Various resources pertaining to educational approaches, styles or methods.
*Note: These contents are assembled from several web sites, some of whom are now defunct. Although I have the documents in my records, I've provided the current links to available items. Copies of material from defunct sites, as well as my works, are provided below. Copyright belongs to the authors and/or publishers of the material according to the information contained in the documents. An internet search of the titles or of content from the material should be made for referencing purposes. The owner of this web site only claims authorship where indicated within the material.
10+ presentation tips to keep your audience from dozing off
A Child Becomes a Reader Proven Ideas From Research for Parents -2006
Alternate Assessment: Teacher and State Experiences — Has alternate assessment helped revamp special education services and practice for students with significant cognitive impairments? The following paper includes true stories from teachers and state level staff who have seen improvements in both the education system and lives of individuals with significant cognitive impairments.
Are Science Lectures a relic of the past? (Mazur) — An interesting critique of the traditional lecture approach to university teaching.
Assessing the Assessors: Choosing the Right Profiling Tool For Your Training Business-2006
Distribution of Proficient Scores that Exceed the 1% Cap: Four Possible Approaches March 2004
Innovation and Differentiation in Canada’s Post-secondary Institutions Robert Crocker Alex Usher, 2006 — the state of innovation on Canadian university and college campuses in teaching and learning as well as research dissemination, based on interviews with provincial officials, a brief survey of post-secondary institutions, and more detailed examination of six examples of innovative practices. More at www.cprn.org
Just-in-Time-Teaching — a teaching and learning strategy based on the interaction between web-based study assignments and an active learner classroom.
Massachusetts: One State's Approach to Setting Performance Levels on the Alternate Assessment (2002)
PablumPoint: Creative Electronic Alternatives in the Classroom - Christopher D. Green 2005 — PowerPoint for download - there are many useful and productive ways in which PowerPoint can be employed for educational purposes. The real problem is that almost no one uses it in these ways.
Pathways from Workforce Development to Child Outcomes -2005 — Download The Evaluation Exchange for more on professional development
Peer Instruction: Engaging Students One-on-One, All At Once -2007 — Peer Instruction is an instructional strategy for engaging students during class through a structured questioning process that involves every student.
Peer Instruction: Getting Students to Think in Class Eric Mazur, 1997 — reprint of Chapter 2 of "Peer Instruction: A User's Manual"
Peer Instruction: Making Science Engaging (2006) — Peer Instruction is an interactive approach that was designed to improve the learning process. This approach provides students with greater opportunity for synthesizing the concepts while instructors get timely feedback that can help focus the instruction on the points that are the most difficult for the students.
Peer Instruction: Ten years of experience and results (2000) — our results indicate increased student mastery of both conceptual reasoning and quantitative problem solving upon implementing PI.
PEER INSTRUCTION A USER’S MANUAL ERIC MAZUR Harvard University (1997) — presents an entirely new approach to teaching introductory physics, complete with a step-by-step guide for converting conventional lectures to a more interactive format and a ready-to-use set of classroom materials in print and on disk.
Post-secondary Education in Canada: A Vision from Canadian Youth (2006) — Dialogue participants talked about four issues that the Advisory Committee on Engaging Young Canadians and other youth had identified as especially important: learning, work, health, and the environment.
Professional Development on Assessment Systems — covers effective professional development
Progress Monitoring in an Inclusive Standards-based Assessment and Accountability System -2004 — This report describes how progress monitoring—a set of techniques for assessing student performance on a regular and frequent basis—can be an essential and integral part of an inclusive standards-based assessment and accountability system.
Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read -2006 — The National Reading Panel (NRP) issued a report in 2000 that responded to a Congressional mandate to help parents, teachers, and policymakers identify key skills and methods central to reading achievement.
Qualitative versus quantitative thinking: are we teaching the right thing? — doesn't the traditional lecture overemphasize problem solving over conceptual understanding?
School Psychology in Four English-speaking Countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and The United States -2005 — s a brief review of the origins of school psychology internationally and discusses the history and current status of school psychology in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and The United States.
School-wide Positive Behavior Support Implementers’ Blueprint and Self- Assessment -2004 — The purpose of this blueprint is to present a rationale for adopting school-wide positive behavior support (SW-PBS), describe the key features of SW-PBS, and illustrate processes, structures, and supports of SW-PBS.
Self-assessed Returns to Adult Education: Life-long Learning and the Educationally Disadvantaged — The report assesses the efficacy of adult learning in meeting the needs of less educated or less skilled adults.
Student Misconceptions in the Psychology Classroom Stephen L. Chew -2004 — ConcepTests are an engaging and interesting way to make bothteacher and students aware of the limits of student understanding.
Testing the test: Item response curves and test quality (2005) — We present a simple technique for evaluating multiple-choice questions and their answer choices beyond the usual measures of difficulty and the effectiveness of distractors. The technique involves the construction and qualitative consideration of item response curves (IRCs) and is based upon Item Response Theory from the field of education measurement.
the Interactive Learning Toolkit — The Interactive Learning Tollkit helps you implement innovative teaching ideas, such as Peer Instruction and Just-in-Time-Teaching, and to monitor your students' learning.
The Teaching of Psychology in Autobiography, 2006 — The authors enthusiastically shared their teaching stories by addressing their early development and maturation as teachers, offering insights to their personal philosophies of teaching, and sharing their advice about how others might become effective teachers of psychology.
The Teaching of Psychology in Autobiography: Perspectives from Exemplary Psychology Teachers — published by the Society for the Teaching of Psychology represent the development and reflections of some of psychology’s very best teachers who provide insightful anecdotes and lessons learned for anyone seeking to improve his or her teaching. For more see http://www.teachpsych.org/
Transforming Arts Teaching: The Role of Higher Education -2007 — examines innovations in arts-teacher training. Best practices at 24 higher-education institutions are featured, along with proceedings from Dana’s national symposium, an event that examined ways in which colleges, universities, and conservatories can enhance arts learning.
Understanding or memorization: Are we teaching the right thing? — Education is more than just transfer of information, yet that is what is mostly done in large introductory courses - instructors present material (even though this material might be readily available in printed form) See YouTube lecture at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn1DLFnbGOo
Universal Design Applied to Large Scale Assessments -2002 — The purpose of this paper is to explore the development of universal design and to consider its application to large scale assessments. Building on universal design principles presented by the Center for Universal Design, seven elements of universally designed assessments are identified and described in this paper.
Using Multimedia In Classroom Presentations: Best Principles -2004 — The goal in this paper is to identify some of the best practices in computer-enhanced classroom instruction.
What is Scientifically-Based Research on Progress Monitoring? -2001 — When teachers use systematic progress monitoring to track their students progress in reading, mathematics, or spelling, they are better able to identify students in need of additional or different forms of instruction, they design stronger instructional programs, and their students achieve better.