UNDERSTANDING LEARNER-CENTERED APPROACHES
Catharine F. Bishop, Michael I. Caston, and Cheryl A. King have a recently published article that is helpful in understanding the term learner-centered and how to create an environment conducive to learning. They wrote, "Learner-Centered Teaching (LCT)has been an effective approach for enhancing the learning experience for students in higher education. A LCT approach means subjecting multiple teaching actions (method, assignment, or assessment) to the test of a single question: Given the context of my students, course and classroom, will this teaching action optimize my students’ opportunity to learn?. To be specific, the classroom for a learner-centered environment is quite different from traditional classrooms. Students are required to take on new learning roles and responsibilities beyond taking notes, listening to teachers teach, and passing exams. It is an environment that allows students to take some real control over their educational experience and encourages them to make important choices about what and how they will learn." They go on to list a number of interventions and approaches that can move a classroom from a coverage-model to learner-centered. The article appears in the latest version of the Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Access is free but you do have to register.

USE FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT TO CHECK FOR REAL-TIME LEARNING
We all know that formative assessment tools are important to our ability to determine if learning is occurring during a lesson. We usually use it to determine if we are ready to move to a more advanced or new topic. Here are a few examples of formative assessment tools you can use in your classes everyday. Having your students write a brief summary of the learning experience (or reading if you gave them an assignment before class) is always a great way to measure learning but you can also get creative and ask them to write a poem using a set number of key terms or have them create it from the information they highlighted in the reading. This tells you immediately if they learned how to differentiate between what is important from all of the other material. They can also do this using a class journal, which is a great way for them to measure their growth throughout the semester. You can also ask them to write a quiz based on the new material, have them select one of the short-answer type questions and reply to it. This gives you some idea of what their expectations are related to assessment and the short answers will give you a good indication if learning occurred. You can ask them to create a public service announcement using the new information which requires them to not only understand the new material but to be able to apply it and explain it to others. They can also write a letter to someone explaining the new information or write to the author of the textbook outlining what they learned and what is still confusing. You could have them prepare to be a guest on a television show where they will be the expert on the new material. Ask them to prepare notes or pair them up and have one ask questions while the other answers them (having them alternate lets everyone play both parts). Finally, see if they can answer the question of what they learned by putting it into a Twitter format. Remind them that they are limited to 140 characters. This requires them to be focused and concise. If you have some favorite formative assessment tools, please share them with me and I will be sure to post them here.

STUDENT PREFERENCES FOR READING ASSIGNMENTS
Many of us struggle with having our students complete the assigned reading. Lola Aagaard, Timothy W. Conner II, and Ronald L. Skidmore provide us with a number of suggestions to make this task more likely to be completed in their new research article College Textbook Reading Assignments and Class Time Activity. They note, "Strategies reported to most likely prompt reading the textbook included in-class quizzes over text material, assigning graded study-guides to complete while reading; testing over material found in the textbook but not covered in class; and assigning shorter reading assignments. Preferences for use of class time varied by experience in college, but the majority of students preferred group discussion and application of material to real life rather than just lecture over the textbook content." The article can be found in the latest version of the Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.