Power of Course Design to Increase Student Engagement and Learning, The

Peer Review, Winter 2007 by Fink, L Dee

All professors would like for their students to be prepared when they come to class, to be motivated to learn, and to achieve high-quality learning that prepares them not only for future classes but also for future personal, social, and professional life experiences. But it often doesn't happen that way. What many professors are finding is that students become more motivated and engaged when courses are designed and integrated with significant learning goals. In this article, I will describe the meaning of "significant learning," identify the principles of effective course design, and then offer two examples of what happens when people use these ideas.

Significant Learning

If we want students to have a "significant learning experience," we must begin by figuring out what we might mean by significant learning. In my book (2003), I offer a taxonomy of significant learning. This builds upon but goes beyond the well-known taxonomy that was created by Benjamin Bloom and his associates five decades ago (1956). Like Bloom's taxonomy, this taxonomy has six general categories of learning, but-unlike Bloom's-they are interactive rather than hierarchical (see fig. 1).

Briefly, these six kinds of learning can be described in the following way:

1. Foundational knowledge: This is the set of facts, principles, relationships, etc. that constitute the content of a course. This we want students to "understand and remember."

2. Application: Most disciplines require students to do something with the foundational knowledge. This might involve some physical skills (e.g., operating technical equipment); more commonly it involves engaging in some kind of problem solving, decision making, or creative thinking.

3. Integration: It is often helpful for students to be able to identify the similarities or interactions between one subject matter and another, or between different theories, historical trends, etc. This is the whole thrust of interdisciplinary learning.

4. Human dimension: When students report that they have learned something in a course about themselves or about how to interact with others in life, this is truly significant.

5. Caring: This is what happens when students change their feelings, interests, or values in relation to a subject.

6. Learning how to learn: Given the fact that we never teach students everything they will ever need to know about a subject, we need to help them learn how to keep on learning about it after the course is over.

The premise is that any course can address all six of these general kinds of learning. And the more of all six the course can promote, the more significant will be the overall learning experience for the student.

How can we do this? By learning how to design our courses in a much more powerful way. We have to learn how to design significant learning into our courses, and this is the purpose of integrated course design (ICD).

Integrated Course Design

The basic idea behind ICD is that, rather than simply develop a list of topics in a course and then provide students with lots of information about each topic, we need to design our courses in a way that is learning-centered, systematic, and integrated. If we can do this, students will respond by becoming more engaged in the work of learning and will succeed in achieving more important kinds of learning.

How does this process work? The key steps are illustrated in figure 2.

Situational Factors

Every time we teach, the situation is a little different. Therefore we need to begin by gathering information about a number of factors:

* Specific context: How many students are in the course? What is the level of the course and the time structure? Will it be offered live, online, or in a hybrid context?

* Expectations of others: Is this course expected to meet certain department goals, university goals, professional licensing requirements, etc.?

* Nature of the subject: The sciences are often "convergent" (working toward a single correct answer), while the humanities are often "divergent" (intentionally seeking multiple interpretations of a piece of work). How do these and other differences in the nature of the subject need to be taken into account?

* Nature of the students: What feelings do they have about this subject? What prior knowledge or experiences related to this subject do they bring with them?

* Nature of the teacher: What beliefs and values do we bring to the course? How do these compare with those of students?

This information is then used (as indicated by the arrows in fig. 2) in making the major decisions about how the course is going to operate.

Learning Coals: What Do We Want Students to Learn?

The first decision in a learning-centered course is about what we want students to learn. As we consider this, we need to go beyond wanting them learn everything about the major topics; we need to formulate more exciting and challenging learning goals. This is where the taxonomy of significant learning can be helpful. It provides us with six kinds of learning to consider for any course.