communicating for
LEARNERS
SPRI N #1 G 2012
featured in this issue
Teaching & Learning Fair
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Visionary Status
Did You Know?
Book Review
Think Smarter
2012 Teaching & Learning Fair A Celebration of Teaching and Learning!
Keynote
The Lenhart Grand Ballroom in the Bowen Thompson Student Union was a crowded and lively place on Friday, February 10, as the campus community celebrated teaching and learning at the Sixth Annual BGSU Teaching and Learning Fair, featuring an Undergraduate Research Showcase. More than 100 educators offered poster presentations about their efforts to enhance teaching and learning at Bowling Green State University. Joining them for the first time this year were more than 50 undergraduate students who were sharing their meaningful research and creative activities in all fields of study. Educators’ presentations ran the gamut from “Developing Video Games to Meet Classroom Objectives” to “Formative Assessment Techniques in College Classes,” and from “Teaching Statistical Thinking” to “Music of the Spheres.”
The Fair’s Keynote speaker, Dr. Todd Zakrajsek, delivered two keynotes, one in the morning intended for educators and entitled, “How Students Learn: Strategies for Engaged Learning” and a second in the afternoon intended for students, “Enhance Your Academic Potential: How Research Can Help You To Be a Successful and Engaged Learner.”
The undergraduate presentations were just as varied, ranging from “Family Environment and its Effects on Female Delinquency” to “Effector Destination in Plant Cells” and from “An Application of the Debate between Isocrates and Plato to Modern American Education” to “Programmatic Music.” After the Fair, undergraduate students migrated across the hall to the Multipurpose Room where they enjoyed a panel discussion and performances by students in the arts.
Zakrajsek is executive director of the Center for Faculty Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was the inaugural director of the Faculty Center for Innovative Teaching at Central Michigan University and the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Southern Oregon University, where he also taught in the psychology department as a tenured associate professor. He also directs the Lilly Conference on Teaching and Learning at Traverse City, MI, and the International Conference on Improving University Teaching. To some extent, Zakrajsek’s first keynote followed his own personal journey from teacher-centered to learner-centered teaching. He talked about some of the research that started him wondering what his students actually learned from his lectures. One study in particular, (Hake, 1998) caught his attention. The study followed the learning of 6000 students in high-school and college physics classes, some of whom were taught by the traditional lecture method and others of whom were taught using an interactive model. The results were vivid and undeniable: students in the best lecture class showed less improvement than any of the students who were in classes that used interactive engagement.
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Zakrajsek’s training in cognitive psychology underlies much of what he says about student learning. One concept that