can/should instructors force students to be metacognitive about their learning?

One of the things that I have learned about using e-portfolios as a teaching & learning strategy is that when it is a large assignment, it is unnecessary to have students complete both the e-portfolio and write the final exam. For the last couple of years, I have given students the choice between writing the final exam and preparing an e-portfolio in Augustana's fourth-year biology capstone course because there is a good correlation between what students achieve on the final exam and the final e-portfolio. This is what I found a couple of years ago when I was still requiring students to complete both the final exam and e-portfolio:


As you can see there is a significant correlation between the exam and e-portfolio marks: I only need to use one or the other to determine whether or not students have learned the material. This only works in this capstone course because the e-portfolio includes a writing dossier in which students must synthesize and digest the course readings. What I have learned is that instructors cannot force students to be metacognitive. The year that the data for the above correlation was collected, some students thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated completing the e-portfolio but there were some who felt it was a heinous assignment. I don't think learning occurs when a learner has such a visceral reaction to an assignment. I don't really understand why some students reacted so strongly against the e-portfolio when simultaneously other students gave it very high praise.

It is apparent to me from the personal comments from some alumni of the course and also from the comments I read on the anonymous Student Evaluations of Teaching that some students resented being forced to complete the e-portfolio because the assignment felt like make-work - they didn't understand the point of the e-portfolio. It is interesting that the alumni understand the objective of the assignment now a couple of years post-graduation. But the alumni thought that this sort of metacognitive ability needs to be developed over many years and to require it of students during the last term of their last year is the wrong time to do it - it is too late.

Interestingly an Augustana colleague of mine explained it to me in terms of many students in the last term of their last year have already checked out. They are either depleted or are already looking forward to the next phase of their lives. These graduating students are no longer focused on completing their degree. My colleague has observed this happen with his students when they are wrapping up their senior thesis. So, again, an argument that having students reflect on their education for the first time just before they graduate is the wrong time to do it. The whole point of students reflecting on their own learning is to have them think about how and why they learn with the goal that they will realize that there are better and poorer ways to learn and that thinking about this early in their education may produce the benefit of developing better learners. It is too late to do this in the term before students graduate. On the other hand, if students have an understanding of what it means to be a life-long learner, then it won't matter when they are asked to be metacognitive about their learning: earlier is better, but later is better than never.

One of my alumni suggested that making the e-portfolio optional is critical because not all students will be ready or willing to consider how and why they learn. Particularly in their last term of their degree. Their reasoning was that the assignment requires students to take a critical look at how and why they learn, and thus places them in a vulnerable place. It may be unsettling to critically reflect at the end of your program and realize that you have been going about learning using the wrong approach for the last four years. No wonder some students might become angry at me for forcing that realization on them. Doing this early in their learning career, however, allows them to make choices about how and why they learn - there is time for corrective action or at least a considered reason for not taking action. Just before they graduate is too late.

I had never thought how the assignment might place students in a vulnerable place. But of course, if I think about it carefully, that is the intention of such an assignment. To invite students to be vulnerable/open to reconsidering why and how they learn. At the end of a degree may be the wrong time to do that.

It requires more investigation on my part but I think the bottom line is that you cannot force students to be metacognitive. What I need to determine as a mature instructor still learning how to teach is how to enable students to realize that metacognition powerfully impacts their ability to deeply learn. And I think it involves supporting students earlier in their learning careers to be reflective about their learning as some of my past students have suggested to me. This is what I am currently attempting to do with the learning philosophy assignment which I have implemented across all year levels of the courses I teach. So far the results are promising. But, I don't force students to complete a learning philosophy - that is something they can choose to do as an optional assignment. Thus, students can be reflective about their learning when they are ready.

Can (should) instructors force students to be metacognitive about their learning? I think, as with teaching in general, all we can do is present students with the educational opportunity and then it is up to them whether or not to engage with the learning process.

Resources

Girash, J. (2014). Metacognition and instruction. In V. A. Benassi, C. E. Overson, & C. M. Hakala (Eds.), Applying Science of Learning in Education: Infusing Psychological Science into the Curriculum (pp. 152–168). Society for the Teaching of Psychology. 

Haave, N. (2016). E-portfolios rescue biology students from a poorer final exam result: Promoting student metacognition. Bioscene: Journal of College Biology Teaching, 42(1), 8–15.

Mind the Gap: Nurturing Our Students Toward Expertise (Resources from Kimberly Tanner's presentations)

We had a great meeting over the last couple of days with Dr. Kimberly Tanner leading us through three interesting and invigorating workshops: Mind the Gap - Nurturing Our Students Toward Expertise. Her slideshows, handouts and articles are linked below. One additional article that is worth reading for those of us interested in implementing active learning in our classrooms is "What if Students Revolt?" and is well worth reading especially after receiving end of term student evaluations (which a number of us are doing now!). In addition, CBE-LSE has collected Dr Tanner's  collection of essays on approaches to biology teaching and learning here.

I - Cultural Competency in the Undergraduate Classroom: Cross-Disciplinary Tools, Insights and Strategies to Promote Student Success

slideshow

handout

further reading

• Chamany Allen and Tanner 2008 Making biology learning relevant. CBE-LSE 7: 267-78
• Tanner 2014 Structure matters. CBE-LSE 12: 1-10
• Tanner and Allen 2007 Cultural competence. CBE-LSE 6: 251-8

II - Order Matters: Becoming Metacognitive about Teaching Choices

slideshow

handouts

• Overview of the 5E learning cycle model
• Changes suggested by the 5E model

further reading

• Schinske and Tanner 2014 Teaching more by grading less. CBE-LSE 13: 159-166
• Tanner 2010 Order matters. CBE-LSE 9: 159-164
• Tanner 2012 Promoting student metacognition. CBE-LSE 11: 113-120

III - AIBA Keynote Address: Beyond Assessing Knowledge – Card Sorting, Superheroes, and Moving Towards Measuring (Biological) Expertise among Undergraduates

slideshow

further reading

• Chi, Feltovish and Glaser 1981 Categorization and representation of physics problems by experts and novices. Cognitive Sci 5(2): 121-152
• Smith et al 2013 Development of the biology card sorting task. CBE-LSE 12: 628-644

metacognition and students' learning process

This article from the Teaching Professor website discusses how active learning - engaged learning - needs to go hand-in-hand with students' meta-cognition of their own learning process. This is why I have been advocating the use of ePortfolios (or a learning portfolio) to enable students to think about how they learn in addition to why and what they learn. How did they come to a particular decision? How did they solve a particular problem? Why did a particular concept in the course give them difficulties and how did they overcome it? These are some of the issues that students need to consider in order to become actively engaged in their own learning and which, I believe, will produce deeper learning in students. Another way to think about this, is that students need to be supported in developing their own learning philosophy.

Resource

Weimer M. 2013. Three ways to help students become more metacognitively aware. Faculty Focus, Oct 10. http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/three-ways-to-help-students-become-more-metacognitively-aware/

mid-course feedback from students

So many post-secondary institutions are now making mid-course evaluations routine. I had read of this practice in a Faculty Focus post a couple of years ago and have been wanting to try it for some time. What has held me back is that I also remember reading that faculty should only implement this with their students if they are willing to consider students' suggestions and to make time to discuss the results of the feedback with the students. This term I implemented some innovations in my senior capstone course such as an e-portfolio assignment and in-class team assignments and discussions. I wanted to see how these were being received by students. After searching for some resources for best practices in the types of questions to use, I came across a great resource from UBC and found that some of their sample questions would work well for me if tweaked and also sparked some creativity to come up with a couple of my own questions.

I used the survey tool available in Moodle (our university's LMS) and created an anonymous feedback form making it available to the students in my class during Spring Break. Ten out of 22 students completed the survey over the week and I received some very good feedback. This is what I found:

(A) The material covered in class is challenging and intellectually stimulating.
-  1. strongly disagree:	0
-  2. disagree:	0
-  3. neutral:	1 (10.00 %)
-  4. agree:	3 (30.00 %)
-  5. strongly agree:	6 (60.00 %)

(B) I am able to make overarching connections between each week’s material.
-  1. strongly disagree:	0
-  2. disagree:	0
-  3. neutral:	1 (10.00 %)
-  4. agree:	8 (80.00 %)
-  5. strongly agree:	1 (10.00 %)

(C) Sensitive material in this course is discussed by the instructor and my classmates in a way that…
-  a) always respects my feelings and the feelings of other students:	8 (80.00 %)
-  b) usually respects my feelings and the feelings of other students:	2 (20.00 %)
-  c) sometimes respects my feelings and the feelings of other students:	0
-  d) rarely respects my feelings and the feelings of other students:	0

 (D) What aspect of the course do you think is contributing the most to your intellectual development?

In this section I was pleased that students indicated they felt that the course content was challenging and that the course structure (team-based discussions) were facilitating their processing of the material helping them to think in ways they hadn't done before. Students also wrote that having a rotating group leader to facilitate discussion of the assigned readings was helping them to broaden their thinking. One identified the class structure as a flipped classroom (students are required to write a two page response to the assigned reading for entry into the classroom) while others indicated that the writing was helping them make connections between assigned readings and to their other courses and life outside the classroom.

(E) What aspect of the course do you think is contributing the least to your intellectual development? 

This was interesting because what students had indicated above was aiding their intellectual development others indicated here were not contributing: writing, discussion leaders, e-portfolio, reading. When I parse through the responses carefully, what students really seem to be saying is that the workload for the course is too high. That is the only way I can reconcile the seeming contradiction in their responses. The readings, discussion, writing are contributing to their intellectual development, yet the readings, discussion, writing are contributing the least to their intellectual development. I wonder if there is also a tension between having students actively engaged in the material (peer discussion and student leaders) with students desire to have an "expert" tell them what is correct. 

(F) If you were the instructor, what one change would you implement to make this course a better learning experience?

This question produced results indicating that students were feeling the workload for the course to be too high. They had different suggestions: one reading per week, shorter readings, break up the required readings with in-class discussion of videos, make the course into a 6 cr full year course.

(G) What do you know now about the course that you wish you knew at the start of term?

Some students commented that they wished they had known how much work the course would be and how much philosophy would be part of the course content. For some reason students equate philosophy with difficulty. Odd, because the philosophy we are doing is simply considering the structure of biological thinking and how it developed. But we do use philosophical approaches to investigate these (e.g. David Hull, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Andrew Pickering, Ernst Mayr). I think they may simply be finding thinking hard work.... which it is.

A couple of students noted that they would not change a thing and that the 'horror' stories they had heard about the course from previous students were largely exaggerated.  That was nice to hear. On the other hand a couple of students indicated that they were not finding the writing dossier or e-portfolio to be an educationally meaningful experience. I am not sure what to with those comments because a number of other students have indicated that these are facilitating their thinking. Again, I wonder if students dislike the writing and e-portfolio mostly because of the time they are taking to complete.

So how did I respond to their feedback? I determined that I could delete three of the 11 remaining assigned readings without compromising the integrity of the course and have replaced them with in-class videos with subsequent class discussion. Students have responded very positively to the changes and indicated they appreciated that I acted on their feedback.

I'll use these questions again for mid-course feedback in future terms. One thing I also learned from this is that I prefer the questions that I placed on my feedback form to some of the questions available in our USRI - Universal Student Ratings of Instruction.

Resources

Tunks KW. 2012. Transforming Teaching through Supplementary Evaluations. Faculty Focus, August 20. http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/faculty-evaluation/transforming-teaching-through-supplementary-evaluations/

Office of the AMS VP Academic and University Affairs. (n.d.) Guide to Collecting Mid-Course Feedback at UBC. UBC Mid-Course Feedback. University of British Columbia. http://midterm.teacheval.ubc.ca/about/

bridging constructivist and instructivist teaching strategies

A colleague forwarded this article to me awhile ago. It discusses the need to bridge traditional teaching strategies (instructor-centric) with more constructivist (student-centered) approaches and to ensure that there is a sound pedagogical basis for using educational technologies. That is, that the educational technology actually aids student learning.

It contains some really interesting conclusions about being careful to bridge instructivist and constructivist teaching approaches for students not yet familiar with taking responsibility for their own learning and also how students still seem to equate lectures with better learning/teaching as opposed to student-centered teaching strategies. That certainly confirms the experience I have had with the student evaluations for my courses that use team-based learning. But what is really interesting is that there is a seeming sweet spot. In my first and second year courses in which I used TBL all of the time, students wrote on the course evaluations a request for more lecturing. In contrast, when I used TBL for only a couple of course sections in my more senior biochemistry course, students indicated that more TBL activities would be appreciated.

Perhaps that also goes along with the conclusions in this paper by Venkatech et al that we, as instructors, need to vary the teaching strategies we use as necessary for the particular educational context and the particular student cohort. This is one of the things that makes teaching both interesting and difficult. A cookie-cutter approach is not appropriate. Rather, as instructors we must constantly engage the act of teaching at a metacognitive level to continually assess how we are teaching while we are teaching. We need to use the instant feedback we receive from our students while teaching to make adjustments on the fly. I think this is why I find online teaching difficult and unsatisfactory for myself - my teaching is too far removed from the act of learning that my students are experiencing. The instant feedback that I can sense while in the classroom is so delayed when teaching online. Mind you, I have never had the experience of teaching online in a synchronous environment. My suspicion, however, is that it would be like communicating with a friend or colleague through Skype or Google Talk - simply not the same thing as being in their physical presence while working through an issue.

For me, teaching is a physical, visceral experience, and it is difficult to do when disembodied.

Resource

Venkatesh V, Jedwab J, Rabah J, Thomas T, Varela W, Alexander K. 2013. From disconnected to connected: Insights into the Future of Distance Education and Web 2.0 Tools in Higher Education. Revue internationale des technologies en pédagogie universitaire ● International Journal of Technologies in Higher Education, 10(3): 6-13. Available at http://www.ritpu.org/spip.php?rubrique74&lang=en

enabling student consideration of instructor feedback

This paper in Higher Education considers the role of continuous assessment in student learning. Continuous assessment, if I understand it correctly, is simply assessing students throughout the term on their learning of the course content. This is in contrast to discontinuous assessment in which students might get assessed once or twice throughout the course (e.g. midterm and final exam - nothing else). Continuous assessment, might include weekly or even daily quizzes or assignments. The advantage of continuous assessment is that students can chart their development in mastering the course content. The problem with continuous assessment, however, is the marking load for instructors - if it is going to be effective for learning it needs to be accompanied by meaningful feedback - and that it commonly mixes formative and summative assessment. The assessments are used to both provide corrective feedback to students but are also counted as marks towards students' final grade. The effectiveness of the feedback thus seems to degrade with the summative aspect due to student performance anxiety. In addition, to be effective, continuous feedback must be timely: effectiveness decreases the longer the period of time between student completion of the work and their receipt of the feedback. Timely feedback is difficult in large classes but there are ways around this problem if marking/feedback is constructed such that it happens in-class rather than out of class. See Schinske & Tanner's article on marking and also this website on the use of IF AT forms.

One of the interesting things Hernández suggests is to have students consider the feedback and reflect on how they will use it to improve work on a subsequent assignment. Thus it brings in a metacognitive component in which students must consider how they will develop their ability to learn the material. It seems similar to me to the concept of exam wrappers in which students reflect on how they performed on an exam comparing the exam results to how they approach their studying and consider how they could improve or strengthen their learning process.

In the case of continuous feedback I can imagine having a post-assignment wrapper followed by an assignment wrapper:

1. students submit their work for marking/feedback
2. upon receipt of their graded work they write a reflection on how they will use the feedback to improve future work
3. with the subsequent assignment students attach a short reflection indicating how the feedback from the previous assignment was actually used to improve the current assignment

Only problem with this is the extra marking and grading involved for instructors. But perhaps there is a way around that difficult by incorporating the wrappers into peer discussions. The point with the wrappers is not to create more marking for instructors, but rather to enable student consideration and incorporation of the feedback we provide them.

Resources

Dihoff, R., Brosvic, G. M., ML, M. L. E., & Cook, M. J. (2004). Provision of feedback during preparation for academic testing: learning is enhanced by immediate but not delayed feedback. The Psychological Record, 54(2), 207–231. Retrieved from http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/tpr/vol54/iss2/4/

Hernández, R. (2012). Does continuous assessment in higher education support student learning? Higher Education, 64(4), 489–502. doi 10.1007/s10734-012-9506-7

Schinske, J., & Tanner, K. (2014). Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently). CBE-Life Sciences Education, 13(2), 159–166. doi:10.1187/cbe.CBE-14-03-0054

Weimer, M. (2010, July 29). Exam Wrappers. Faculty Focus - The Teaching Professor Blog. Retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/exam-wrappers/

on note-taking

Maryellen Weimer has a short article on developing students' note-taking ability posted on the Teaching Professor website. It explains why note-taking is so important - it promotes learning. This is the primary reason why I do not make my own course notes completely available to students: I think that taking notes during class enables students' thinking of the material. Note that this is not the same as recording every word an instructor states during class. Good note-taking is a skill that requires judgement - a metacognitive skill. I resisted placing my lecture slides online for students until students informed me that they used them to write their notes on - they rarely simply relied on the text on the slide but rather embellished the text I had already typed. So that was great! students were engaging with the material in-class.

This blog post from the Chronicle of Higher Ed discusses a study that suggests that handwriting notes on paper is better than typing notes on a laptop during a lecture. This was measured in terms of learning/recall by the participants in the study. This article from the Atlantic discusses the same research. I think the important point from the research is to think while taking notes rather than simply recording verbatim what an instructor is lecturing.

My own personal experience is that typing is far more effective for me than writing: I cannot read my own handwriting after taking notes during a lecture or conference presentation. This is the reason why I started carrying around an iPad and using Evernote to jot down notes. In addition, it is way easier to search for notes when it is organized by something like Evernote. When I started to type to take notes I found that it improved the conversation within my own mind with the material being presented. Hand-writing notes I found I became too worried about the quality of my handwriting so that I could read it later!  :P

When I type my notes I am not transcribing what the speaker is saying. Rather, my typing is writing to think. And I think that is the important point to impress on students - note-taking is not transcribing. Note-taking is writing to think not thinking to write. My typing is my form of writing which is my way to think. I believe that this should be the take home message to students: Don't think about writing - write to facilitate your thinking. If approached this way it becomes clear that transcribing a lecture or presentation is not thinking, and this is the reason, I think, that many typists do not do well on subsequent quizzes - they haven't been thinking while they type on their laptop.

So I think one of the comments posted to The Chronicle blog-post is correct; it depends on the typing and handwriting skills of the particular student. And, of course it depends upon the level of engagement the student brings to the lecture.

I wonder if this issue will be moot in a few years when we are all using active learning strategies in our classrooms and rarely lecturing?

Resources

Meyer R. 2014. To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand: Students do worse on quizzes when they use keyboards in class. The Atlantic [online - May 1]. Available from http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/to-remember-a-lecture-better-take-notes-by-hand/361478/

Perez-Hernandez D. 2014. Taking Notes by Hand Benefits Recall, Researchers Find. The Chronicle of Higher Education [online March 28]. Available from http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/taking-notes-by-hand-benefits-recall-researchers-find/51411

Weimer M. 2013. How to Help Students Improve Their Note-Taking Skills. The Teaching Professor 27(6): 7. Available from http://www.magnapubs.com/blog/teaching-and-learning/how-to-help-students-improve-their-note-taking-skills/

changing the learning paradigm

Maryellen Weimer published a great post yesterday on her Teaching Professor Blog: "She didn't teach. We had to learn it ourselves." She discusses the comments that a colleague recently received on her end-of-term student evaluations and suggested that this is a result of student-centered learning or active learning in which students are given more responsibility for their learning. Comments such as this typically arise because students resist shouldering this responsibility. However, Weimer suggests that instructors could do a better job of unpacking the teaching and learning strategy used in the course so that students might better understand why they are shouldering the burden of their own learning - teachers cannot learn the material for students. If students understand the reasons for the implementation of a particular teaching and learning strategy they are more likely to accept responsibility for their own learning and more deeply engage in the learning environment. 

I have also received this sort of comment on my student course evaluations when I have used the teaching strategy Team-Based Learning. Some students felt that I had abdicated my teaching responsibilities when I didn't lecture every class and instead had students doing work (under my guidance) during class. I thought I had explained why I was using the teaching strategy and presented the data suggesting that deeper learning happens with collaborative active learning. What I have read over the past summer, and am reminded of again by Weimer's post is that as instructors we need to constantly be explicit about our teaching strategies and about the metacognitive development that is happening in our students as a result. The objective of every educator, I am sure, is to produce independent self-regulated learners that are no longer reliant on instructors to tell them what is the right and wrong way to do things. But this is something that requires work on the part of both learners and instructors in the sense that teachers must resist the easy way out and not give students the answers they seek instead guiding them to produce their own answers. And for their part students must be patient and understand that learning is hard difficult applied work and is not easy, quick, or simple.

Otherwise we graduate students who are unable to contextualise situations resulting in an inability to think on their feet when conditions change. As instructors we have an obligation to develop students intellectual ability.

Barbara Walvoord's assessment advice

This week Barbara Walvoord lead a couple of workshops at the Augustana Campus on program assessment and how to make grading more efficient. What I found interesting is that she advocated for teaching and learning strategies that are embedded in team-based learning (TBL): have the students engage with the material before coming to class; use class time for students to practice applying the material and providing feedback to them on their progress. This describes the Readiness Assurance Process and Application portions of TBL. It is also a version of the flipped classroom. Here is one description of the flipped classroom from Educause, however, it views flipping narrowly involving replacing a traditional face-to-face didactic lecture with an online lecture. In contrast, I consider required readings to be superior to supplying video recorded lectures and a technique to flip the classroom (old-fashioned but effective). As I have been learning for the past couple of years from Bligh's book What's the Use of Lectures?, Weimer's book Learner-Centered Teaching, and How Learning Works by Ambrose et al, student learning increases when students become engaged with the material and are held accountable for being responsible for learning the material for discussion and application in class. The evidence suggests that the traditional lecture is not quite as good as reading the textbook for information transfer (Bligh 1998) and that for students to become engaged in the material and their own learning processes, they must be given time in a safe environment where they are able to practice applying the material under the guidance of an instructor and with the support of their peers (Weimer 2013, Michael 2006, Prince 2004). Basically the research supports what Dr. Walvoord was telling us for the last couple of days in her workshops. Students learn better/deeper if they attend to the rote learning outside of class before class, are held accountable for that learning during class, and class-time is used for student practice of applying their learning under their supervision and guidance of their instructors and in collaboration with their peers. There are many different teaching and learning strategies that would fall under the category of active learning. TBL is but one example; here is how it is developing in my classroom.

One of the reasons that Dr. Walvoord was promoting active learning strategies and flipping our classrooms was that this would decrease the amount of individual grading that faculty must do to provide feedback to our students. We still need to provide feedback, but if done within the classroom, it will decrease the amount of out of class grading that we, as instructors need to do. Kimberly Tanner recently published an article describing the history of grading and some alternatives to traditional grading that support the ideas Dr. Walvoord was promoting in her workshops.

In addition to encouraging faculty to use active learning strategies in our classrooms, Dr. Walvoord additionally emphasized the importance of developing students' metacognitive abilities. Instructors can aid student engagement with course material leading to deeper learning by helping students ask critical questions about their own learning process. We need to prompt our students to help them think about their thinking - we need to help them consider how they learn and how they might improve their learning. This is what I learned from Augustana's eportfolio pilot a couple of years ago and lead me to write a short piece for the Teaching Professor on developing students' learning philosophies. A couple of articles that delve into how to promote metacognition and the evidence suggesting that this promotes student learning may be found in this article by Kimberly Tanner and a book chapter by John Girash.

Finally, assessment is not something that we should fear and avoid. The more I learn about program assessment, the more I understand that it is about gathering evidence of how well our students are learning what we teach them so that we are able to adjust our teaching practice such that our students' learning outcomes improve. Something that we discussed at my workshop table was the value of gathering different kinds of evidence: that students' self-reports were interesting from the point of view of learning what students thought they had learned, but that we also needed to compare that with instructors' assessment of students' performance of the skills we purport to inculcate in our students. We need to understand what students think they are learning to ensure they align with what we intend to teach our students. If those two are different, then we have a problem - students' expectations of their learning outcomes will not match instructors' expectations and that will lead to disappointment for everyone involved: students, teachers, and administrators. Gathering evidence of students perceptions of their own learning and comparing that to their performance of the skills learned will enable us, as educators to revise our teaching practices, whether that be what or how we teach, such that student learning is improved.

And that is in everyone's best interests.

Resources:

Ambrose SA, Bridges MW, DiPietro M, Lovett MC, Norman MK. 2010. How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. San Francisco, CA. [UofA faculty, staff and students may access this as an e-book through our library's EZProxy here]

Bligh, Donald. 1998. What's the Use of Lectures?, 5/e. Exeter (UK): Intellect. [UofA faculty, staff and students may access this as an e-book through our library's EZProxy here]

Girash J. 2014. Metacognition and instruction. In: Benassi VA, Overson CE, Hakala CM, editors. Applying Science of Learning in Education: Infusing Psychological Science into the Curriculum. Society for the Teaching of Psychology. p. 152–168.

Haave N. 2014. Team-based learning: A high-impact educational strategy. National Teaching and Learning Forum 23(4):1–5. [UofA faculty, staff and students may access this article through our library's EZProxy here]

Haave N. 2014. Developing students’ learning philosophies. The Teaching Professor 28(4):1,4.

Michael J. 2006. Where's the evidence that active learning works? Advances in Physiology Education 30(4): 159-167.

Prince M. 2004. Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research. Journal of Engineering Education 93(3): 223-331. [UofA faculty, staff and students may access this article through our library's EZProxy here]

Schinske J, Tanner K. 2014. Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently). CBE-Life Sciences Education 13(2):159–166. 

Tanner KD. 2012. Promoting student metacognition. CBE-Life Sciences Educaction 11(2):113–120.

Walvoord BE. 2015.How to Make Grading Time-efficient and Useful for Learning. Augustana Faculty Fall Workshop. Camrose, AB. [podcast]

Walvoord BE. 2005 July. Explaining the reasons for criticisms of students’ academic performance. IDEA Item #7.


Walvoord BE. 2005 July. Giving tests and projects that cover the most important points of the course. IDEA Item #12. 

Walvoord BEF & Anderson VJ. 2010. Effective grading: A tool for learning and assessment in college, 2/e. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Weimer M. 2013. Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice, 2/e. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.