Teaching undergraduates

This practical guide is designed to help college teachers plan their undergraduate courses and deliver high-quality instruction. The book's theme is that teaching is a creative, decision-making, idea-testing enterprise whose purpose is to facilitate student learning in all of its facets. Its goal is to help instructors understand the multiple kinds of learning taking place in their courses so that they can select, devise, evaluate, and modify teaching techniques to improve their effectiveness. Based on research on human learning, memory, thinking, and problem solving, as well as studies of teaching and less-formal reports of teaching practices, the book offers concrete advice about all aspects of college teaching.

*Part I is devoted to course planning. It outlines the many decisions instructors face in defining a course as their own and discusses the larger issues that shape a course and constrain some specific choices. Selecting course content, choosing learning goals, deciding how to pace a course, and scheduling tests are some of these issues. A workable timetable for preparing a course is included.
*Part II is a mini-course on human learning, memory, and thinking. It provides the conceptual foundation for making teaching decisions, for selecting instructional strategies, and especially for inventing new techniques that might particularly fit a specific course.
*Part III deals with the "nitty-gritty" of college teaching, including how to choose a textbook; lecturing and conducting classroom discussions; types and purposes of writing assignments, and how to structure and evaluate them; dealing with plagiarism; strengths and weaknesses of different types of tests, the relation of tests to learning goals, and guidelines for constructing good tests; and grading systems.
*Part IV addresses professional and ethical issues of importance and consequence to instructors.

New college instructors, more experienced faculty who would like to reflect on their teaching practices and consider making some changes, and teaching assistants will all find this book relevant and useful.

Preface	p. viii
Part I Introduction	p. 1
Chapter 1 Course Planning	p. 3
What's Needed Before Your First Class	p. 3
Course Content: What Will the Course Cover?	p. 4
Determining Course Goals	p. 5
Choosing a Course Format	p. 7
A Planning Timetable	p. 14
Summary	p. 18
Part II Learning, Memory, and Cognition	p. 19
Chapter 2 Understanding Attention and Working Memory	p. 21
Attention	p. 21
Working Memory	p. 25
Long-Term Versus Short-Term Memory	p. 29
Summary	p. 29
Chapter 3 Learning and Remembering	p. 30
The Nature of Long-Term Memory	p. 30
Factors Influencing Learning	p. 31
What Affects Remembering?	p. 37
Summary	p. 41
Chapter 4 Teaching Thinking	p. 43
The Nature of Thinking	p. 43
Concept Learning	p. 44
Problem Solving	p. 48
Reasoning	p. 57
Metacognition	p. 62
Summary	p. 64
Part III Implementing Instruction	p. 65
Chapter 5 Selecting Textbooks	p. 67
Content Coverage	p. 68
Lecture-Text Relations	p. 68
Rating Readability	p. 70
Choosing Additional Materials	p. 72
Summary	p. 73
Chapter 6 Lectures and Discussions	p. 74
Lecture Preparation	p. 74
Lecture Delivery	p. 79
Discussions	p. 92
Good Teachers	p. 94
Summary	p. 96
Chapter 7 Writing Assignments	p. 97
Writing and Thinking	p. 97
Kinds of Writing Assignments	p. 99
Setting the Assignment	p. 102
Feedback, Grading, and Revising	p. 103
Plagiarism	p. 109
Summary	p. 111
Chapter 8 Test Construction	p. 112
Multiple-Choice Questions	p. 113
Short-Answer Questions	p. 118
Essay Questions	p. 120
True-False Items	p. 122
Tests Based on Judgments of Association	p. 124
Using Tests to Promote Learning	p. 127
Summary	p. 128
Chapter 9 Grading Systems	p. 129
Choosing Component Weights	p. 130
Grading on a Curve	p. 132
Criterion-Based Grading	p. 135
Special Considerations	p. 138
Summary	p. 139
Part IV Professional Issues and Concerns	p. 141
Chapter 10 Ethical Issues and Special Situations	p. 143
In the Classroom	p. 144
Equitable Assignments	p. 146
Rules and Exceptions	p. 147
Socializing	p. 149
Academic Integrity	p. 151
Students with Disabilities	p. 154
Summary	p. 155
Chapter 11 Student Evaluations and Improving Instruction	p. 157
Factors Affecting Evaluations	p. 158
Collecting Evaluations	p. 159
Feedback and Improving Instruction	p. 164
Summary	p. 167
Closing Note	p. 168
References	p. 170
Name Index	p. 177
Subject Index	p. 181

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