Bloom's Sixth

  By Doug Ward When Mark Mort began remaking a 100-level biology course a few years ago, he asked instructors who had taught the class what they thought students needed. “Not surprisingly, the answers were very much content, content, content,” said Mort, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. Then he went to colleagues who taught classes later in the curriculum, courses for which his course, Biology 152, was a prerequisite. He asked what they expected students to know after taking Biology 152, or Principles of Organismal Biology. Their response? Nothing…

By Doug Ward The amount of debt that colleges and universities are taking on is rising even as the number of students in higher education is declining, The Hechinger Report says. It offered these sobering statistics: Public universities have taken on 18 percent more debt in the last five years, and now owe a collective $145 billion. When you add in private universities, the amount rises to $240 billion. On average, 9 percent of…

By Doug Ward The evaluation of teaching generally looks like this: Students hurriedly fill in questionnaires at the end of a semester, evaluating an instructor on a five-point scale. The university compiles the results and provides a summary for each faculty member. The individual scores, often judged against a department mean, determine an instructor’s teaching effectiveness for everything from annual reviews to evaluations for promotion and tenure. That’s a problem. …

By Doug Ward Add another lock to the ivory tower. A majority of college students say it is acceptable to shout down a speaker they disagree with, and 20 percent accept the idea of resorting to violence to keep an undesirable speaker from campus, a poll from the Brookings Institution finds. John Villasenor, a senior fellow at Brookings, conducted the poll to gauge students’ understanding of the First Amendment. The survey contained responses from 1,500 students in 49 states and the District of Columbia. It has a margin of error of 2 to 6 percentage points. The Blue Diamond…

By Doug Ward If you’ve noticed that your students still don’t have required course materials, you have lots of company. That’s because more students are delaying purchase of course materials, if they buy them at all, and paying more attention to price when making decisions, according to a report by the National Association of College Stores. That’s not surprising, as students have said for several…

By Doug Ward Students aren’t always sure what to make of a flipped class. Some resist and complain. Others take to the format immediately and recognize how it helps them learn. Most are somewhere in between. A class in film and media studies that Anne Gilbert helped transform provides a good example of student reaction. “The students who are in the class, they’re learning a lot,” she said. “…

By Doug Ward Research universities generally say one thing and do another when it comes to supporting effective teaching. That is, they say they value and reward high-quality teaching, but fail to back up public proclamations when it comes to promotion and tenure. They say they value evidence in making decisions about the quality of instruction but then admit that only a small percentage of the material faculty submit for evaluation of teaching is of high quality. That’s one finding from …

By Doug Ward Randy Bass sees a struggle taking place in higher education. On one side are those who see the future as “unbundled,” a model in which students pursue discrete skills at their own pace and mostly under their own direction. On the other side are those who see the future as bundled, much as a university is now with classes and programs and a physical environment that draws everything together. Randy Bass during a breakout session at the 2017 Teaching Summit This is not a clash of right vs. wrong or good vs. evil, Bass, a professor and administrator at Georgetown…

By Doug Ward Monday’s solar eclipse provided many great opportunities for teaching and learning. Here are a few examples from a viewing event at the Shenk Sports Complex at 23rd and Iowa streets. The event was organized by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, with assistance from the Spencer Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, and the Lawrence Public Library. Perhaps 2,000 people gathered at the Shenk playing fields to watch the eclipse. Layers of gray clouds blocked the view, but…

By Doug Ward Concealed carry laws in Colorado, Idaho and Texas generated considerable anxiety among faculty members and students when they took effect over the past few years. Many feared for their safety. Others worried about whether they could teach controversial topics in the same way. “It felt like the end of the world here,” a professor in Idaho said. Many faculty members at the University of Kansas have had much the same response to the Kansas concealed carry law, which allows anyone 21 or older to carry a concealed weapon in most areas of the university. That law took…