This study employed a web-based survey investigating graduate students’ perceptions of effectiveness of various learning activities in an online teacher education course designed to teach instructional strategies. Learner-centered evaluation allows for insights into the teaching and learning process, and learner satisfaction is particularly critical in determining quality in distance education. The findings would inform a redesign of the course with the goal to enhance learning, using students as evaluators. The students’ ratings and comments of course activities are discussed, and implications related to course redesign are examined.
Tag: volume 4 (2009)
Implementing Problem-Based Learning in an Undergraduate Psychology Course
Problem-based learning (PBL) is a small-group pedagogical technique widely used in fields such as business, medicine, engineering, and architecture. In PBL, pre-written cases are used to teach core course content. PBL advocates state that course material is more likely to be retained and applied when presented as cases reflecting “real life” applications of class material. However, rather than traditional lecture-discussion, PBL encourages student autonomy in analyzing cases, with the instructor serving initially as a structuring facilitator before gradually becoming less active as students take more responsibility for their learning. As students proceed through each case, they address four dimensions: What they know, what they want to know, possible causal hypotheses, and questions that can be answered through library research. The PBL cases referred to herein were developed and employed for an undergraduate psychology course, “Psychology of the Exceptional Child.” Students completing this course included psychology, special education, and human service majors and have positively evaluated this technique as a teaching tool.
Assessing Assessment: Toward a Hermeneutic-Phenomenological Perspective
Assessment is generally not a favorite subject for many teachers, and this is likely due to a perceived tension between the goals they wish to accomplish as educators and the methods of assessments prescribed by accrediting agencies. With even President Obama calling for improvements in assessing education, this paper seeks to develop an innovative phenomenological-hermeneutic model of assessment, one that focuses on the first-person interpretation of one’s transformative educational experience. After the theoretical framework for developing this model is explained, I present an application of the model through the introduction of “mindful reading assignments.”
Putting It All Together: Incorporating “SoTL Practices” for Teaching Interpersonal and Critical Thinking Skills in an Online Course
Views of critical thinking were culled from the literature and developed into a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) model that was implemented into the Internet course, “The Politics and Psychology of Hatred.” Assessment of student course postings demonstrated a strong relationship between interpersonal skills (referred to in the curriculum as “course etiquette”) and advancement on the levels of critical thinking. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Integrating Service-Learning Pedagogy: A Faculty Reflective Process
Research on service-learning has focused mainly on student outcomes. However, this study addresses the transformative change that three faculty members from different disciplines experienced during a semester-long fellowship on service-learning as a pedagogical method. Through their personal reflections, the authors show how service-learning and the scholarship of teaching were intertwined as they engaged in course redesign. This experience went beyond creating an academic service-learning course to transforming the teachers into reflective practitioners actively engaged in systematically improving their teaching practice.
Applying the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Pursuing a Deeper Understanding of How Students Learn
The research discussed within is one example of how to move from scholarly teaching to the scholarship of teaching and learning. This transition began with a desire to better understand the teaching and learning process and evolved into the development of an empirically-based emerging theory called Mutual Engagement (ME). Mutual Engagement reinforces how group formation and a safe learning environment can benefit teaching and learning. Mutual Engagement embraces classroom research with the goal of making teaching and learning more visible for others to critique and to build theory and pedagogy.
Beyond Boyer: SoTL in the Context of Interesting Scholarly Things
The positive effects of Ernest Boyer’s broader definition of scholarship have been attenuated by stress on published outcomes as indicators of all his scholarships, including the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). At universities outside the research university sector, we need to find ways to recognize and reward a wide variety of interesting scholarly things related to teaching that are not likely to meet the formal assessment criteria that have come to define the SoTL category of scholarship. The faculty’s scholarliness in teaching should be recognized and evaluated directly.