches for supporting stressed out students and additional resources.
Hi All, Stress affects all Americans regardless of age, gender, race, socioeconomic status or prior life experience. Typically, those who are experiencing stress report feeling “overwhelmed, worried or run-down” (Alvord et al., n.d.). Now more than ever, college students feel stressed in the university setting (Yorke 2004). These feelings are particularly acute among first- and… Read more »