College Teaching: Practical Insights from the Science of Teaching and Learning

This book mines the science of teaching and learning for strategies to help college professors align every aspect of their teaching. Everything matters when it comes to teaching and learning: student characteristics, the school itself, and cultural ideas about the value of higher education, to name a few. Most of these influences are outside the college instructor’s control. Other issues, however—such as a course’s intellectual demands, the type of feedback students receive, the instructional methods, and the relationship that connects professor to student—are controllable. This book examines the many choices professors make about their teaching, beginning with their initial planning of the course and its basic content through final decisions about grades and assessing effectiveness. This book is for beginning instructors as well as those who have been teaching at the college level for many years. Author Donelson Forsyth calls readers’ attention to basics such as the cognitive, motivational, personal, and interpersonal processes flowing through even the most routine of educational experiences. He also addresses online teaching, instructional design, learning teams, and new technologies to help professors re-examine and refresh their existing practices.