I had the opportunity to discuss teaching and learning ideas with the adjuncts a week before school started. What a great group of people who do a very difficult job - they usually just get dumped in the classroom with little guidance, so I hope our conversation provided some useful ideas. Here's the Adjunct Presentation (PDF) I used that focuses on how people learn and how to design effective classes that actually can work for students (and you).
Recently in Mental models Category
Card sorts are an easy and effective way to peer into students' brains to see how they perceive your course material. Each person assimilates and organizes new information differently, and typical exams do not reveal how the learner "sees" things. There are several excellent techniques for eliciting mental models, but the card sort is easy to develop, administer, and analyze. Here is a PDF of the presentation from the CETL Teaching Matters discussion, and here is the website developed by B. Hill on mental model analysis in general. Call me with questions and if you would like to give it a whirl. You'll probably be pleasantly surprised at the results.
How do we really know what students are getting from our courses? Do they truly understand the material, or are they merely memorizing content? Elicitation of students' mental models is a powerful approach that goes beyond traditional assessment methods. What's a mental model? Tune into this website to find out. The site will also describe an easy technique for doing a quick assessment of how your students are organizing course material in their minds.
