Plenary Presentations

Helping Students Learn in Harmony with their Brain

Dr. Terry Doyle — Keynote Presentation

Almost daily, neuroscience, biology, and cognitive science researchers reveal new insights about how the human brain works and learns. The value of this research is its potential to elevate the learning success of all students regardless of their learning challenges. Applying this science research about human learning to our teaching practices improves the opportunities for all learners to be successful. This presentation will discuss many of these new research findings and suggest ways to apply them in a higher education setting. Topics will include findings on movement and exercise, stress, sleep, memory enhancers, attention enhancers, and the role of neurogenisis and neuroplasticity in enhancing learning.

About Terry Doyle

Dr. Terry Doyle is an author, educational consultant, and professor of reading at Ferris State University, where he has worked for the past 34 years. From 1998 to 2009, he served as the senior instructor for faculty development and coordinator of the new to Ferris Faculty Transition Program in the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at Ferris State. Terry has presented over 60 workshops on teaching and learning topics at national and international conferences since 2000. During the past five years he has worked with faculty in Taiwan, South Korea, and on 50 different colleges and universities across the United States sharing methods for developing a learner-centered teaching practice. His newest book, Learner-Centered Teaching: Putting the Research on Learning Into Practice, was released in October 2011. He is also the author of the book Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Centered Environment: A Guide to Teaching in Higher Education, published in 2008, and co-author of the book New Faculty Transition: An Ideal Program, published in 2004.

Lecture as Laboratory: Applying Scientific Inquiry to Teaching Practices

Ben Motz — Closing Plenary

In recent years, much conventional wisdom about teaching and learning has been overturned, as empirical advances have refuted the efficacy of learning styles, challenged the benefits of detailed examples on learning basic concepts, transformed what it means to pay attention to coursework, clarified the dynamics of collaborative group work, and more. This presentation will explore some of these findings, championing a more evidence-based platform for effective college teaching… but in the words of LeVar Burton, "Don't take my word for it." As demonstrated by these recent advances, college teaching does not benefit as much from sweeping claims of best practices, as by empirical inquiry of pedagogical assumptions. The learning sciences are ripe with opportunity for major advances as more educators view their lecture halls as laboratories; simple experimental techniques and promising future directions will also be explored.

About Ben Motz

Ben Motz is a senior lecturer and the director of pedagogy for Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, where he is responsible for instructional training and development for faculty and associate instructors. With a basic science background in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, his scholarly work has explored the cognitive processes involved in abstract concept learning and the neural systems involved in human attention and cross-modal integration. More recently, he has focused on bridging psychological theory and experimental rigor with pedagogical practices. Toward this goal, he has studied the effects of detailed and idealized examples during concept learning, crafted more effective learning activities for topics in animal behavior, neuroanatomy, and statistics, and better-targeted university-wide associate instructor training curriculum to the needs of new instructors. He teaches introduction to psychology, experimental methods, cognitive psychology, an interdisciplinary course on statistics and fantasy football, and a graduate seminar on the Teaching of Psychology.

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