Bloom's Sixth

True learning has little to do with memorization. Benjamin Bloom explained that with enduring clarity 60-plus years ago. His six-tiered taxonomy places rote recall of facts at the bottom of a hierarchical order, with real learning taking place on higher tiers when students apply, analyze, synthesize, and create. Deep learning, project-based learning and a host of other high-impact approaches have provided evidence to back up Bloom’s…

Faculty often see the benefits of online education for students but not for themselves, Karen H. Sibley and Ren Whitaker write in Educause. Development of online courses takes precious time away from other activities that generate greater rewards for faculty. The way to change that, Sibley and Whitaker argue, is to offer incentives to move into online education. They give these examples: Providing compensation as salary, research funds, or time (e.g., a course buy-out) Appealing to a…

Jennifer Roberts walks through the lecture hall during her geology class, above and bottom, working with students on collaborative problem-solving. Several teaching assistants also help in the classroom. Jennifer Roberts first noticed the difference a few years ago in Geology 101. The course regularly draws 300 or more students a semester, and Roberts, an associate professor of geology, was teaching in much the same way she had since she took over the course in 2002: lecture and exam. Problem was, exam scores were…

Active learning helps students learn in deep, meaningful ways, as study (There was a link here, but the page no longer exists) after study has shown. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. On the contrary, students who have grown accustomed to sitting through lectures with one eye on their phones and one foot out the door often rebel at changing to hands-on exercises, in-class discussion among dozens or hundreds of students, peer learning, group projects, and other techniques that force them…

Will students one day piece together their own degrees by assembling courses a la carte from a variety of colleges and universities? Derek Newton of the Center for Teaching Entrepreneurship, says no. Writing in The Atlantic, Newton argues that technology won’t force the “unbundling” of degrees and programs in higher education the way it has the music industry and cable TV.…

The note cards I handed out to students in my hybrid class last week drew astonished looks. Each contained a hand-written list of three things: events, people, animals, objects, locations, movies, songs, television shows. All were random, created one evening in a stream of consciousness. For instance: “Eye of the Tiger” Eye of a needle Arctic Ocean and Fire alarms Fairy tales Calvin Klein “Here’s the fun part,” I told students. “Find a connection among the three things.” That’s where the astonishment came in. The main goal of the exercise was to help students synthesize, to open…

A new study suggests that all students gain when a lecture moves to an active learning format but that black students show even larger gains than white students, Ainissa Ramirez explains in an article for Edutopia. Photo by Doug Ward The study examined results from a 400-person biology class at the University of North Carolina over six semesters. It found that black students scored better on tests after working in the active learning format. It also found that they were more…

Two recent surveys help illustrate the barriers that block much-needed changes in teaching, learning and course design at colleges and universities. In one, conducted by Gallup for Inside HigherEd, most full-time faculty members saw little value in online courses and took an even bleaker view of online courses at their own institutions. The survey found that only 24 percent of full-time faculty members agreed or strongly agreed that…

Forget the technology. Instead, focus on the humanity. That’s the advice of Kirstin Wilcox, a lecturer at the University of Illinois-Champaign. Wilcox isn’t anti-technology. Rather, she says, learning technology generally means something that helps deliver class material for large lecture classes, not something that helps students understand literary texts in small classes. Once-novel technologies like wikis, blogs or online discussions have…

Sylvia Manning offers an insightful characterization of a college education that summarizes the challenges all of us in higher education face today. In a paper for the American Enterprise Institute, she writes: The reality is that no one can guarantee the results of an educational process, if only because a key element is how the student engages in that process. The output or outcome measures that we have are crude and are likely to remain so for considerable time to come.…