The ability of postsecondary students to write and communicate proficiently is an expectation identified by many, including not only organizations such as the OECD but also other public and employer groups. There is concern, however, that students and thus employees often fail to meet expectations in these areas. To address this concern, it is necessary to understand more about the writing skills that students learn during their postsecondary education. This research project was designed to examine whether and how students are taught to write at university.
If you’re a faculty member, you’ve spent the last few weeks preparing your syllabus for the spring semester. You’ve updated the document and added a little to it. This latest round of edits may have pushed your syllabus another page longer — most now run about five pages, though nearly every campus has lore of some that exceed 20.
So much of the work that goes into teaching is necessarily invisible. Nobody sees your best teaching days — when everything clicks, when you get your class to truly see the world differently — except for the students in the room. Most of us don’t teach for plaudits, but it’s a shame that our best work in the classroom is usually unseen by our peers and superiors. It’s also a shame that those of us who want to improve as teachers don’t get the benefit of learning directly from excellent teachers in our fields.
Consider how you learned about your research discipline in graduate school. Sure, you got ideas, advice, and information from your adviser and from other professors, but you also had the benefit of reading other people’s work to see how scholarship in your field was done. When it comes to developing as teachers, however, most of us haven’t been able to learn by watching others. We can hark back to our own teachers, but that’s a pretty limited sample.
Looking for inspiration on teaching or some specific strategies? David Gooblar, a lecturer in rhetoric at the University of Iowa and a blogger on teaching, writes about classroom issues in these pages. Here is a sampling of his recent columns.
After all, the basic science of nutrition hasn’t changed: People who consume more calories than they burn tend to gain weight. But just telling people to cut down on calories isn’t enough to change their behavior. (If it were, we’d all have our ideal BMI.) So what did the researchers behind the JAMA study do differently? They taught people how to adopt the sort of eating habits that naturally lead them to consume fewer calories.
Participants attended classes — once a week for the first two months, then less frequently throughout the year — to learn about healthy eating habits. Class size was small (with no more than 22 students), and the instructors focused on making "sustainable lifestyle changes, not simply following a temporary ‘diet.’" Moreover, based on early feedback, the researchers
modified their teaching to make it "less dense, less didactive, and more interactive." Instructors lectured less and began organizing classes around activities, including students cooking their own recipes.
Small class sizes? Fewer lectures? More active-learning activities? Does any of that sound familiar?
Zac Wendler needed a new syllabus. An assistant professor of English, literature, and world literatures at Ferris State University, he was tired of the same routine at the beginning of every semester: He would hand out his syllabus — five or so pages of text — and students would glance at it and wait for him to walk them through it. Then for the rest of the semester, they would ask him questions that could be easily answered if they had read the syllabus.
Does that sound familiar? It rang a bell for me. As I listened to Wendler’s presentation at this year's Conference on College Composition and Communication in Portland, Ore., I thought about my own syllabus. It has swelled to 11 pages of single-spaced text, even after I changed the departmental policies section to a nine-point font.
Public concern over the employability of youth has reached pandemic levels. Over the last several years, whole storehouses of ink have been spilled exploring the challenges facing a “lost generation” of highly educated, jobless youth, struggling under the yoke of student debt and low wages. Over time, this public concern has given rise to public doubt over the value of sending a generation of youth to post-secondary education.
A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various kinds of biases against instructors. (Here’s one addressing gender.) Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors; tenure cases have even hinged on it.
What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed, a mere “artifact of small sample sized studies and publication bias.”
A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various kinds of biases against instructors. (Here’s one addressing gender.) Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors; tenure cases have even hinged on it.
What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed, a mere “artifact of small sample sized studies and publication bias.”