LEARNING MADE EASIER
IDEA provides some great tips on how you can help your students learn fundamental principles, generalizations, or theories. How can students show they “comprehend” a principle, generalization or theory? Bloom describes three ways. First, they can restate the principle, generalization or theory in their own words, which Bloom calls translation.  When asked what is Newton’s third law of motion, the student might answer, “It’s when two things hit each other, they push each other equally in opposite directions.” Bloom states that translation can take one of three forms: translation into the student’s own words, as we’ve just seen; translation into symbolic form e.g., from verbal to graphical form (inserting arrows into a picture to depict the forces operating on the chair in the example above); translation from one verbal form to another, e.g., metaphor, analogy. Read more here.

DOES LEARNING STOP
Most of us can describe what good teaching looks like and many of us accept the premise that learning occurs when student accept the new knowledge and are able to apply it to different contexts. But when does learning end or does it have to? That is the basis of Dr. Maryellen Weimer's latest blog post. She writes, "With courses ending so definitively, it’s easy to think that whatever impact you or the course might have on students is over. But learning doesn’t always end when the course does. Some insights and understandings are iterative and cumulative. Students arrive at them after repeated exposure, as the evidence mounts and their skills and experiences deepen. Other intellectual development happens when students are finally ready to learn.Read more here.

HOW MUCH FEEDBACK IS ENOUGH
Are you sure that the feedback you are providing to your students is really helping them? It is a question that nags at us. We want to provide enough feedback to help our students from repeating the same mistakes. We also want them to learn from what they did right and wrong. But we are always concerned about giving feedback that demotivates our students. Dr. Matt Gomes and doctoral student Noel Turner offer their own take on this dilemma. They suggest that we have students identify a specific outcome or assessment criterion they are concerned with, and respond only to that concern. When Dr. Gomes uses this strategy, the question becomes “What does this student need to do in order to perform better along specific project goals or assessment criteria? What do they need to do to become a more reflective writer (project goal) or to organize their claims effectively (criterion)? This strategy has the added benefit of prodding him to specifically elaborate on his understanding of outcomes or assessment criteria." Read more here.