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Showing posts from September, 2016

Note-taking 101

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The Fall return to school is a good time to remind students and parents about learning strategies. Lectures still dominate teaching approaches. In spite of such teaching reforms as "hands-on" learning, small group collaborations, project-based learning, and others, teachers generally can't resist the temptation to be a "sage of the stage," instead of a "guide on the side." Maybe that's a good thing, because many students are not temperamentally equipped to be active learners. Rather, they have been conditioned by television and movies, as well as their former teachers, to function passively, as an audience. Students are even conditioned to be passive by the way we test learning with multiple-choice questions, which require a passive recognition of a provided correct answer among three or four incorrect ones. The other major teaching device, reading, is also problematic. Too many students don't like to read academic material. They want somebody ...