In a previous newsletter, the concepts of primacy and recency effects were presented from the perspective of encouraging faculty to intentionally plan the first and last 5 minutes of class in such a way as to foster and support learning and retention. This week, we will tackle the concepts of the 'f...

Did you know that how you begin and end your class can have one of the biggest impacts on what students remember? 

Psychology research shows that people are most likely to retain information presented at the beginning and end of a learning session. Known as the primacy and recency effect, this prin...

We all know that words can sting, even hurt, and stay with us for a long time. This is a common occurrence for us with student evaluations. So many times I sat with faculty members who could only focus on the one negative comment despite ten or more positive ones. That one comment was devastating. I...

A common question I get from folks enrolled in the PA Educator Master One course is how to include more active learning in courses that are, by nature, lecture-heavy. As I continue exploring AI, I’ve come to appreciate how helpful it can be, especially for new faculty still climbing the steep learni...

With AI tools flooding the education space, it's essential to remember that AI is just a tool. It can support your work as an educator, but it shouldn't do the work for you. Let me explain. 

If you have ever tried to teach from someone else's slides, then you know how hard, if not nearly impossible...

One of the most important documents you have is your course syllabus. Whether you inherited one or wrote one from scratch, it is an essential tool for you and your students. As such, care and intention must be paid to its development and design. 

Although I have written several articles on the syll...

I believe we are all familiar with the growing problem of college students not wanting to or simply not reading. This is true not only for required reading, we may assign them for class, but for reading overall, including for enjoyment (McMurtrie, 2024; Swan, 2024). The number of students who read f...

I bet we all remember when the teacher called on us cold at least once. Either we didn’t see it coming, or we knew they wanted to pick on someone to answer the question, so we pretended to be writing notes or doing anything other than making eye contact with the teacher. Then, the dreaded thing happ...

Many of us use quizzes in some form or another. We use them for different reasons as well, some better than others. Some of the challenges with quizzes are that they tend to be lower-level questions that reflect more memorization of information rather than actual learning (Weimer, 2016). Then there ...

When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, much of the focus and concern was students misusing it to write admission essays, papers, or assignments. Faculty worried about how we would know if the student actually did the work or if AI produced it. Attention then focused on products that could help us tell ...