Conceptions of teaching and learning can often be highly personalized constructions, consisting of a bricolage of individual teachers' assumptions, knowledge and beliefs about teaching and learning. These conceptions can be tacit or explicit and can drive practices and decisions about teaching. This article examines key theoretical frameworks intended to help faculty members examine, name and refine their epistemological and ontological
notions for teaching and learning with the intended purpose of supporting reflection on practice.

Download Article
TheoreticalFrameworksLearning.pdf

As we have worked with faculty over the years, one area that comes up time and time again is critical thinking. Defining what critical thinking means in our own disciplines, communicating our critical thinking expectations to our students, and finding effective ways to both promote and assess it, remain challenging. The following article by Robert Duron, Barbara Limbach and Wendy Waugh, offers an interesting approach to all of the above from a cross-curricula perspective. We hope you enjoy the article, and look forward to your comments.

Link to Article

September's article of the month features a piece by Michael Wesch, that explores the impact of new media tools and practices on teaching and learning. In From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-Able: Learning in New Media Environments, Wesch challenges us to consider how this new environment of information abundance is creating new ways of relating, interacting, sharing, and collaborating. For Wesch, the most revolutionary aspect of these changes "may be in the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways."

We hope this article generates some thoughts and questions for you, and that you'll consider sharing them in the comment area below.

The Monthly Article Series is taking a summer break. Join us next August as we, once again, explore interesting articles about teaching and learning in higher education.

The article of the month for March is the 2010 Horizon Report. This annual report, now in its seventh year, is a collaborative project between EDUCAUSE and the New Media Consortium. Each Horizon Report describes adoption horizons and charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative inquiry. Each of the three horizon time lines identify two main technologies that are seen as having the greatest potential impact.

Below are the technologies identified in the 2010 report:

One Year or Less - Mobile Computing and Open Content

Two to Three Years - Electronic Books and Simple Augmented Reality

Four to Five Years - Gesture based Computing and Visual data Analysis

In addition to the "Big 6," the 2010 Horizon Report Advisory Board also identified key trends that establish a context and lens for understanding how the currently identified technologies will be affecting the practice of teaching, learning and creative inquiry.

You can learn more about each of the technologies, and the methodology used for selection by reviewing the 2010 Horizon Report which you can download in the link below.

2010-Horizon-Report.pdf

One of the first things any budding faculty member learns about is "learning style." We have been told by both colleagues and educational development professionals that we should match our teaching styles to the learning styles of our students. This matching would necessitate understanding learning styles, measuring them, and discovering what teaching methods would appeal to the learning styles of our students.

But wait a minute, can we prove that this matching actually results in better learning by our students?

These two articles explore exactly that question. David Glenn writes an introductory piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In that piece, he refers to the work of Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork published in the Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Read them and then decide. Better yet, read them and have a discussion with your colleagues.

Permission for Educational Use, Psychological Science in the Public Interest; It is APS policy not to charge any kind of reprint or copyright fee or to require any kind of permission for the use of any APS journal article for any teaching, classroom, or educational activity, provided that no resale occurs.

This article is part of our Monthly Article Series. In this article, Marie Sontag, from the Union Middle School in San Jose, CA., proposes that our students learn differently because of the integration of technology in their lives. She presents a new learning theory, the social-connectedness and cognitive-connectedness schemata (SCCS) theory, that integrates key elements of other learning theories with gaming elements in a structure designed to facilitate student engagement.

The article can be found here.

This article is part of the CTE's Monthly article series. In this article, the authors Matthew Koehler and Punya Mishra, from Michigan State University, introduce the concept of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK). Building on Lee Shulman's original notion, they offer a framework to guide the integration of technology in teaching.

You can access the article here.

Copyright 2009 by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). [http://www.aace.org] Included here by permission.

This article is a part of our "Monthly Article Series." Each fall, Beloit College publishes a "Mindset List" which helps us identify the worldview of the entering freshman class. The creators of this list, Beloit's Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and Emeritus Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, remind us of rapidly changing cultural references for our current generation (http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2013.php).

This year's "Mindset List" can be found here.

This article is a part of the CTE’s Monthly Article series. In this article, Revere, Elden, & Bartsch examine ‘social loafing’ in a collaborative learning environment. Using a quasi-experimental design and survey research, the authors report that students who participated in collaborative learning followed by a group examination had higher perceived levels of learning and more positive attitudes toward the course than a control group who did not participate in a group examination. The students who participated in a group examination also reported less social loafing.

Download file

In this month's CTE Monthly Article series, we feature the recently released 2008 Horizon Report from the New Media Consortium. This annual report, now in its fifth year, describes emerging technologies likely to impact teaching and learning over the next five, three and one year periods. Student and faculty generated video and collaborative webs were seen as emerging near-term, while mobile applications, data mashups, collective intelligence and social operating systems are further out on the horizon. Check out the report to see examples of instructional uses of the technologies featured.

Download file

This article is part of the CTE's Monthly Article series. In this article,
Felder and Brent supply us with time-proven techniques and advice that
improve the success of students working in groups. Questions addressed
include 1). How can I best form groups; 2). How can I deal with
dysfunctional teams; 3). What about grading teams; and 4). What about
dealing with teams in an on-line course.

Download file

This article is part of the CTE's Monthly Article series. In this article, Lee Shulman, current President of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, offers a fresh perspective on learning taxonomies. Building on the work of one of his former teachers - Benjamin Bloom - Shulman provides a context for understanding the development of taxonomies in education and then offers his own "Table of Learning" for consideration. As always, Shulman's inquiring perspective and clear style shed new light on the value of using taxonomies to support teaching and learning. We hope you'll read the article and follow Shulman's advice to use it "as a stimulus for thinking about the design and evaluation of education, and as the basis for creative narratives about the learning process."

Download file

This article is part of the CTE's Monthly Article series. In this article, Joe Novak discusses the theory behind concept mapping and gives practical advice for the construction and use of concept maps. Concept maps are graphical representations of knowledge and the concepts that link knowledge. Concept mapping is a tool that can be used to assess student knowledge, helping both you and your students realize what they do and do not understand. Instructors can even use concept mapping to design courses and curriculum. This article gives background for the use of this very rich teaching, planning, and assessment tool.

You can access a copy of the article by clicking on the "Download file" link below.

Download file

This article is part of the CTE's Monthly Article series. In this piece, author Barbara Oakley, provides practical advice on how to coach well-meaning students to manage behavioral problems that can occur during teamwork. The article begins with a brief description of how the technique was used and gives some outcome measures as to its effectiveness. The techniques comprise the latter half of the article; the techniques give advice on how to manage the two most common behavioral problems – that of the ‘couch potato’ and the ‘hitch-hiker.”

You can access a copy of the article by clicking on the "Download file" link below.

Download file