Last week, Lars Larson challenged us to integrate interleaving into our courses, basing his proposal on principles found in Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel’s Make it Stick (2014). One simple approach to interleaving is to bridge the introduction of material over two classes while also working on a different topic or concept. Although I know to…Continue Reading “…and I was happy not to finish what I had intended.”
For over fifty years the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA and their Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) have been administering surveys to incoming first-year college students at U.S. institutions of higher education. The questions they ask have evolved over time, but contain lots of interesting tidbits — ranging from the percentage of students…Continue Reading How Our Students Compare: Some Data on Mental Health
This post is an entry for Part II of the Mentally Healthy resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns. Many of us know the feeling: seeing that first-year student “fail” (sometimes meaning a C, but still…) their first exam, and having to suddenly confront their…Continue Reading Mentally Healthy: Failure (Deprivation) and Resilience?
Class discussions can sometimes be described as “transient instructional events.” They pass through the class, the course, and the educational experiences of students with few lingering effects. Ideas are batted around, often with forced participation; students don’t take notes; and then the discussion ends—it runs out of steam or the class runs out of time….Continue Reading 9 Tips For Improving Class Discussions
This post is an entry for Part III of the Mentally Healthy resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns. Anyone paying attention to higher education in recent years is well aware of two pressing issues on regular repeat: changing perceptions of student mental health needs, and the…Continue Reading Intersections? How diversity, mental health, and teaching might mix