TEACHxpert: Mark McDaniel

Mark McDaniel, the author of Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, will visit Northwestern as part of the TEACHxperts speaker series on October 24th.  As a Professor of Psychological & Brain and the principal investigator in the Memory and Complex Learning Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, McDaniel studies memory and education, the primary focus of his 2014 book.  Make It Stick illustrates that many students go about studying and memorizing the wrong way, not only wasting time but not really learning.  What McDaniel and his co-authors point out are various ways students can improve their retention of information and how instructors can help train students to study in more effective ways.  By creating opportunities for review, and modelling excellent learning methods, instructors can guide the students to adopt better techniques that they’ll use for their entire lives.

Our entire team read Make It Stick and has been encouraging instructors to adopt some of the strategies McDaniel recommends.  We are so excited to welcome him to Northwestern and present for the TEACHxperts series.  Mark promises audience members that they will leave his talk with at least four tangible techniques instructors can apply to improve student learning.  Make It Stick offers some great questions that any student should ask themselves when learning new material:

What are they key ideas? What terms or ideas are new to me? How would I define them? How do the ideas relate to what I already know?

Brown, Peter C. Make It Stick : the Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014, p. 201

Register for Mark McDaniel’s TEACHxpert talk today!

Details:

Tue, October 24, 2017
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM CDT
University Library, Ver Steeg Faculty Lounge, 3rd Floor
1970 Campus Dr.
Evanston, IL 60208

 

Book cover image via Harvard University Press