Student Guide Corner

On Friday morning, April 8, 2016, I will be speaking at the Ohio region meeting of the American Accounting Association on the topic of �Perspectives of High-Quality Teaching.�   If you are in the Cleveland area, I hope you will show up.  I would love to meet you and chat about teaching.   Here�s the URL. http://aaahq.org/meetings/2016/ohio-midyear-meeting ** I am teaching three classes this semester�two Intermediate Accounting II classes and one Financial Accounting class.  I have 78 students.   I realize that some of you teach hundreds but, for me, 78 is a fairly large number.  That provides some challenges when trying to get each student to do outstanding work. I always give three tests every semester and a final exam.   I believe that gives the students a chance to show me what they have really learned.   After the first two tests, I usually have a good group (50-60 percent) who are doing well and have an excellent chan...

  A good friend emailed me a few days ago and asked for some suggestions on writing a test.   S tudents were mostly getting good grades on her tests but she wasn�t sure that they were learning as much and as deeply as she wanted. I think testing is a teaching topic that we do not talk about frequently enough.    Too often, we are probably afraid of exposing our weaknesses.    Few people are trained to write good test questions.    She was creating an accounting test but I believe the basic discussions around testing are pretty much universal across the various disciplines.    Here were the thoughts that I sent to her. Rule 1 � Testing is just about the most important thing a teacher does each semester because it sets the tone for the students.   It tells them what you really want and expect from them.   If you test memorization, they will learn to memorize.   If you test mechanics, they will learn nothi...

�Too often, we settle for dreams that merely scratch the surface of our abilities and then wonder why we are dissatisfied with the results.� From the book:    Don�t Just Dream about Success:    Stack the Odds in Your Favor By:    Joe Hoyle (to be published in January 2014)   Returning from Thanksgiving break, virtually all college teachers start looking forward to creating and then grading final exams.    It is a necessary part of the job but it is also an event that can impact the education of each student rather significantly.    Below is a rewritten version of a blog entry that I posted 3 � years ago.    I thought it made a good point back then.    I believe the same thing today. ** Why do you give a final exam to your students? What do you hope to accomplish?   I have talked with many professors over the years and their strategies for final examinations vary greatly from one to the next.   Here ar...

As I have mentioned before, on August 7, 2013, I will be giving a 75 minute presentation about this blog at the Annual Convention of the American Accounting Association in Anaheim, California.   If you are going to be at the convention, I hope you�ll stop by and chat.    I�d love to meet each and every one of the people who read these essays.   I�ll be there for several days so let�s get together over coffee and talk about teaching.    In preparing for this talk, I have gone back and looked at some of the 170 posts that I have written over the years.    To me, it is interesting how many of these posts push teachers (including me) to think about the last day of class and what the teachers want their students to have accomplished.    Until you visualize what you want your students to do by the end of the semester, it is hard to know how to guide them.    Over and over, you see that theme in my thoughts on teaching.    Y...

  In my previous blog posting, I talked about the creation of faculty learning communities as a way to generate conversation about various aspects of teaching/learning/education.    At that time, I brought up one of my favorite topics.    If you have read this blog for long, you are aware that I am a firm believer that the way you test will strongly influence the way your students learn.    If you want to create a different class environment, you need to test differently. Therefore, in discussing faculty learning communities, I strongly feel that every aspect of testing should be a topic of serious conversation by people who want to become better teachers. So, today, I have a question for you.    I would bet it is a question that you have never been asked before no matter how long you have taught.    And, I would argue that it is a question we should be asking all the time.    In fact, I think we should have a national con...

In my previous blog entry, I responded to a student from Florida who wrote in about the potentially devastating results of a bad first test.    As often happens with me, I have spent a lot of time since then thinking about how I could better prevent my own students from being trapped by the results of that first test.    I do not want my students to come to accept that they are just C or D students and have no possible way to improve.    I too often hear �well, I made a low C on that first test; I guess I�m destined to do poorly in this class.�    That�s nonsense.    I want them to fight back.    One test grade is just one test grade.    But, we are all human and much of our self-image is based on what happens to us right now.   A lot of success in life comes from having confidence and a bad first test grade can kill anyone�s confidence.    How do you avoid ruining a student�s confidence as a result...

I think college education would improve rather quickly if students would start asking more questions about the process. For most of them, it is their one and only shot at a college education. What they learn and then know for the rest of their lives is dependent on how well that process works. It is not something that they should take lightly. The efficiency of the process might be important to the teacher but it is essential to the lives of the students. Personally, I believe transparency is a good idea. Plus, what a teacher does should be able to withstand a little scrutiny from the students that are involved. If I cannot explain why I am doing something, I probably need to rethink it. However, we tend to train our young people to be very obedient � to do what their elders tell them to do without asking any questions. I have often speculated that I could walk into a college class and start giving nonsense assignments about Martians and the North Pole and most students...

  If you have followed my blog postings over the years, you know that I have several obsessions about teaching.    (1) � I believe in having a lot of communications with my students.   Whether it is love, marriage, or a college class, things go better with communication.    To the teacher, everything makes sense.    Too often, to the students, everything is a mystery.    I want to cut out as much of that mystery as possible.   I think students respond well when they understand what is expected of them. (2) � I believe in honest and frank communication.    College students are adults.   I never see any reason to feed them a bunch of nonsense.    If you aren�t going to tell them the truth, you would be better off not to have the communication.    I think you should stress the good as well as the bad.   No one wants to get praise all the time and no one wants to hear how bad they are all t...

Happy holidays to all the teachers out there.    This blog just went over 67,800 page views.    I have been thrilled throughout the year to have the chance to interact with so many wonderful educators.    ** When I give teaching presentations around the country, I am often asked how my teaching has changed during the past 42 years.    Because I stress working for 5 percent improvement each year, that particular question is certainly a legitimate one.    Invariably someone will jump up and ask:    Okay, how are you managing to improve over time? I actually have a couple of different answers for that question.    But, there is one response that I always give:    During the past decade, I have come to spend a lot more time writing my test questions.    I used to throw tests together hurridly with one goal:    to be fair.    Now, though, I view testing as a much more important ...