Evidence-Based Teaching for Higher Education(Paperback) - 2012 Edition

by Beth M. Schwartz

Over the past two decades, a growing body of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) has emerged. This empirical study of teaching methods, course design, and students' study practices has yielded invaluable information about how teachers teach and learners learn. Yet, university faculty members remain largely unaware of the findings of SoTL research. As a result, they tend to choose their teaching techniques and tools based on intuition and previous experience rather than on scientific evidence of effectiveness. This book synthesizes SoTL findings to help teachers choose techniques and tools that maximize student learning. Evidence-based recommendations are provided regarding teacher-student rapport, online teaching, use of technology in the classroom (such as audience response systems, podcasting, blogs, and wikis), experiential learning (such as internships, teaching assistantships, research assistantships, and in-class research projects), students' study habits, and more. In order to stimulate future SoTL research, the book also recommends numerous areas for future investigation. It concludes with advice for documenting teaching effectiveness for tenure review committees. Both novice and experienced university teachers will find this book useful, as well as professionals who work in faculty development centers.

Genres: Nonfiction

Paperback

First published June 15, 2012

Reviews

[Robin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A real mixed bag, starting with the title. It's great to go for evidentiary bases for good teaching practices, but the title is misleading; the definition of "evidence" seems to be quite loose. And the majority of chapters focus on teaching-adjacent activities, not teaching itself (e.g. online tools, technology, internships, textbooks, etc.). Worse, some chapters are simply much better written than others. The primary value here is thus to guide the reader towards the primary literature, which should be more helpful than the vague and often provincial advice offered (it would be great if Americans would learn to define culture-specific terms for people who come from that tiny place outside the US called "the rest of the world"; like what the hell do class, term, paper, section, professor, etc. mean in these contexts?).

Also, the authors of the various chapters collected here seem to miss the bus on the good parts of evidence-based teaching. Murray did lots of studies over decades that tried to bring some level of empirical rigour to the incomprehensibly nebulous field of education, but unless I missed it, he's not cited more than once or twice in the whole volume. For example, Murray took the vague and nebulous term "rapport" and broke it down into behaviours requiring no abstract inference: does the teacher call you by your name, or not? Does that lead to higher grades, or not? Yet here in this edited volume we have a whole chapter explicitly on "rapport."

So, uh, just read Murray's 2007 review of his own research. It's far more interesting and informative than whatever this is.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Coming from natural science, a soft-science like this is so frustrating: no real control group, so many unknown and un-controlable variables, how much change is due to someone who is simply a very motivating teacher who is excited about the new thing vs. the technique? That said, I do "feel" on a squishy level that changing technique can lead to real change in overall student learning and this book is a good place to start getting ideas on what techniques might be useful to implement.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice summary of research relevant to teaching. Sadly, the book makes clear the sparsity of high quality research. Definitely offers some solid principles for effective facilitation of student learning. Hopefully, a future book will outline even more evidence-based teaching principles.

[Ashley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not particularly helpful or insightful, but the end-of-chapter points help it be a quick scan.