Teaching Goals, Learning Styles, and Course Design

1. Teaching Goals, Learning Styles, and Course Design What are your teaching goals? What do you hope to accomplish in your courses? Heather Macdonald Barbara Tewksbury Robyn Wright Dunbar

2. How Do Students Learn 1? • They learn by actively participating • Observing, speaking, writing, listening, thinking, drawing, doing • They must be engaged to learn • Learning is enhanced when students see potential implications, applications, and benefits to others • Learning builds on current understanding How People Learn (NRC, 1999)

3. Learning Styles How does the person prefer to process information? • Actively – through engagement in physical activity or discussion • Reflectively – through introspection Questionnaire - Barbara Soloman & Richard Felder http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html Thanks to Robyn Dunbar and Marcelo Clerici-Arias, Stanford University Center for Teaching and Learning

4. Your Learning Styles (n=38) For comparison: Active 60%; Reflective 40%

5. Learning Styles What type of information does the person preferentially perceive? • Sensory – sights, sounds, physical sensations, data … • Intuitive – memories, ideas, models, abstract…

6. Your Learning Styles For comparison: Sensing 65%; Intuitive 35%

7. Learning Styles Through which modality is sensory information most effectively perceived? • Visual – pictures, diagrams, graphs, demonstrations, field trips • Verbal – sounds, written and spoken words, formulas

8. Your Learning Styles For comparison: Visual 80%; Verbal 20%

9. Learning Styles How does the person progress toward understanding? • Sequentially – in logical progression of small incremental steps • Globally – in large jumps, holistically

10. Your Learning Styles For comparison: Sequential 60%; Global 40%

11. How Do Students Learn 2? • Different people are most comfortable learning in different ways • Multiple representations enhance the learning of all students

12. Context for Today’s Sessions • Consider your teaching goals in designing courses • Active engagement is important for learning • Students have different learning styles Expand your “toolbox” of teaching strategies Most students most students passive active

13. Developing a Course: Different Strategies • Content-centered • What will I cover? • Learner-centered • What will they learn?

14. One Course Design Process* • Consider course context and audience • Articulate your goals and objectives • Evaluate content options • Select teaching strategies and design assignments/class activities/labs • Develop assessments * Cutting Edge Course Design Process: Workshops and Tutorial – Barbara Tewksbury http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/tutorial/index.html

15. Consider Course Context and Audience • Context of course? • Pre-requisites? • General education course? • Course for majors? • Required course? Elective course? • Characteristics of course? • What are your students like?

16. Articulate Your Goals I: Overarching Goals • What do you want students to be able to do as a result of having taken your course? • What kinds of problems do you want them to be able to tackle? • How might students apply what they have learned in the future?

17. Synthesis Analysis Application Comprehension Knowledge Focus on goals that involve higher-order thinking skills Bloom’s Taxonomy Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956) Evaluation

18. Writing Goals • Use verbs that indicate your goals extend beyond recalling, reciting, or explaining what was covered in class • Interpret, construct, formulate, solve, analyze, predict … • “recognizing plate boundaries” vs. “being able to interpret tectonic setting based on information on physiography, seismicity, and volcanic activity”

19. Two Comments • Translate fuzzy language into skills – observable/measurable Students will learn to appreciate their natural surroundings. What does that mean? What could students do to show they have mastered this objective? • Focus on higher-order learning skills: analyze, synthesize, interpret Some examples

20. Some Examples of Goals I want students to be able to: • use characteristics of rocks and surficial features in an area to analyze the geologic history • interpret unfamiliar geologic maps and construct cross sections • analyze unfamiliar areas and assess geologic hazards (different than recalling those done in class) • predict the weather given appropriate meteorological data • design computer models of geologic processes

21. Consider A Course That You Will Be Teaching • What are your goals? • When students have completed my course, I want them to be able to:

22. Articulate Your Goals II: Ancillary skills • What skills do you want your students to improve on during the course? • Accessing and critically evaluating information on the WWW • Accessing and reading the geoscience literature • Working in groups • Writing (what kind in particular?) • Quantitative skills (what kind?) • Oral presentation • Self-learning • Peer-teaching

23. Evaluate Content Options • Select topics • What are the essentials? • What meets student needs? • Linked to goals? • Compare to the wide range of content options – is something missing that you value? • An example

24. Example from ageologic hazards course Overarching goal: students will be able to research and evaluate news reports of a natural disaster and communicate their analyses to someone else

25. Be able to research and evaluate news reports of a natural disaster and communicate analyses to someone else • Instructor #1 chose four specific disasters as content topics • 1973 Susquehanna flood • Landsliding in coastal California • Mt. St. Helens • Armenia earthquake • Instructor #2 chose four themes as content topics • Impact of hurricanes on building codes and insurance • Perception and reality of fire damage on the environment • Mitigating the effects of volcanic eruptions • Geologic and sociologic realities of earthquake prediction • Instructor #3 chose to focus on a historical survey of natural disasters in Vermont • Historical record of flooding in NW Vermont • 1983 landsliding • 2-3 other places in Vermont that have had natural disasters of different types.

26. Goals and content topics unite to provide course framework • Previous example • Single goal; each instructor could achieve goal even though content topics different • Choice of content topics drives how the instructor will accomplish the goal. • Students will receive different kinds of practice during the course even though the overall goal is the same

27. Select Teaching Strategies and Design Assignments • Lectures, discussions, small-group work, labs, problem sets, research projects, … • Build the course around tasks and assignments designed to achieve your goals (rather than around a list of content items and topics to which you want students to be exposed) • How will you give students frequent practice in doing x (with timely and constructive feedback)?