CELT Learning Sciences Workshop Series 2024-2025

The Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) hosted a series of workshops in Fall 2024 exploring how faculty can leverage learning sciences to enhance student learning. This summary shares key highlights from the sessions.

Introduction – Leveraging Learning Sciences to Enhance Your Teaching

The process of learning is complicated and impacted by many factors, including the many competing cognitive and emotional demands that students experience. Research in learning sciences consistently highlights strategies that can significantly impact student engagement, focus, and retention. Here are two practical tips you can implement immediately:

1. Activate Prior Knowledge: Start class by having students recall previous material or share existing knowledge about the topic. This grounds their learning, highlights connections between new and existing knowledge, and reveals misconceptions.
2. Mix It Up: Vary your course activities to maintain engagement. For example, in a 50-minute class, change the teaching/learning format midway. This not only keeps students focused but also promotes deeper learning through context transfer.

Session #1: Strategies to Engage and Deepen Learning (October 9th 2024)

Led by Dana Leeman, this session focused on understanding today’s learners and their unique challenges, while introducing strategies to engage and deepen learning (Session Recording here).

The session began by focusing on understanding the learners in front of us today, discussing how various factors are impacting the cognitive and psychosocial development of young adults.

• Cognitive Development: Extended screen time and sleep deprivation have created physical changes in the brain that affect reasoning, impulse control, problem-solving, and emotional regulation.
• Mental Health: Current events, including climate uncertainty and geopolitical instability contribute to increased anxiety, impacting focus and retention.
• Social Skills: Pandemic experiences and social media use have led. to difficulties in handling interpersonal interactions and conflict.

Simple activities, to regain students attention and strengthen recall, will support students in processing and consolidating what they are learning more effectively. Example activities could include:

1. Jot Recall: During a lecture, pause and ask students to write down key concepts without consulting their notes. Optional extensions: Share in pairs or small groups to compare takeaways.

1. Pause & Reflect:
   1. (2-3 min) Ask students to close their books or laptops and take a moment to repeat to themselves two things they’ve just learned, either aloud or in writing.
   2. (5-10 min) Have students explain concepts to peers and discuss how the concept applies to them as human beings in the world.

3. Jot Notes: Ask students to close all laptops and notebooks while you give a 10-minute mini lecture. At the end of ten minutes, ask them to open their devices or notebooks and write down all that they remember from the mini lecture you just delivered. Ask students to share out main takeaways so you can identify what they learned, how they understand it at that point, and what didn’t they get that you need to deliver again or reinforce.

Regardless of which activities you chose to use, explain to the students that they are practicing recall and applying new knowledge to their lives, which can help strengthen engagement and attention and these approaches can be used when they are studying or preparing for an assessment outside of class because they strengthen retention and recall.

Session #2: Sticking With It When Learning Feels Hard (October 30th 2024)

Heather Dwyer led our second session, focusing on strategies to help students engage in the effortful process of learning and persist when learning feels uncomfortable and challenging. (Session Handout link here).

Productive learning often takes place outside of the learner’s comfort zone, requiring environments where they are challenged but still feel supported—what we might call the Learning Edge or Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). However, when faced with challenging material, students may respond in various ways, from avoidance and disengagement to seeking support from peers or instructors and persisting through difficulty.

The workshop suggested practical strategies that can help students persist through difficult learning moments, including:

• Scaffolding with Early Success: Providing small milestones, such as drafting stages of a research paper, helps build confidence early in the process.
• Peer Work: Encouraging collaboration allows students to support each other, reducing feelings of isolation during challenging tasks.
• Depth over Breadth: Focusing deeply on fewer readings or tasks incentivizes persistence, rather than overwhelming students with extensive content.
• Reducing Distractions: The Pomodoro Technique helps students focus their attention in short bursts (e.g., 25 minutes) followed by breaks (e.g., 5 minutes), which can help maintain focus and reduce the tendency to get distracted.

Finally, the session highlighted the importance of metacognition—helping students accurately assess their understanding and recognize what they still need to learn. Strategies like ungraded pre-assessments and practice tests can build these skills, allowing students to be more effective judges of their own learning. We also explored “desirable difficulties,” where introducing certain challenges, such as varying study conditions or spacing study sessions, can enhance long-term retention and deepen learning.

Session #3: Applying the Science of Learning to Large Lecture Classes (November 20th, 2024)*

Our third session, led by Carie Cardamone, focused on leveraging the science of learning to create engaging and community-oriented environments in large lecture classes. (Session Recording link here, Session Handout Link here)

The workshop began by discussing the unique challenges faced by today’s students, many of whom have experienced significant developmental influences like increased screen time, pandemic-related disruptions, and heightened anxiety due to global events. These factors impact students’ cognitive development, mental health, and social skills, often making it harder for them to focus, retain information, and engage in learning effectively.

To address these challenges, we explored two primary approaches:

• Building Community: Building a supportive community helps students persist through discomfort and engage deeply in learning. Techniques such as Values Affirmation—where students reflect on their personal values and how these intersect with the course material—and Break-the-Plane Engagement, where instructors move throughout the lecture space and interact personally with students, were introduced as effective ways to foster connection.
• Maintaining Student Focus and Attention: The session emphasized the importance of regularly renewing student attention during large lectures. Drawing on Attention Restoration Theory, participants discussed techniques like brief pauses, shifting focus from instructor-led content to peer interactions or other activities, and active learning exercises such as jot recalls or creating concept maps. These attention renewals are key to keeping students engaged, especially in lecture-heavy contexts.

Participants were also invited to share and compare strategies for both building community and maintaining attention, fostering a collaborative discussion about applying these methods effectively in their own courses.

* please note for transparency that this summary was created by ChatGPT from the handout and the transcript of the meeting.

Upcoming Sessions:

December 2024 Teaching Symposium on the Learning Sciences: Accepting Not Knowing as Part of the Learning Process, Thursday, December 12, 9:30am-2:00pm. If you are interested in attending, please register here.