Teaching Goals, Learning Styles, and Course Design

Heather MacdonaldBarbara Tewksbury

Robyn Wright Dunbar

What are your teaching goals? What do you hope to accomplish

in your courses?

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)

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

Your Learning Styles (n=38)

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Active Reflective

For comparison: Active 60%; Reflective 40%

Learning Styles

What type of information does the person preferentially perceive?

• Sensory – sights, sounds, physical sensations, data …

• Intuitive – memories, ideas, models, abstract…

Your Learning Styles

For comparison: Sensing 65%; Intuitive 35%

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Sensing Intuitive

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

Your Learning Styles

For comparison: Visual 80%; Verbal 20%

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Visual Verbal

Learning Styles

How does the person progress toward understanding?

• Sequentially – in logical progression of small incremental steps

• Globally – in large jumps, holistically

Your Learning Styles

For comparison: Sequential 60%; Global 40%

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Sequential Global

How Do Students Learn 2?

• Different people are most comfortable learning in different ways

• Multiple representations enhance the learning of all students

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

Developing a Course: Different Strategies

• Content-centered– What will I cover?

• Learner-centered– What will they learn?

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

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?

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?

Focus on goals that involve higher-order thinking skills

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956)

KnowledgeComprehension

Application

AnalysisSynthesis

Evaluation

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”

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

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

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:

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

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

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

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.

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

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)?