In their recent book, Relationship–Rich Education, Elon colleagues Drs. Peter Felten and Leo Lambert weave together dozens of stories emphasizing the importance of meaningful connections for successful learning and well-being in higher education. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, they offer extensive evidence of the power of relationships between learners and peers, staff, and faculty, asserting that all students should “create webs of…

Take six people and give them all a list of words to commit to memory individually. Next, have three of those people work as a group to recall as many words as they can. Have the other three people try…

Collaborative testing (aka team-based testing) is a collaborative learning technique that has received a fair amount of attention from researchers (LoGiudice, Pachai, and Kim 2015). It is a practice that typically involves students taking a test individually and then taking…

James Barber’s Facilitating the Integration of Learning: Five Research-based Practices to Help College Students Connect Learning across Disciplines and Lived Experiences (Stylus 2020) is one of the few books that delivers more than its title promises. The middle section of…

The Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning (2017) at Brown University defines inclusive teaching as “an explicit intellectual and affective inclusion of all students into our fields and disciplines, through course content, assessment, and/or pedagogy.” This definition was developed based…

Interviewing teaching faculty about the pedagogies they use in their courses has been one of my primary methods of collecting data for my exploration of immersive learning practices in higher education. With each interview, I learn more about the range…

In this retrospective, we review two seminal papers on undergraduate research (UR) written by David Lopatto (Lopatto 2003; 2010) and discuss the importance of these articles with regard to demonstrating the benefits of UR and the qualities that make it…

Although day-to-day life for college students is far from normal, right now, faculty and staff can continue to help the class of 2024 pursue a journey of self-discovery. How can students make the most of their experience?  Educational scholars George…

What is the value of an undergraduate education? Scholars, politicians, and families have debated that question for decades. Research consistently demonstrates the economic payoff of earning a degree, but is that enough to make college “worth it” for students? In…

In previous posts (here and here), I’ve been writing about the different ways that groups can be created for class projects, and whether the method of group assignment has an impact on learning. In this post, I want to focus on one…