A "Teacher's Dozen"

A "Teacher's Dozen:" Fourteen General, Research-based Guidelines to Inform College Teaching and Assessment and Improve Higher Learning

Active learning is more effective than passive learning.

What l hear, I forget; What I see, I remember; What I do, I understand.
Chinese proverb

It is not simply how busy you are, but why you are busy. The bee is praised; the mosquito is swatted.
Marie O'Connor

Simply put, the greater the students involvement or engagement in academic work or in the academic experience of college, the greater his or her level of knowledge acquisition and general cognitive development.
Ernest T. Pascarella & Patrick T. Terenzini
Learning is more effective and efficient when learners have explicit, reasonable, positive goals, and when their goals fit well with teachers' goals.

If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.
L. J. Peter & R. Hull
High expectations encourage high achievement.

Where there is no hope, there is no endeavor.
Samuel Johnson

Expectations are themselves predictions, ranging from the elaborate scientific forecast of the large business enterprise to primitive guesses and dark hunches.
Grunberg & F. Modigliani
Motivation to learn is alterable; it can be positively or negatively affected by the task, the environment, the teacher and the learner.

Extrinsic incentives and competition are more effective for stimulating intensity of effort than for inducing thoughtfulness or quality of performance
Jere Brophy

Just as we learn new skills, so also we learn new motives.
Gordon W. Allport
Learning requires focused attention, and awareness of the importance of what is to be learned.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.
Samuel Johnson
To be remembered, new information must be meaningfully connected to prior knowledge, and it must first be remembered in order to be learned.

Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.
G. K. Chesterton
Unlearning what is already known is often more difficult than learning new information.

It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning.
Claude Bernard
Information that is organized in personally meaningful ways is more likely to be remembered, learned, and used.

Much goes on in the mind of the learner. Students interpret. They overinterpret. They actively struggle to impose meaning and structure upon new material being presented.
Donald A. Norman
To be most effective, teachers need to balance levels of intellectual challenge and instructional support.

Any subject can be effectively taught in some intellectual honest form to any child at any stage of development.
Jerome Bruner
Mastering a complex skill or body of knowledge takes great amounts of time and effort.

There are some things that cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.
Ernest Hemingway

[There 's] Nothing I do [that] can't be done by a 10-year-old . . . with 15 years of practice.
Blackstone the Magician
Learning to transfer, to apply previous knowledge and skills to new contexts, requires a great deal of directed practice.

We learn to do neither by thinking nor by doing; we learn to do by thinking about what we are doing.
George Stoddard

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
George Santayana
The ways in which learners are assessed and evaluated powerfully affect the ways they study and learn.

Let the tutor demand an account not only of the words of his lesson, but of their meaning and substance ... Let [ the learner] show what he has just learned from a hundred points of view, and adapt it to as many different subjects, to see if he has rightly taken in it and made it his own.
Michel de Montaigne

It is a great folly to reward one thing while hoping for another.
Anonymous
Interaction between teachers and learners is one of the most powerful factors in promoting learning; interaction among learners is another.

A large part of the impact of college is determined by the extent and content of one's interactions with major agents of socialization on campus, namely, faculty members and student peers. ... The most influential interactions appear to be those that focus on ideas or intellectual matters, thereby extending and reinforcing the intellectual goals of the academic program.
E. Pascarella & P. Terenzini
Learners need feedback on their learning, early and often, to learn well; to become independent learners, they need to become self-assessing and self-correcting.

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.
Mark Twain

Final Notes

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.
Lord Macaulay

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim that isn't properly applied to the particular.
T.A.

Psychology is a science; teaching is an art, and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by use of its originality.
William James

Compiled by Thomas A. Angelo; American Association for Higher Education.; One Dupont Circle, Suite 360; Washington, DC 20036

References for "Teacher's Dozen: 14 General, Research-based Guidelines to Inform College Teaching and Assessment and Improve Higher Learning"

Bloom, B. S. "The Hands and Feet of Genius: Automaticity." Educational Leadership, 43 (5), 1986.

Bruner, J. S. and Haste, H. W. (Eds.). Making Sense: The Child's Construction of the World. New York, NY: Routledge, 1987.

Cruikshank, D. R. Research that Informs Teachers and Teacher Educators. Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa, 1990.

Dunkin, M. J. "Research on Teaching in Higher Education." In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Macmillan, 1986.

Gamson, Z. F. and Chickering, A. W. (Eds.). Applying the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 47. San Francisco, CA: Jossey_Bass, 1991.

Guskey, T. R. Improving Student Learning in College Classrooms. Spnngfield, IL: Thomas, 1988

McKeachie, W. J. and others. Teaching Tips: Strategies. Research. and Theory for College and University Teachers, (9th ed.). Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1994.

McKeachie, W. J., Pintrich, P. R., Lin, Yi_Guang, and Smith, D. A. F. Teaching and Learning in the College Classroom: A Review of the Research Literature. Ann Arbor, Ml: National Center to Improve Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, U. of Michigan, 1986.

McMillan, J. H. and Forsyth, D. R. ÏWhat Theories of Motivation Say about Why Learners Learn.Ó In R. J. Menges and M. D. Svinicki, (Eds.). College Teaching: From Theory to Practice. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 45. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1991.

Norman, D. A. ÏWhat Goes On in the Mind of the Learner.Ó In W. J. McKeachie (Ed.), Learning Cognition. and College Teaching. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 2. San Francisco, CA: Jossey_Bass, 1980.

Pascarella, E. T. and Terenzini, P. T. How College Affects Students: Fmdings and Insights from Twenty Years of Research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey_Bass, 1991.

Sorcinelli, M. D. ÏResearch Findings on the Seven Principles." In A. W. Chickering and Z. F. Gamson (Eds.), College Teaching: From Theory to Practice. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 47. San Francisco, CA: Jossey_Bass, 1991.

Svinicki, M. D. "Practical Implications of Cognitive Theories." In R. J. Menges and M. D. Svinicki, (Eds.). College Teaching: From Theory to Practice. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 45. San Francisco, CA: Jossey_Bass, 1991.

Weinstein, C. E. and Meyer, D. K. ÏCognitive Learning Strategies and College Teaching." In R. J. Menges and M. D. Svinicki, (Eds.). College Teaching: From Theory to Practice. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 45. San Francisco: Jossey_Bass, 1991.