How Faculty Applied the Science of Learning

Index of topics

Distinguishing between novice and expert learners

Karen Rhea, Mathematics

“I train a lot of new instructors every fall, but the idea of novice learner and expert has suddenly meant a lot more to me, not only in contrasting expert teachers with novice students, but in teaching people to teach.  I realized I probably haven't reflected on that enough, about the fact that I'm trying to instill and develop new ideas for novice teachers. When I read Brookfield’s article suggesting that we should all go back and be a novice every year, do something that makes us a novice, I thought I should take yoga.  I would sure feel like a novice there, I can tell you. I’ve been so stiff and creaky and I could learn to do some stretching. That’s what new ideas do for new teachers too.”

 

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How the distinction between novice and expert learners affects graduate education in the humanities

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, History

“In graduate school, we presume -- and in most cases usefully presume – that our students are engaged in expert learning. At least in the humanities, we have no sequential curriculum, we don't require that students build up a base of skills or knowledge in order to get to advanced classes. We don't separate new students from more advanced students. In fact, we throw them together and expect the same things of them. Although I think that this system has many strengths, it does we can to more to recognize the distinct challenges it presents to newly arrived members of an intellectual community, members with significantly less experience."

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Restructuring challenging text -based material

Angela Dillard, Center for Afroamerican and African Studies

“Prior to participating in this colloquium, my original course design used theoretical materials to open up insight in science fiction novels, films, comic strips, and so forth. I had initially started with the challenging texts up front -- the Bell story, Edward Said's classic "Examination of Orientalism," Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" – but I think that was backwards.  Now the course is designed to ease students into these works, preferably through other kinds of media.  I am reversing the order to present the short stories, the film clips, songs, and comics first as a way of preparing students for the more demanding text.  I’m hoping that this approach will work better for two major reasons.  First it incorporates insight from our readings and discussions early on about the experience of being a novice.  Bransford's "How Experts Differ from Novices" was most useful here.  Experts think differently about problems than novices do, and part of that difference has to do with the ability to recognize patterns in a meaningful way.  The second reason I think this will work better and will produce a better learning outcome has to do with the relatively bleak ideas about race and power that my theoretical literature produces and reinforces. 

My goal throughout will be to replicate this model in section after section of the course through critical race theory, theories of whiteness, critiques of color blindness, post-colonial theory and critiques of empire, black feminist theory, and so forth with the overall goal of getting students to imagine the kinds of alternative worlds and alternative arrangements of power and justice that are possible, not only in science and speculative fiction, but also in the world in general.” 

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Learning in and out of the classroom

Vince Diaz, American Culture Program

“In the very first meeting we talked about reminding students that the lecture hall is not the only place for learning.  I found that to be a really important insight. Students can differentiate learning in the classroom from what will happen in the discussion section, and differentiate that from what will happen over beer, over the football game, with the dorm mates, with their families, with their families when their grandparents are in town, or with their partner's families.

In fact, learning contexts are multiple and by extension what students will do with what they learned in lectures is multiple.  This idea made me excited once again about what I could do with lecture time.  The lectures aren't intended to deliver objective facts, but rather convey alternative perspectives and critical frameworks.  This may not be something that students have to know for a test, it may not be what they think they are supposed to learn in college, but this is the kind of thing that I want to come up years from now, when they are trying to figure something out or they are sleeping and suddenly wake up and say, “That’s what he meant.”

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Engaging students in large lecture classes

Thad Polk, Psychology

Link to video on his strategies

Vince Diaz, American Culture Program

“What snagged me about the readings on engaging students in lectures was the appeal to the metaphor of practice in golf.  It really snagged me because I'm learning how to play golf.  I realized I could spend three hours working just on driving, and that doesn't translate to good driving out there.  I would have done better had I spent 15 minutes on driving and 15 minutes on putting and 15 minutes on something else.  Then, when I get out there, there would be a good chance that I'd probably do better in driving.  This was a novel concept and it is really going to help me when I’m presenting material in class. The students will be very happy about that.”

Maria Cotera, American Culture Program

“DeWinstanley and Bjork identify successful lecturing as presenting information in ways that engage effective processing. Elaborative processing is one aspect of this model that helps students retain knowledge when they’re called upon to retrieve it in different contexts. So coming up with, let's say, a hermeneutic for understanding various examples of the same thing helps students remember that hermeneutic or that key better and be able to apply it to other situations that may not be in the lecture or in the class.

Another element of their successful lecturing model is ‘generation retrieval,’ which helps students generate their own knowledge about a subject by pushing them to extrapolate from the information provided to them; in other words, not just spoon feeding them but getting them to really think about and to come up with the information on their own.”

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Identity, affect, and learning

Tiya Miles, Afroamerican and African Studies

“One thing that stood out to me was the idea of integration and combining facts of identity with knowledge.  I love this idea.  We did lots of readings that talked about people who have multifaceted identities who can actually gain in creativity if they are able to tap into those different aspects of their experiences or knowledge sets.  I want to hold onto this because who among us doesn’t have multiple identities?  I think all of our students do, and all of us do.  For me this was exciting as a way to think about how we, as teachers, can help our students make connections with each other around their multiplicities, around their complex identities, and how we can build on those things to help our students learn better.

Along with this really exciting point, though, I had a point of concern.  And that is that the readings that we did, the presenters that we listened to, really focused on how students who don't have integrated identities can be disadvantaged when it comes to innovative thinking, and I'm concerned that there can be -- especially for those students of color who do not have integrated identities, but who feel like their identities are in conflict. I think back to W.E.B. DuBois' comment about African-American experience being about two-ness and unreconciled strivings, and that makes me worry about African-American students in a context where greater innovation and creativity can come from a sense of interconnection and integration between different knowledge sets.  I wonder how we as teachers can actually prime different aspects of students' identities so that they can feel comfortable with accessing both or multiple sets of knowledge.”

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How to draw on student diversity in Chemistry classes

Mark Banaszak-Holl, Chemistry and Engineering

“One of the problems for teaching chemistry is that large lecture halls might be beautifully designed rooms but they may not be very conducive to promoting meaningful engagement and dialog with the 300 to 400 students who are in them.

I didn't know about Pat Gurin's work before the Colloquium. She talked about active listening, development, and asking questions, follow-up, and inquiry, a lot of sharing between people.  Those types of things have actually been designed into the course I teach although my colleagues and I use a slightly different language than Pat Gurin uses that night.  We use the language of trying to develop what we call a community of scholars in the class.

So the question is, can we take the dialogic principles that Pat Gurin talks about, and can we incorporate them successfully into physical sciences courses? For example, one of the ways we set up a dialog in the course is to get the students talking about science while also getting them engaged on problems for which there aren't concrete answers. So some really neat problems that exist currently in our society that don't have answers are things like what level should arsenic be in water that we drink?  To what extent should we add fluoride to our water?  What's an acceptable level of estrogen in our water?  These are all choices we're making as a society.  We would really love to have society members be informed.  It's the sort of thing that maybe we would like science graduates from the University of Michigan, to be able to read articles, in the Science Times, or listen to the debates that are going on in places like the Environmental Protection Agency, and understand.” 

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Teaching students to discover patterns in a math class

Anna Gilbert, Mathematics

“Something that I incorporated this semester was having frequent quizzes that goes over material that we covered in class several weeks before.  That is, I am using “spacing” to get students to recall what they have learned before, a strategy that DeWinstanley and Bjork documented .  It's also fantastic way to dry-run exam questions in addition to reinforcing teaching.  I gave five two-question quizzes over the course of the semester. Four of them were true/false, and just one of them was computational.  I gave a range of questions, from just a simple recall of definitions to a true/false question that was based on inferences from observations that student could have drawn from the in class experiments and the homework. 

Just a little anecdotal evidence:  One quiz asked students to compute this quantity of a matrix, and the students had to recall what the definition of this quantity of the matrix was.  After the quiz, one student said he had gotten it wrong, he said, "I forgot the definition.  Now I see why you give these quizzes.” 

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Drawing on the developmental model

Brian Noble, Computer Science and Engineering

“This colloquium helped me frame how I approached my classes, and I’m especially speaking here of the big class with freshmen and sophomores.  The discussion on reflective judgment, promoted by our reading of Pat King’s work, motivated me to think about how little ambiguity there is in the big classes that I teach.  The senior-level courses, on the other hand, have much more ambiguity because there is more design flexibility, and the more advanced students have many more decisions to make.” 

Gus Evrard, Physics

“On the issue of reflective judgment that we discussed after reading Pat King's work, I wrote down in my notes `multiple stages of development as an evolutionary sequence'. What that's brought to mind for me is the importance of `conceptual recycling' as we try to introduce new material in our classes. We need to make sure that we have some time for reflection, even as we move forward.”

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Applying the Developmental Model

Liz Cole, Women Studies and Afroamerican and African Studies

“The key benefits we gain from Pat King’s model are to understand the stages that the students are at developmentally, and to try to gear the way that we challenge students in class.  In the past, I have seen relativistic thinking as a problem, for example, and not one step along the path to more critical thinking.  So seeing this as part of a process will help me work with student who might be thinking in a relativistic mode.”

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How reframing the problem helps Computer Science students make connections

Brian Noble, Computer Science and Engineering

“I’m increasingly talking to students about the process of producing programs as analogies of the process of producing an essay.  For example, a student would come in and say, “This isn’t working and I don’t know why.”  And I would ask them, “Well, what does it do?”  And they would talk about it in terms of the code, which is sort of the formal language in which this problem is expressed.  So instead, I started getting students to think about why they’re producing a program in the first place, and what it does as opposed to how it does it.

I think because they’re struggling with mastering the elementary mechanics of the problem, they aren’t making connections to what it actually means to produce this type of work.   So I’m going to have them write down a little one-page essay about what they’re going to write, just to make them think about it before they start banging out code on a keyboard.”

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How students become more responsible for their own learning in a literature class

Susan Najita, American Culture Program

“When we discussed evaluation and novice learners, lectures, the quizzes, and low-stake quizzes, all of these things were useful for me.  However, when I shared them with my students and I said, ‘I'm sitting in on this seminar and they're talking about these things, I'm doing this because research shows this,’ there seemed to be this sense of relief in the classroom that, ‘Oh, there is research, and it shows this is the outcome.’ I wanted students to realize that I am being thoughtful about what I am asking them to do.  Additionally, I think that students can assess for themselves whether the process that I asked them to go through was actually useful for them and in what ways it helped them learn.    This approach gets students to be in charge of their own learning.” 

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General statements from participants

Angela Dillard, Afroamerican and African Studies

“The idea that problem solving and education go hand in hand is hardly a new or startling idea, but I’m not sure I ever really thought through it in such a concrete way.”

Brenda Gunderson, Statistics

“I am grateful to be able to have been a part of this colloquium.  It introduced me to ideas and helped me make lots of connections between what we can do better as teachers and how to motivate our students to learn.  I also f eel that I was able, to talk and interact with some amazing people.  Overall, it was a great learning opportunity for me because teaching and learning are things that I am very passionate about."

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, History

“I've spent a number of years working on undergraduate lectures and have had many conversations with folks here at CRLT, yet I certainly learned a lot in this seminar that I will apply to undergraduate teaching.”

Josephine Kurdziel, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

“This was a really fantastic experience to get to read things on the science of learning and to hear experts give their advice, and then to be able to share the things I learned with people outside my department. That’s been great.” 

Tiya Miles, Afroamerican and African Studies, American Culture, and History

“One of the ideas that stuck with me after our meetings was the exciting realization that having a diversified classroom and a teaching style that emphasizes diversity matters, not just in the hopeful ways that I had thought about before participating in the colloquium, but in ways that have been documented in scholarly research.  This, for me, was an incredible finding.” 

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