Center for Teaching and Scholarly Excellence: Fall 2011

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Center for Teaching and Scholarly Excellence CTSE Official CTSE Newsletter

Fall 2011

So Much for One Size Fits All

Vol. 7, No. 1

by BRUCE TORFF

Students learn differently. Ignoring this has a high price. It sounds like education-school claptrap to say that not all students learn alike, but it happens to be the truth. Human beings differ a great deal from one another, including both individual and group variation. As for group differences, much is made of the influence of gender, for example, with Mars and Venus perched on bestseller lists and debated at Starbucks. It’s equally clear that individuals differ every bit as much as groups do, in terms of height, intelligence, athletic prowess, and a host of other variables. These individual and group differences profoundly affect students’ learning, as education-school claptrap would have it. To optimize educational outcomes, professors need to take students’ learning proclivities into account.

Teaching the same way all semester creates bias against some students, warns education professor Bruce Torff (right).

IN THIS ISSUE Twitter in the Classroom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 We’re All in This Together. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Hofstra-Claflin Exchange Program. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Distance Learning: Closer Than You Imagine?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 To Friend or Not to Friend?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 The Salzburg Experience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Picturing Pop Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Coining New Words. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Trouble is, this means coming up with a working taxonomy of human abilities, and there are numerous ways to slice that pie. The most common is called learning styles theory, which holds that people are either made or born with a penchant for gaining information in one of three ways: visual (e.g., reading a book); auditory (e.g., listening to someone speak); or kinesthetic (e.g., manipulating something to see how it works). The visual style has more recently been bifurcated, with read/write referring to text-based tasks and visual continued on page 2

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