Bloom's Sixth

For many students and educators, this year’s election felt personal. Women were ridiculed for their physical appearance. Mexican immigrants were called drug traffickers and rapists. …

“What just happened?” Carl Luchies asked his graduate teaching assistant.  They stood at the front of a lecture hall in early 2013, watching as 120 normally subdued engineering undergraduates burst into spontaneous conversation. Luchies, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, had just given the students a problem to work on and told them it was a collaborative quiz due at the end of class. Students could work with anyone in the room, he said. “Anyone?” they asked. Carl Luchies works with a student in a graduate-level biomechanics class Anyone, he said. They could move…

It’s no secret that we are big fans of active learning at the Center for Teaching Excellence. So when the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a call to action for active learning and declared today Active Learning Day, we had to join the festivities…

My mom managed a college bookstore for many years. That was in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, when the bookstore was the only place to buy books. Students could sometimes snag a used book from a friend, but for the most part, they bought their books from the college store. That doesn’t mean students were happy about the arrangement. My mom never got used to the disparaging remarks that students would mutter when they bought their books or tried to sell them back. Stocksnap, Gaelle Marcel “What a ripoff!” they would say. Some even called the bookstore “Max’s Ripoff Shop.” She calmly explained…

Gauging the effectiveness of teaching solely on student evaluations has always been a one-dimensional “solution” to a complex issue. It is an approach built on convenience and routine rather than on a true evaluation of an instructor’s effectiveness. And yet many universities routinely base promotion and tenure decisions on those evaluations, or, rather, a component of those evaluations in the form of a single number on a five-point scale. Those who rank above the mean for a department get a thumbs-up; those below the mean get a thumbs-down. It’s a system that bestows teaching with all the…

This fall’s enrollment figures contained much for the University of Kansas to be proud of, and the university rightly bragged about that. Freshman enrollment has grown for five years in a row, and the incoming class is made up of nearly 23 percent minority students. That was great news, especially because more restrictive admissions standards went into place this fall. Those higher admissions standards show up in the 3.58 average GPA of the incoming class. Two other…

Here’s a glimpse into the classroom of the future. It’s huge, and I mean HUGE: big enough for a football field, a magical playground, a dig site for studying bones, and an area for playing with dogs, bears and dolphins. It has cool carpet and places for listening. The tables are spread out and you can choose among giant chairs, bouncy chairs and floating chairs. It has crayons, of course, but also drawers to hold skulls (from the dig site, no doubt) and a secret room. Best of all, it has a portal to a lake and a monorail that will take you anywhere. Are you on board? I was when I visited…

Here’s a thought to start the semester with: Education offers only a blueprint. Learning takes place in the application. If that sounds familiar, it should. It lies at the heart of active learning, an amalgam of practices that that moves education beyond the mere delivery of information. It’s an approach that improves student learning, especially …

Alma Clayton-Pedersen offers this vision for higher education: “Imagine what a nation we would be if students really took away everything we wanted them to have,” she said at last week’s Teaching Summit in Lawrence. Alma Clayton-Pedersen at the KU Teaching Summit Problem is, they don’t. Much of the reason for that, she said, has to do with their background, the quality of the education they received before college, the way they are treated in college, and the connections they feel – or don’t feel – to their peers, their instructors and their campus. We talk about college readiness as…

WASHINGTON — To understand the priorities of the Association of American Universities, you need to look no further than its criteria for membership: volume of federally funded research; number of memberships in the National Academies; faculty awards and fellowships; citations that reflect research volume and quality. That is, research, research, research, and more research. So it was refreshing – and hopeful – to hear Tobin Smith,…