Teaching at Georgia State University

Guide for Promoting Student Learning at GSU (you must have internet access to use the links to externals websites)

Introduction to the CD
Welcome Letter from the Center for Teaching and Learning

 

Welcome to this fourth edition of a Guide to Teaching and Promoting Student Learning at Georgia State University. The intent of this material is to provide a resource for your work with GSU students. The material is organized into three sections. First, there is a short introduction with some comments about teaching and learning in higher education. This material is not intended to provide sufficient coverage how to plan a course, organize and engage students in the content and evaluate their progress.

The first section emphasizes Student Learning--the key focus of our classroom endeavors. Section Two describes some teaching strategies which can promote student learning, and Section Three provides some practical suggestions and resources for getting started.

The Guide also provides a summary of information on the policies that guide those who teach. These are found in Appendix A and drawn from the GSU Faculty Handbook (http://www.gsu.edu/~wwwfhb/fhb.html). Appendix B provides a listing of the resources that are available to students at Georgia State University.

Section 1: Student Learning at Georgia State

Some Background about Georgia State University

You might be interested to know that a recent survey of graduating undergraduates indicated that more than 80% of them judged the quality of teaching in courses in their major to be very good or excellent. Most departments take great pride in the quality of the students graduating from their programs.

Teaching well at Georgia State involves knowing something about the school and the students who attend it. GSU is recognized as a leading urban, research university. With a full-time enrollment of more than 26,000 students (fall 2006) and serving more that 40,000 degree-seeking students during the year, the university is the second largest institution of higher education in Georgia. Traditionally, GSU has served many transfer students and nontraditional students—individuals who might be returning to school after being out of school for several years and often attend on a part-time basis for the purpose of a career change or to fit school around family or work responsibilities. In recent years, however, an increasing number of our students have been more like traditional college students, that is, entering as freshmen and attending as full-time students.

As part of the preparation to teach a course, you will want to get a understanding of the types of individuals who make up the class. Recent years have brought some significant changes to the student body. The enrollment at GSU has been growing, becoming more highly qualified (mean SAT scores for freshmen was 1091--an increase of 90 points in the last 10 years), and remaining one of the most diverse in the nation. Diversity at GSU is reflected in the fact that 45% of our undergraduate students are classed as minority and there has been a significant increase in the number of international students at GSU (more than 1,600 from nearly 150 countries). The average undergraduate student is age 25 and the average graduate student is age 32. Although most GSU students graduated from high schools in Georgia (89%), many have lived in other states or countries and a high portion of them work at least part time.

What is a bachelors-level graduate of Georgia State University expected to have learned?
(Click above to see the GSU general education learning outcomes and an explanation of how they work)

That’s a good question. With more than 250 fields of study at Georgia State, it’s hard to characterize the typical GSU graduate. There are, however, several defining factors. First, because GSU is a large university in a rapidly-growing metropolitan area of more than five million people, our programs tend to be connected to real-world issues and problems. Increasingly, students choose GSU because they are seeking an urban campus which offers the business, social, governmental, educational, and cultural opportunities and challenges of a city.  The Campus Atlanta concept, where the boundaries between city and campus are blurred, is an accurate description for the educational experiences of GSU students.

Furthermore, the University Senate has defined six broad areas of common learning outcomes which should be mastered by all graduates of Georgia State’s undergraduate programs. For example, while majors in different fields of study will learn different content (e.g., accounting, philosophy, or chemistry), all GSU graduates are expected to communicate effectively through writing. The learning outcomes are introduced within the undergraduate core (freshman and sophomore years) and refined within the various majors during the junior and senior years. For example, a major in sociology and a major in finance might both take the same sections of freshman English composition (ENGL 1101 and 1102). In their lower division courses their courses would endeavor to provide skills in writing that remain generic in focus. Writing skills might be extended in “writing intensive” course in the social sciences, such as a history course or political science course. The final part of their preparation to communicate effectively in writing would be shaped by how the courses in their individual majors define writing within that discipline. That is to say, a graduate in sociology would typically have different purposes and formats in which writing than would be used by a major in finance.

It is also worth noting that over the past several years, professional organizations in most disciplines have increasingly emphasized the importance of skills over content. That is to say, it is generally more important to do effective critical thinking in a discipline that to just master the content of that discipline. because our knowledge base is changing ever more rapidly, experts across many different fields are calling for students to be prepared with tools of learning that will enable them to be life-long learners. Hence, the general education learning outcomes

It’s about learning

Consider the proposition that learning depends not on on what we  what we do as the instructor, but on what we have the students do. This simple statement has major implications for how we conduct our classes. We are challenged to find ways for our students to become actively engaged in the material rather than focusing on "covering" content. Effective teachers are those who help their students make connections with real life examples and limit the time spans of lectures in order to intersperse activities which require student participation.  Consider, for example, how ineffective it is for a music teachers to expect students to improve their instrumental skills if the only instruction was to tell them how to play, or if the director of a play only told the actors how their individual parts were to be performed. We expect musicians and actors to improve when they engage in "doing" music or theatrical roles. It is more challenging, but no less important, for us to find ways for our students to engage in thinking and acting in the way historians, or economists, or mathematicians, or teachers, or accountants do. It's the nature and quality of the engagement that shapes learning.

Our discussions about teaching and how to teach are anchored in our understanding of student learning. That is to say, nothing we do in teaching makes sense unless it results in students’ learning. And, of course, we are faced with deciding what that learning should be.

Each program at Georgia State University has developed a set of student learning outcomes in each degree area. That is to say, the list of what a bachelors level graduate should know (content), be able to do (skills), and value (dispositions and ethics) has been developed for all programs-- from history to economics, from art to astronomy, from social work to computer science. For a list of the learning outcomes for a specific program, go to http://education.gsu.edu/ctl/outcomes/gsu_plan.htm . It is from this overall program framework of what students should know, do, and value when completing our programs that we gain a perspective on what students should learn in our individual classes.

Once you have an idea about the learning outcomes for your program, you can develop learning outcomes for your course. The course learning outcomes (or course objectives) are provided to students in the course syllabus (as required by the GSU Faculty Handbook). The format for learning outcomes is that they describe behavior of students successfully demonstrating mastery of the course requirements and expectations. As such, learning outcomes have three basic components: First, learning outcomes are always stated in terms of what the learner does, rather than what the instructor does.

For example, NOT "I will introduce the concept of supply and demand" (instructor's performance); but, "Students will solve four problems using the principles of supply and demand" (student performance).

Second, learning outcomes are expressed in action verbs that describe behaviors that can be assessed.

For example, NOT "Students will understand key psychological theories and concept" (not assessable) but, "Students will compare and contrast how different psychological theories explain learning, forgetting, and generalization" (assessable).

And, third,  the learning outcomes should provide some expectation or standard for students' performance. For example, NOT "Students will write an effective  paper" (too vague to assess)  but, "Students will write a paper in which the content is accurate and appropriate for the thesis, is accurately documented and based on appropriate sources, is organized in a coherent manner, and from which appropriate conclusions are drawn and clearly expressed" (more clearly expressed to guide students' writing and faculty grading).

Ideally, clearly written learning outcomes provide enough information so that multiple faculty members can judge students' work and arrive at the same conclusions about the students' level of mastery. For many faculty, guidelines, such as Bloom's Taxonomy, have provided helpful guides in selecting active verbs to describe varying levels of student competence. 

• knowledge—recall of previously learned material

• comprehension—understanding of material and ability to explain it

• application—ability to use what has been learned in other situations

• analysis—separating the content into its component parts to understand the relationships between them

• synthesis—combining parts to form a new whole

• evaluation—making judgments on the value of material for specific purposes

So what do we as faculty members do to promote student learning? That's in the next section.

Section 2. Some Comments about Teaching

Section  3 Getting Started