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Teaching Goals, Learning
Styles, and Course Design
What are your teaching goals?
What do you hope to accomplish
in your courses?
Heather Macdonald
Barbara Tewksbury
Robyn Wright Dunbar
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)
-11
-9
Active
-7
-5
-3
-1
1
3
5
7
9
11
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
-11
-9
Sensing
-7
-5
-3
-1
1
3
5
7
9
11
Intuitive
For comparison: Sensing 65%; Intuitive 35%
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
-11
-9
Visual
-7
-5
-3
-1
1
3
5
7
9
11
Verbal
For comparison: Visual 80%; Verbal 20%
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
-11
-9
-7
Sequential
-5
-3
-1
1
3
5
7
9
11
Global
For comparison: Sequential 60%; Global 40%
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
passive
most students
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
Evaluation
Synthesis
Analysis
Application
Comprehension
Knowledge
Bloom’s Taxonomy
Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956)
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 a
geologic 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
–
–
–
–
•
Instructor #2 chose four themes as content topics
–
–
–
–
•
1973 Susquehanna flood
Landsliding in coastal California
Mt. St. Helens
Armenia earthquake
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)?