Joan Middendorf

Joan Middendorf
Indiana University Bloomington | IUB · Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning

About

40
Publications
10,607
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805
Citations
Introduction

Publications

Publications (40)
Article
Full-text available
Although Decoding the Disciplines and Threshold Concepts appear to be similar theories, they actually operate differently and complementarily. Threshold concepts (and bottlenecks) analyse the nature of the content difficulty, while decoding provides a pedagogical model for getting students through the difficulty, including measuring student profici...
Presentation
Recent reports call for educational developers to focus on discipline-based strategies. The Decoding the Disciplines framework, starting from the bottlenecks, empowers consultants to help experts interrogate their own critical thinking processes and develop strategies for modeling disciplinary expertise in the classroom. This unconference session w...
Book
Through “decoding”, implicit expert knowledge can be turned into explicit mental tasks, and made available to students. This book presents a seven-step process for uncovering bottlenecks and determining the most effective strategies to enable students to surmount them.
Article
Full-text available
When the process of curriculum mapping begins with the faculty's articulations of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes students should master upon graduation, a curriculum map results that enables faculty to review the curriculum for effectiveness, see the workings of the whole curriculum at a glance, plan assessments, and recognize where adjustmen...
Article
Full-text available
Comprehension of geologic time does not come easily, especially for students who are studying the earth sciences for the first time. This project investigated the potential success of two teaching interventions that were designed to help non-science majors enrolled in an introductory geology class gain a richer conceptual understanding of the geolo...
Article
The understandings and preconceptions students bring into the history classroom can interfere with student learning. Analyses of student and professor interviews in light of emotional bottlenecks revealed two different, though related, student preconceptions: procedural preconceptions about history as a field of study and pre-existing worldviews th...
Conference Paper
After thirty years or more of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) many students still struggle to learn at the university level, while ever more techniques are being developed to help students learn and measure their success. In practice, however, efforts to reshape classes begin with questions such as: "How can I make use of this new t...
Article
Full-text available
Relates the results of a 2006 study sponsored by Indiana University's History Learning Project, which examines why some students in undergraduate history courses understand the material and are able to do well, while others do not. The initial aim was to discern how professors could teach history better, but in the process, the authors discovered t...
Article
Full-text available
When student end-of-course ratings are not commensurate with instructor skill and effort, one possible reason may be that students question the instructor's authority. It is proposed here that such doubts about authority are reinforced by specific instructor behaviors. This pilot study attempts to identify these behaviors in the interest of reducin...
Article
The purpose of this research is to determine if role playing is a pedagogical strategy that can assist sport management educators in achieving educational objectives. This article provides a brief literature review to establish the rationale for implementing role playing in classroom, describes a role play activity created for a course in intercoll...
Article
Students' difficulty in mastering material can motivate faculty toward the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) if instructors' frustration can be framed as a researchable question, and they have practical models for assessing learning outcomes. The “decoding the disciplines” approach supports this shift from reflective teaching to SoTL. By...
Article
This chapter explains how to plan a faculty learning community that engages a disciplinary inquiry of teaching and learning. It concludes with a five-level assessment of the Indiana University Faculty Learning Community.
Article
A teaching experiment, setting extremely high goals, was conducted in two courses enrolling only high school graduates in the summer before they entered college. One was a six-week Introduction to Geology in the field (Indiana University Judson Mead Field Station, Montana) and the other was a three-week seminar on Life in Mars in a computer cluster...
Article
Full-text available
Using the Decoding the Disciplines model, faculty who are deeply ingrained in their disciplinary research answer a series of questions to understand how students think and learn in their field. The cross-disciplinary nature of the process clarifies the thinking for each discipline.
Article
This chapter presents a vision in which the kinds of thinking and learning that are commonly required of students become a regular part of the teaching and scholarship within every discipline.
Article
Evidence has been accumulating for over a decade that approaches such as collaborative and active learning, have potential for creating real increases in student learning. Yet on many campuses these ideas are having little impact on what is actually happening in classes and in the formation of institutional practices. What are the cultural obstacle...
Article
For faculty development professionals to succeed with projects, we need the help of key administrators. More than anyone else, they can link our efforts to campus priorities, help us understand the decision-making system, and facilitate our efforts. This essay describes six steps for gaining and maintaining administrative support for projects. The...
Article
To succeed in getting faculty to accept new teaching approaches, academic support professionals can benefit from the literature on planned change. By understanding the different rates at which faculty accept change, we can also identify the faculty most likely to lead their colleagues to accepting new approaches. Opinion leaders can offer insight i...
Article
Academic support professionals have a lot to share with faculty, but it is our special challenge that faculty do not always welcome our help. We can achieve greater success and suffer less frustration by understanding some principles about the process of change. This article offers four principles of implementing change and illustrates their applic...
Article
Full-text available
In his 1993 book, What Matters in College, Alexander Astin reviewed the literature on college teaching, finding two things that made the biggest difference in getting students involved in the under–graduate experience: greater faculty–student interaction and greater student–student interaction. Though learning student names may seem a trivial matte...

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