Evaluation and Assessment | Teaching Practices |Teaching with Technology| Sample Course Evaluation Forms
Teaching Tools
2. Teaching Practices
2.4. Knowing Your Students
Engaging Students in Meaningful Learning
While all students benefit from increasing active engagement in class, first-year undergraduates particularly have a great deal to gain. As students who are still learning how to learn in college, frequent opportunities to test their understanding can help them recognize and correct misconceptions and other potential problems more quickly. Since a number of important first-year courses include large lectures, students in these courses spend much of their time learning in what can easily become passive settings. Regardless of class size, faculty and TAs can take advantage of a variety of strategies to enhance students' active engagement and promote more meaningful learning.
In lectures: Ask students lots of questions during class. In addition to increasing active engagement in learning, the answers provide you with vital information about the range of student knowledge and ongoing comprehension. If students have difficulty with note-taking, do an example where you ask students not to take notes while you work through the example step-by-step on the board. Instead, give them 5 minutes to take down notes after the example has been discussed. Students are often so busy taking notes that they don't process the information and don't realize what they don't understand until they sit down to do a homework assignment - when it's too late to ask you questions.
Encourage students to collaborate on assignments, then give regular individual quizzes to assure individual accountability. Quizzes can help students who are not experienced with group work and who may have the illusion that they have mastered more of the material than they have. Be sure to clearly note the distinction between productive collaboration and cheating for the types of assignments where group work is helpful. The Division of Student Affairs and the Center for Teaching can provide written materials to assist you in discussing academic integrity issues with your students.
Consider making some exercises into contests or games to engage students' competitive spirit. Group competitions can be an alternative to individual ones to get the benefits of both within-group collaboration and between-group competition. To ensure a collaborative environment is fostered, don't make individuals compete for grades on a standard curve.
In any course: Encourage students to make material meaningful by relating it to prior knowledge and experience. For example, ask students to paraphrase key concepts in their own words or generate their own examples.
Ask more questions which require students to probe deeply into the significance or implications of the course material.
For example, comparisons and analogies can help students to see connections between related problems, concepts, situation or arguments. Or asking students to complete a statement like "this information might explain why ..." can encourage students to think more deeply about the material.
Carefully select a mixture of realistic and familiar examples to demonstrate the relevance of course material. Students are often more engaged and motivated to learn when they see how course material relates to their personal and/or future professional lives.
In any course: Combine and vary the type of representations you use. Use combinations of different representations (e.g. diagrams, graphs, mathematics, and text) and ask students to do the same. Multiple types of representations can provide complementary information, reinforce understanding of key concepts, enable students to expand their repertoire of reasoning tools, and reach out to students with a variety learning styles.
Explicitly tell students when you are modeling a valuable learning strategy like those mentioned above, so they can learn to use these strategies on their own.
Have students solve problems or analyze examples in groups during class so that they can discuss the material and ask questions. This approach can be effective with pairs in large lectures, or with groups of 3-4 in smaller classes. In larger classes you can call on a small sample of groups to report their responses or questions. In smaller classes, you or a TA can observe students' work-in-progress and offer appropriate feedback or questions to guide their work, then elaborate on common concerns to the whole class. In either case, in-class practice gives students a chance to test their understanding and ask questions before they begin to attempt the homework on their own.
Adapted from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University
