Learning Curve

Four days before commencement exercises, Duke psychology professor Ruth Day was still teaching. Her students - 15 middle-aged folks - ringed the conference tables, engrossed in sorting slips of paper into piles. Each slip had a word or phrase on it.

One person sorted terms from inorganic chemistry, including core concepts such as "structure," "nuclear theory," "ionic," "symmetry" and "bonding." Others sorted concepts from economics, genetics, linguistics, protein chemistry, physics, public policy, engineering, psychology or political science. It's an exercise Day uses frequently in her classes at Duke, but this time her students were college professors from across the country, all experts in their respective fields.

As the professors continued to work with terms from their own discipline, they clustered ones with similar meanings. Piles emerged around the table. Once finished sorting, they wrote down what they had put in each cluster. Later in the day, they shuffled their slips of paper and gave them to someone from a different discipline, who then repeated the sorting task.

The demonstration helped the professors consider how novices think about concepts in a new discipline. This enabled them to see that there are different ways to perceive and teach the same subject matter, Day said.

The professors had gathered at Duke for a three-day course offered through the National Science Foundation's Chautauqua program. The program enables faculty to learn about new ideas that they can take back to their own college classrooms. During much of the program, the professors take courses with peers in their field. Day offers the rare course that draws a crowd across disciplines.

At 22 years, Day's course, "Cognition and Teaching," is the longest-running course in Chautauqua history. She presents basic phenomena and concepts in cognitive psychology, but also applies them to a concern of all college professors - the teaching/learning process. "I realized that if I could teach professors something about how the mind works, I could teach them not only about cognitive psychology, but also about how to teach more effectively in their own disciplines," she said.

Day challenges professors to consider their own mental processes as well as those of their students. "When students have problems understanding course material, the instructors themselves may be part of the problem," she said. Rather than being offended by this idea, faculty rethink their teaching assumptions and practices. Afterwards, they often write Day to report their teaching has improved and also to request a follow-up course.

Day offers two cognition and teaching courses. In Part 1, she covers basic cognitive processes such as perception, attention, memory and comprehension. In Part 2, which was developed at the repeated request of "graduates," she emphasizes knowledge structures, expertise, alternative mental representations, writing, language and thought as well as cross-disciplinary approaches.

So far she has taught some 800 professors in the Chautauqua program. She also has presented abbreviated versions to professional organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Association for Higher Education as well as universities and colleges. Since participants usually share the course ideas with colleagues, Day's message likely has reached thousands of college faculty members and their students over the years.

Day recently taught the follow-up course at Duke. The "sorting terms" experiment helped launch the discussion of knowledge structures ‚ what they are, how to assess them, how to facilitate their development and differences between experts and novices.

"A key idea is representation, how to display information both externally - on paper, blackboard, computer screen - and also in the mind," Day said in an interview. "There are always alternative ways to display information. Some ways enable people to take hold of an idea, understand it, remember it and use it. Other ways can hinder these processes."

Each time Day teaches a Chautauqua course, she incorporates modules with findings from her latest research.

"The course is really rich with content material," said Jeannette Seaberry, a faculty member in the counseling department at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, during a class break. Seaberry said the Part 1 course, which she took two years ago, made a huge difference in her life. She became conscious of her thinking patterns and how to tweak them to improve her teaching. Since the course, she has been designated a master teacher and was recently appointed chair of her department.

Although Day has won a variety of teaching awards, she said her faculty courses are not about "telling others how to teach." She said they provide a chance to present empirical evidence about how the mind works and show ways to apply it in the classroom.

"There is no one 'correct' way to teach, but a variety of ways," she said. "These courses are designed to enable professors to discover new and effective ways to teach."

Written by Karen Hines.