What people learn about their skills (with student comments in quotes)

What students learned about themselves or their skills as they took the class:

“The easiest way to be prepared and actively engaged in class is to do the reading before class.”

This last point becomes a common theme, and it reflects my general understanding (from experience and from the research on learning) that reading ahead of the lectures is best. You might not like it, and I can totally understand how unfair it seems to read things the teacher hasn’t taught yet. That said, reading ahead of time will make the lecture make more sense and will help the entire class move farther through the material. More students will reach more interesting learning outcomes when more people read ahead.

"I am more capable getting the larger picture from articles now than I was able to at the beginning of my Grinnell career."

“This isn't exactly specific to my skills, but I've learned that I harbor a lot of rigid and perhaps outdated beliefs about sensation/perception (like the whole 'the brain is a computer' thing) that I had to re-evaluate a lot during your class.”

“This class has really made me a critical thinker. I could not just passively observe the world and justify what I am perceiving is all because of something the brain does. There are so many things to consider: nestings, context, and knowledge. We cannot take perception for granted.”

"This class has been a good exercise in self-motivation; Reading was only checked on exams, Papers were assigned very far in advance and we were not pestered about it, Paper 3 is not scaffolded. Working with a younger student also taught me about the difficulty of framing something one is trying to say in multiple ways."

"I think in terms of writing skill, I noticed more about what I usually do and what I should do to change it for the better. Reflections turned out to help me a lot in that aspect."

Back to Sensation & Perception or back to In the Classroom