ARE OUR BRAINS TO BLAME FOR OUR INACTIVITY?
Researchers at the University of British Columbia have published a report indicating that our brains may be wired towards laziness. They note, "Our brains may be innately attracted to sedentary behavior. Electroencephalograms showed that test subjects had to summon extra brain resources when trying to avoid physical inactivity. The research findings, published recently in Neuropsychologia, suggest that our brains may simply be wired to prefer lying on the couch. "Conserving energy has been essential for humans' survival, as it allowed us to be more efficient in searching for food and shelter, competing for sexual partners, and avoiding predators,"said Dr. Matthieu Boisgontie.

HOW TO BUILD RAPPORT WITH YOUR STUDENTS
How do we get the best out of our students? By building a rapport with them. We hear that over and over again, but do we really know what that looks like or what that means? It’s not about preaching to them or trying to make them better people. It’s about learning who they are, accepting and celebrating their uniqueness, and really listening to them. Helen Boyd offers her suggestions for strategies to build trust.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE STUDENTS GONE?

Jill Barshay’s reflections on what the declining birthrate means for colleges and the students who hope to get a college degree a decade from now may be a wakeup call for us in higher education. She cites research provided by Nathan Grawe, an economist at Carleton College in Minnesota, who predicts that the college-going population will drop by 15 percent between 2025 and 2029 and continue to decline by another percentage point or two thereafter. Grawe’s forecasts for the number of students at two-year community colleges and four-year institutions are published in his book, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, with updates on his website. He breaks the numbers down not only by type of school, and how selective it is, but also by geographic region and race/ethnicity. “Students are going to be a hot commodity, a scarce resource,” said Grawe. “It’s going to be harder during this period for institutions to aggressively increase tuition. It may be a time period when it’s a little easier on parents and students who are negotiating over the financial aid package.”

CAN I DO THIS?

David Gooblar writes, “No matter how much students value your course, or how supportive your classroom environment, they won’t be motivated to do the work if they don’t think they can succeed at it. And of course the solution is not about making things easy for them. As a new academic year gets underway, I’ve been thinking a lot about student motivation. Specifically I’ve been rereading a 2010 book How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, which offers a compelling chapter on the three main pillars that underlie student motivation. Continue reading here.

 

WHAT GOOD LEARNING LOOKS LIKE

This blog post by Anya Kamenetz for NPR has some pretty useful information. So print it out; get out your highlighter and take off the cap. Ready? Now throw it away, because highlighters don't really help people learn. We all want for our kids to have optimal learning experiences and, for ourselves, to stay competitive with lifelong learning. But how well do you think you understand what good learning looks like? Ulrich Boser says, probably not very well. His new research on learning shows that the public is largely ignorant of, well, research on learning. Boser runs the science of learning initiative at the left-leaning thinktank the Center for American Progress. He has a new book out, also about the science of learning, titled Learn Better.

RECOGNIZING DIFFERENCES IN LIVED EXPERIENCES BETWEEN STUDENTS AND INSTRUCTORS
As part of the first week of classes, we had our regular opening reception for adjunct faculty. It’s a combination of a social gathering, an orientation, and an awards ceremony. I sat at a table with someone who teaches in the Homeland Security program, having recently retired from the field. He mentioned his shock last semester when he referred to 9/11, and the students didn’t remember it. He did some quick math, and realized that when it happened, most of them were only a year or two old.  He remembers it so vividly that it doesn’t even seem like the past; they remember it not at all. It sneaks up on you. I remember referring to Ronald Reagan in a class, and getting back a wave of blank looks. Today’s 18 year olds may remember Bill Clinton mostly as Hillary’s husband. Jimmy Carter is about as current for them as Harry Truman was for me. From the perspective of the instructor getting older, it’s easy to perceive that as loss.  And in a certain way, it is. But it’s also the gift of fresh sets of eyes. Keep reading here.

THE STUDENTS SPEAK
Harry Brighouse shares instructional practices that undergraduates say they have rarely encountered and think should be more widely shared. The first recommendation of the American Academy’s recent report "The Future of Undergraduate Education" is simple: we should work to improve undergraduate instruction. But how? In many disciplines, we don’t have rigorous measures of learning, so we cannot easily identify the best practitioners and simply copy what they do. Undergraduate students, however, experience numerous teachers and a lot of instruction, some good and some bad. They are a source of valuable information about what constitutes good practice. So, at a recent event co-sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Education, the University of Wisconsin at Madison College of Letters and Science, and the American Academy, we asked five undergraduate students at the university to describe instructional practices that they’ve encountered rarely but were especially effective -- and that they think should be more widely shared. Of course, some strategies work in some disciplines better than others, in some kinds of classes better than others and for some instructors better than others. Here’s what the students at the event told us.


WHAT IS TRADITIONAL?
Popular culture tells us that college "kids" are recent high school graduates, living on campus, taking art history, drinking too much on weekends, and (hopefully) graduating four years later. But these days that narrative of the residential, collegiate experience is way off, says Alexandria Walton Radford, who heads up postsecondary education research at RTI International, a think tank in North Carolina. What we see on movie screens and news sites, she says, is skewed to match the perceptions of the elite: journalists, researchers, policymakers. Today's college student is decidedly nontraditional — and has been for a while. "This isn't a new phenomenon," Radford says. "We've been looking at this since 1996." So, what do we know about these "typical" college students of today?

CAN YOU LEARN WHILE YOU SLEEP?
Hypnopedia, or the ability to learn during sleep, was popularized in the '60s, with for example the dystopia Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, in which individuals are conditioned to their future tasks during sleep. This concept has been progressively abandoned due to a lack of reliable scientific evidence supporting in-sleep learning abilities. Recently however, few studies showed that the acquisition of elementary associations such as stimulus-reflex response is possible during sleep, both in humans and in animals. Nevertheless, it is not clear if sleep allows for more sophisticated forms of learning. A study published this August 6 in the journal Scientific Reports by researchers from the ULB Neuroscience Institute shows that while our brain is able to continue perceiving sounds during sleep like at wake, the ability to group these sounds according to their organization in a sequence is only present at wakefulness, and completely disappears during sleep.


INTEGRATING ACTIVE LEARNING
James Salsich, writes, "During my career, I have at times struggled with the effectiveness of active learning in my classroom. But after reflecting and planning over the summer, I have always returned to school convinced more than ever of the dire need for our students to claim ownership of their learning. Active learning is student-driven, teaches students how to learn in collaboration with their peers, and asks teachers to give some portion of the authority that has traditionally been theirs over to students. Students, on the other hand, take increased ownership for the direction and progress of their learning. However, when we take a step toward this student-centered approach to teaching, we must first help our students to unlearn some problematic ideas. When we ask our students to adapt to a more complex, self-directed, self-regulated approach, we are often going against their very beliefs about how people learn. It is a process that is most successful when implemented gradually and purposefully." Continue reading here.