Teaching at Its Best

A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors

Linda B. Nilson

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119107798
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación superior

The classic teaching toolbox, updated with new research and ideas

Teaching at Its Best is the bestselling, research-based toolbox for college instructors at any level, in any higher education setting. Packed with practical guidance, proven techniques, and expert perspectives, this book helps instructors improve student learning both face-to-face and online. This new fourth edition features five new chapters on building critical thinking into course design, creating a welcoming classroom environment, helping students learn how to learn, giving and receiving feedback, and teaching in multiple modes, along with the latest research and new questions to facilitate faculty discussion. Topics include new coverage of the flipped classroom, cutting-edge technologies, self-regulated learning, the mental processes involved in learning and memory, and more, in the accessible format and easy-to-understand style that has made this book a much-valued resource among college faculty.

Good instructors are always looking for ways to improve student learning. With college classrooms becoming increasingly varied by age, ability, and experience, the need for fresh ideas and techniques has never been greater. This book provides a wealth of research-backed practices that apply across the board.

• Teach students practical, real-world problem solving
• Interpret student ratings accurately
• Boost motivation and help students understand how they learn
• Explore alternative techniques, formats, activities, and exercises

Given the ever-growing body of research on student learning, faculty now have many more choices of effective teaching strategies than they used to have, along with many more ways to achieve excellence in the classroom. Teaching at Its Best is an invaluable toolbox for refreshing your approach, and providing the exceptional education your students deserve.

PART 1

PREPARATION FOR TEACHING

CHAPTER 1
Understanding Your Students and How They Learn

Whenever we prepare an oral presentation, a publication, or even a letter, the first issue we consider is our audience. Whoever that is influences our content, format, organization, sentence structure, and word choice. The same holds true in teaching. The nature of our students—their academic preparation, aspirations, and cognitive development—affects our choices of what and how to teach. We need to think of our job not as teaching art, biology, English, history, math, psychology, and so on but as teaching students.

For teaching, another critical consideration is how the human mind learns. Some ways of receiving and processing new knowledge are easier for people to attend to, grasp, and remember. Yet in spite of the fact that we are all responsible for encouraging human minds to learn, too few of us know how the human mind works.

Knowing both who your students are and how their minds learn is the starting point for teaching at its best.

YOUR STUDENT BODY PROFILE

If you’re not already familiar with your student audience or your experience tells you that its composition has changed, your institution's admissions or student affairs office can provide the student data you need. At a minimum, you should find out the distributions and percentages on these variables: age, marital and family status, socioeconomic background, race and ethnicity, full-time and part-time employed, campus residents versus commuters, native versus international, geographical mix, and special admissions.

If your students are older, research suggests that they share certain characteristics. Most want to talk about and apply their work and life experience in class, discussion forums, assignments, and group work, so do draw on and refer to it whenever you can. Because they know the world to be complex, they expect to learn multiple ways of solving problems and to have discretion in applying the material. Adult learners need the opportunity for reflection after trying out a new application or method; rote learning doesn't work well with them. In addition, they want the material to have immediate practical utility and relevance (Aslanian, 2001; Vella, 1994; Wlodkowski, 1993). But they are not difficult learners. In fact, they are often highly motivated, eagerly participatory, and well prepared for class.

You also need to know your students’ level of academic preparation and achievement. You can assess your institution's selectivity by comparing the number of applicants each year with the number of those accepted (a two-to-one ratio or above is highly selective). For each entering class, you can find out about its average scholastic test scores (SATs, ACTs), the percentage ranked at varying percentiles of their high school graduating classes, the percentage of National Merit and National Achievement Finalists (over 5 percent is high), and the percentage that qualified for Advanced Placement credit (over a third is high). For several hundred American colleges and universities, almost all of this information is published every summer in the “America's Best Colleges” issue of U.S. News and World Report.

Another question you might want to answer is where your students are headed in life. Your institution's career center should have on file the percentage of students planning on different types of graduate and professional educations, as well as the immediate employment plans of the next graduating class. Often departments and colleges collect follow-up data on what their students are doing a few years after graduation. Adult learners are usually seeking a promotion or a new career.

HOW PEOPLE LEARN

Whatever your student body profile, certain well-researched principles about how people learn will apply. Those that follow don't represent every learning principle ever discovered. In fact, the next section, “How Structure Increases Learning,” addresses an interrelated set of learning principles. In addition, you’ll find a few more principles in chapter 23 that explain how visual representations contribute to learning. Nevertheless, the following list provides a broad range of robust findings about learning.

1. People are born learners with an insatiable curiosity. They absorb and remember untold billions of details about their language, other people, objects, and things they know how to do (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Spence, 2001). They most readily learn what they regard as relevant to their lives (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010; Bransford et al., 1999; Persellin & Daniels, 2014; Svinicki, 2004; Winne & Nesbit, 2010).
2. People learn through elaborative rehearsal, which means thinking about the meaning of the new knowledge and connecting it to what they already know and believe (Bransford et al., 1999; Tigner, 1999).
3. People learn new knowledge most easily if it fits in with their prior knowledge (Ambrose et al., 2010; Bransford et al., 1999; Zull, 2002).
4. People learn only when they concentrate on the material and the learning process (see chapter 4).
5. People learn in interaction with others when they are constructing knowledge together (Stage, Kinzie, Muller, & Simmons, 1999), but in most contexts, learning is an internal, individual activity (Nilson, 2013a; Spence, 2001; see principle 8).
6. People learn more when they are motivated to do so by the inspiration and enthusiasm of their instructors or other people in their lives (Hobson, 2002; Sass, 1989).
7. People learn better when they are actively engaged in an activity than when they passively listen to an instructor talk. The human brain can't focus for long when it is in a passive state (Bligh, 2000; Bonwell & Eison, 1991; Hake, 1998; Jones-Wilson, 2005; McKeachie, 2002; Spence, 2001; Svinicki, 2004). Group work generally increases engagement (Persellin & Daniels, 2014).
8. People learn new material best when they actively monitor their learning and reflect on their performance, a mental operation called metacognition or self-regulated learning (Ambrose et al., 2010; Bransford et al., 1999; Hattie, 2009; Nilson, 2013a; Winne & Nesbit, 2010; Zimmerman, Moylan, Hudesman, White, & Flugman, 2011).
9. People learn procedures and processes best when they learn the steps in the same order that they will perform them (Feldon, 2010).
10. People learn most easily when the instruction is designed to minimize cognitive load—that is, to reduce the effortful demands placed on working memory (Feldon, 2010; Winne & Nesbit, 2010).
11. People learn best when they receive the new material multiple times but in different ways—that is, through multiple senses and modes that use different parts of their brain (Doyle & Zakrajsek, 2013; Hattie, 2009; Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn, & Charalampos, 2006; Tulving, 1985; Vekiri, 2002; Winne & Nesbit, 2010; Zull, 2002).
12. People learn better then they review or practice new material at multiple, intervallic times than when they review it all at one time (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014; Butler, Marsh, Slavinsky, & Baraniuk, 2014; Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2006; Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, & Willingham, 2013; Hattie, 2009; Rohrer & Pashler, 2010; Winne & Nesbit, 2010). This schedule of practice is called spaced or distributive, and it can take the form of being tested or self-testing (see principle 14).
13. Relatedly, people learn better when that practice is interleaved than when it is blocked. In other words, they benefit when they occasionally review old material as they are learning new material (Butler et al., 2014; Dunlosky et al., 2013; Rohrer & Pashler, 2010).
14. People learn more from being tested or testing themselves on material than they do from rereading or reviewing it, as the former involves more effortful cognitive processing (see principle 18) and retrieval practice (Brown et al., 2014; Dempster, 1996, 1997; Dunlosky et al., 2013; Karpicke & Blunt, 2011; Roediger & Karpicke, 2006; Rohrer & Pashler, 2010; Winne & Nesbit, 2010).
15. In fact, people learn more after being pretested on material before they even start learning it (Carey, 2014).
16. People learn from practice only when they receive targeted feedback that they can use to improve their performance in more practice (Ambrose et al., 2010).
17. People learn more from making and correcting mistakes than from being correct in the first place, and research on mice reveals a biological base: when an organism gets an error signal, its brain releases calcium, which enhances the brain's ability to learn, that is, its neuroplasticity (Najafi, Giovannucci, Wang, & Medina, 2014).
18. People can remember what they have learned longer when they have to work harder to learn it—that is, when they have to overcome what are called desirable difficulties (Bjork, 1994; Bjork & Bjork, 2011; Brown et al., 2014; McDaniel & Butler, 2010).
19. People learn better when the material evokes emotional and not just intellectual or physical involvement. In other words, a lasting learning experience must be moving enough to make the material memorable or to motivate people to want to learn it. This principle mirrors the biological base of learning, which is the close communication between the frontal lobes of the brain and the l...