K. Patricia Cross
David Pierpont Gardner Professor of Higher Education
University of California, Berkeley

In less than five years, the calendar will turn a page and open on a new year, a new decade, a new century, and a new millennium. So, it's a big deal! Although the year 2000 is just a number, to our numerically-obsessed culture, it offers a once-in-a-hundred-year's opportunity to reflect on the past and take a shot at predicting the future. In my privileged role of opening this conference on "Teaching and Learning in the Next Century," I'm going to talk a bit about what we have learned in this century, and what we might do in the next century to improve student learning. As I understand it, the general goal of the service academies is to develop "leaders of character," a goal that is without question worthy, ambitious -- and quite difficult to accomplish. But I notice that in the literature that is sent to prospective students and faculty members, there is a commendable effort to define and articulate the attributes of "leaders of character." To what extent those laudable goals are accomplished is the question being raised by the demands for assessment and accountability in higher education as we close out this century.

I hope that somewhere you in the service academies are collecting information about the impact of your education on the young people in your charge because the considerable body of research that now exists on the impact of colleges on students suggests that your institutions are likely to have more impact -- for better or for worse -- on your students than almost any other kind of institution of higher education in the nation. Therefore, be very careful about what you aim for because you have a better than average chance of accomplishing it. Why? Because, quite simply, your institutions have an uncommon concentration of the characteristics that have been shown in the research of the past 30 years to have an impact on students.

The most comprehensive and authoritative compendium of the research on the outcomes of a college education is found in a giant 900 page tome entitled How College Affects Students (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991). In it, the authors synthesize the findings reported in literally thousands (approximately 2600) of studies done on and across campuses since the 1960s. The upshot of this, and similar efforts of synthesis over the past several decades, is that we think we know some useful things about what happens to students on the way to a college degree. We still have to make some educated guesses as to why it happens, but perhaps research will gain more insight into causal factors in the next century. At this point, however, the sheer volume of information available has encouraged some pragmatically-inclined folks to try to condense and simplify the findings into something that teachers and administrators can and will read and use. Thus within the last few years, we have had a rash of lists of things to do to enhance the effectiveness of higher education.

For starters, there are the "three conditions of excellence," identified by a group of educational researchers in 1984 (Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education, 1984). Then there is the widely distributed and much talked about "seven principles of good practice in undergraduate education," set forth by a group of educational researchers in 1987 (Chickering & Gamson, 1987). A study group in England has come up with "nine strategies" for enhancing student learning. (AAHE Bulletin, 1993). There are the "twelve attributes of good practice," organized by researchers from the Education Commission of the States this year (1996), and "a teacher's dozen research-based principles for improving teaching offered by my colleague Tom Angelo (1993).

I confess that I am about to deliver yet another list --one that will not continue the upward count of things to do to improve education, but that will pull from the existing lists those items that I think are most relevant to the unique educational mission of the service academies. Since you know the educational characteristics of your academies far better than I, it may be presumptuous of me to attempt this feat, but breathe easy; my list has only six items. The first three are what might be called environmental factors that create the cumulative overall impact on the personal and intellectual development of students. These factors are most likely to affect attributes such as leadership and character. They are : 1) the coherence and reinforcement of a consistent educational message, 2) the socialization of the student into the values of the institution, and 3) the integration of education and experience. The second set of three items are instructional or classroom factors that promote the development of academic and intellectual skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, and effectiveness in communication. The three items in that list are: 1) the communication of high expectations, 2) the encouragement of active student learning, and 3) the provision of assessment and prompt feedback.

Environmental Factors: The educational environment of the service academies is probably one of the most potentially potent that exists on any campus in the United States. Students are immersed in a consistent and reinforcing environment from the day they arrive to the day they graduate. Thus, I have listed coherence and reinforcement of the educational message as first on my list of research-documented characteristics known to have an impact on students. This characteristic represents, I think, one of your most distinctive departures from the average college campus. First and perhaps most powerfully, you are residential institutions. Your students live on campus and are subject 24 hours a day to the influence of the people and environment of your academies. That, says the research, makes for a peculiar potency that affects values, attitudes, self-concept, intellectual orientation, and a host of other personal variables that contribute to what you might call leadership and character (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991, p. 611). With the possible exception of small residential colleges, most institutions have less opportunity for this sort of overall impact because they have less -- much less -- contact with their students. Nationwide, most of today's college students commute to campus; 44 percent are part-time; many have jobs, financial worries, and other concerns that detract from the impact of college on them. Given your educational goal of developing "leaders of character," what happens in your residence units (barracks?) is important. But I suspect that it is not as important as it is pictured in the research because most colleges have so little unified impact in the curriculum and elsewhere that dormitory life is likely to show up as especially important relative to other rather weak influences. On your campuses, residential living is but one of many possible reinforcers of your educational message.

Multiplying the impact of residential living is the potency of the tradition and culture that pervades service academies, plus what I perceive as a serious effort to structure the curriculum. Not only is the core curriculum one of the most concentrated and coherent that I know of, but the structure appears --to the reader of catalogues, at least -- to reinforce the central mission of developing the continuing lifelong intellectual skills and attitudes that are widely sought in today's society. A curriculum structured so that individual courses constantly reinforce one another in delivering a coherent message is, of course, likely to have far more impact than the scattered and unrelated messages delivered by so much of the higher education curriculum today. Closely related to course integration across the curriculum is the research finding that coherence and integration of the freshman year into the four-year experience is especially important -- both in establishing expectations and in helping to bridge the transition from high school to college. (Education Commission of the States, 1996, p. 6) Your required common experience in the freshman year is an orientation to the college experience far exceeding the half-day to full week of orientation offered by most colleges and universities.

The second environmental factor that has been found in the research to have an impact on students is socialization and collaboration. The "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" (Chickering & Gamson,1987), which is probably the best-known and most frequently quoted condensation of the research starts with these two principles: 1. Good practice encourages student-faculty contact, and 2. Good practice encourages cooperation among students. A lot is being made these days of the importance of informal out- of-class contact with faculty. Faculty represent to students the values and standards of the institution. Your overarching educational goal of developing leaders of character is enhanced when these qualities are displayed and conveyed in faculty/student interactions in and out of the classroom. The most comprehensive review of the research on this topic concludes that "A large part of the impact of college is determined by the extent and content of [students'] interactions with major agents of socialization on campus, namely faculty members and student peers." (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991, p. 620)

Colleges and teachers everywhere seem to be getting the message. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported a couple of weeks ago (Sept. 13, 1996) that of a dozen common teaching methods, the greatest gains in use by faculty since 1989 have occurred in the use of cooperative learning and group projects; the largest decrease was in extensive lecturing, down from 56 percent in 1989 to 49 percent in 1995, but still one of the most common forms of teaching among the 34,000 college teachers surveyed.

The third factor identified in the research as having an impact on students is the extent to which education and experience are integrated. Classroom learning is augmented and reinforced when there are multiple opportunities to see applications and to practice skills. (Education Commission of the States, 1996, p. 7) The academies probably do a better than average job of reinforcing undergraduate academic learning with illustrations of applications and opportunities to apply them. In that regard you offer a professional education much like law, medicine, and education, which emphasize the application of knowledge. Most undergraduate education is notably short on application, with the exception of those few programs that offer internships or cooperative education.

These three broad findings from the research on college impact summarize very briefly what is known about the potency of the total college experience on students. In a nutshell, we can conclude, along with the authors of How College Affects Students that, " A majority of important changes that occur during college are probably the cumulative result of a set of interrelated experiences sustained over an extended period of time." (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991, p. 610)

There is nothing very surprising about that conclusion. What may be surprising is that we had to go to so much effort to confirm what seems rather apparent, namely that the more deeply students are involved and engaged in the values and attitudes of a strong and visible college culture, the more effect it will have on them.

The environment of the service academies almost certainly demands more participation and involvement in the life of the campus than the average college these days. But I want to make a subtle distinction between participating and being actively engaged in a learning experience. To some extent, we can coerce participation by requiring that students attend class, live in the dorms, participate in certain campus events, and the like. We cannot, however, coerce the engagement of a person's mind, and modern learning theory holds that people construct their own learning by actively engaging their minds in the experience. Compliance with regulations and expectations without active engagement may be quite futile as a learning experience; indeed it may lead to withdrawal rather than learning. So while the academies offer unusual opportunities for learning, there is no guarantee that students will use these opportunities to become actively engaged. In order for learning to occur, students must be actively constructing the experience in their own minds. Too much organization and structure done for the student may actually inhibit the work required for learning.

I want now to turn to what the research says about classroom learning -- the kind of intentional learning that colleges are held accountable for. Three factors that appear consistently in the research on promoting effective learning are: 1) communicating high expectations, 2) encouraging active learning, and 3) providing assessment and prompt feedback. (Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education, 1984). The value of communicating high expectations goes considerably beyond the common-sense wisdom that you get about what you expect from students i.e. that expecting great things will lead to great performance. The optimum conditions for learning are in place when the task is realistic but attainable with effort. If the expectations are set too high, students concentrate more on avoiding failure than on accomplishing the task. If they are set too low, students are not challenged and fail to grow. So, much of the skill of communicating high expectations lies in accurate diagnosis of what students can learn with a reasonable amount of effort.

Encouraging active learning is the second classroom practice shown to have a positive impact on students. We hear a lot today about the necessity for active learning because active learning lies at the very heart of modern learning theory. It is certainly not a new idea. Charles Gragg, the inspired teacher at the Harvard Business School 50 years ago, put it eloquently when he wrote these words, "No one can learn in any basic sense from another except by subjecting what that other has to offer to a process of creative thinking; that is unless the learner is actively and imaginatively receptive, he will emerge from the experience with nothing more than a catalog of facts and other people's notions" (Gragg, 1940). Because knowledge is changing so rapidly today, learning a "catalog of facts" is quickly outdated. The half-life in medicine, that is the time it takes for half of the knowledge to become obsolete, is reputed to be about five years. This means that by the time a student graduates from medical school, half of the knowledge of his or her profession has been replaced by new knowledge. What students know when they graduate from your academies is not nearly as important as what they are capable of learning. That is why there is so much emphasis today on critical thinking, problem solving, analysis, and other learning skills that enable people to keep on learning throughout their lives.

Yet lecturing remains the teaching method of choice throughout higher education. Let me tell you about the discouraging results of some research done to determine what students learned from a lecture even under the most favorable of conditions. In this study, students were told that they would be tested immediately following the lecture; they were permitted to use their notes; they were even given a prepared summary of the lecture! Even with all this going for it, when the researchers examined students and their notebooks, they found that "students carry away in their heads and in their notebooks not more than 42 percent of the lecture content." (McLeish, 1968, p. 9) The test for immediate understanding was bad enough, but when students were examined one week later without the use of their notes, they could recall only 17 percent of the lecture material. Surely, there are more efficient ways to teach and to learn. This does not mean, I hasten to add, that all lecturing is bad. There are lectures that encourage people to think, to see relationships that they had not seen before, to test their knowledge against that being presented -- in short, to become actively engaged in thinking. The criticism of lectures is primarily directed against those where the lecturer is more actively engaged than the students are.

Most of us know how deeply we become involved in thinking when we are preparing a lecture. If the students were only half as involved, we would be grateful indeed. I think that the most fundamental contribution of the intensive research on learning over the past 30 years is the simple fact that students must be mentally engaged in order to learn. New information must be worked on to fit into the cognitive structure of a student even as the cognitive structure grows and changes to accommodate new knowledge.

And finally, I want to mention the need for providing assessment and prompt feedback. One of the basic principles of learning is that learners need feedback. Consider, for example, the role of feedback in learning a skill such as archery. Imagine, if you will, a group of people who are trying to learn archery in a darkened room where both the target and feedback on hitting it are invisible. The archers may be provided with the best and most sophisticated equipment that money can buy; they may have one-on-one coaching from an expert teacher; and they may have access to good library materials on the dynamics of flight and the arc of the trajectory. Despite all this quality education on the input side, it's pretty clear that they are not going to improve their performance until they get some feedback on whether they are hitting the target.

I have presented these six principles of learning as the principles that I think are probably most salient at the service academies. The latter three concerned with classroom learning are, of course, common to all classrooms in all kinds of institutions. And it is those that I wish to explore further today. In particular, I want to talk about what you can do as teachers to improve your teaching and your students' learning. Working on the principle that assessment and feedback are essential for learning and improvement, my colleague, Tom Angelo, and I have been working with college teachers from all kinds of colleges and from across the disciplines to develop some Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs). The purpose of CA is to inform teachers how effectively they are teaching and students how effectively they are learning (Angelo & Cross, 1993). Through Classroom Assessment, teachers get continuous feedback on how well students are learning what teachers hope they are teaching. And students are required, through a variety of classroom assessment exercises, to monitor their learning, to reflect on it, and to take corrective action while there is still time left in the semester.

Let me give an example of Classroom Assessment's most famous CAT. It is called the Minute Paper, and it works like this: Shortly before the end of a class period, the instructor asks students to write brief answers to these two questions: (1) What is the most important thing that you learned in class today? and (2) What is the main, unanswered question you leave class with today?

Like most CATs, the Minute Paper is a teaching tool as well as an assessment device. It requires students to be active learners -- to think about what they have learned, to synthesize and articulate an important piece of learning, to express themselves in writing, and to think actively about what they did not understand. In short, it engages students in the evaluation of their own learning. If students are told that the Minute Paper is going to be requested at the end of a given class session, they may ask themselves along the way what they are learning, and they tend to be more involved and more active in sorting out the major message. So, even if the instructor failed to learn something important about students' responses to the teaching of that class session, the Minute Paper would still be worthwhile for students, requiring them to reflect on their learning experience.

But teachers do learn a great deal from the feedback of the Minute Paper. Dick Light, the director of the Harvard Assessment Seminars, reported last month at the AAHE national assessment conference in Washington, D.C. that the Minute Paper is now used in more than 400 classes at Harvard. Indeed, the distinguished professor of statistics at Harvard, Fred Mosteller, made his own contribution to the legends of CATs by inventing a version of the Minute Paper that he calls the Muddiest Point -- an invitation to send a message to the instructor about the muddy points in statistics that many struggling students of statistics would find hard to resist (Mosteller, 1989). The Minute Paper is used, I think, first because it simple and easy to administer, but more fundamentally because it provides immediate feedback to both teachers and students about the learning that is taking place-- or not taking place -- in any given classroom while it is still fresh in everyone's mind and there is still time to do something about it.

The Minute Paper is one of 50 Classroom Assessment Techniques described in the Handbook for College Teachers that Tom Angelo and I put together in 1993 (Angelo & Cross, 1993). The book describes each of the 50 CATs in some detail, giving examples, step-by-step procedures, pros, cons, and caveats, and ideas for analyzing and using the data collected. While we tried hard to make the CATs simple and useful across the wide span of academic disciplines, we still think that the best CATs are invented or adapted by individual teachers to tell them what they want to know about their own teaching and their students' learning.

One very effective CAT that is described in the Handbook was invented by a writing teacher who modified the Minute Paper to get some idea of what students were learning from the small-group work sessions that she used to engage students in critiquing one another's papers. She asked students to answer these two questions when they had finished their group-work session: 1) What specific suggestions did members of your group offer to you that are likely to help you improve your draft essay? and 2) What suggestions did you offer to others that are likely to help them improve their draft essays?

The good news is that she found that most students mentioned things they had learned from others that they thought would improve their papers. The bad news is that only 3 out of 24 students could think of something they had offered that might have been helpful to the other students in their group! What became clear to this teacher was that, for all our talk about the advantages of collaborative learning, students don't automatically know how to reap the benefits of cooperative learning.

At this point, the teacher had several different options about the level of her involvement in teaching students how to make the small group sessions more productive. She might let the CAT do the pedagogical work of reminding students that they are expected to contribute as well as to benefit from the work of the group sessions. For students, just having to write out the benefits of the group sessions is a gentle reminder of the two-sided obligation of collaborative learning. At a somewhat higher level of involvement, the teacher might spend a little time in class discussion, eliciting suggestions from students about how the group work might be made more productive. Or she might decide to get more heavily involved yet by devising some learning exercises that teach students to critique other's papers helpfully.

In any case, this illustrates an important use of CATs beyond assessment and feedback. CATs can be used to involve students in monitoring their own learning. One of the major conclusions from the research on cognition over the past 30 years is that students who monitor their learning are more effective learners than those who do not. Good learners are aware of themselves as learners; they are able to watch themselves in the process of learning, and therefore able to direct and control their use of learning strategies.

Classroom teachers can help students become self-regulated learners through a variety of rather simple Classroom Assessment Techniques. For example, a CAT labeled "Punctuated Lectures" calls for stopping the class occasionally to ask students to reflect on what they were doing during the lecture and how their behavior, while listening, helped or hindered their understanding. They are then asked to write down any insights about their own learning that they have gained and give feedback to the teacher in brief anonymous notes. This form of pedagogical assessment not only teaches students to become more aware of how they are using their learning time; it also informs the teacher about distractions in the environment. A similar assessment technique called "Productive Study-Time Logs" assesses the effective use of study time. It asks students to keep brief records of how much time they spend studying for a particular class, when they study, and how productively they study. All of these CATs direct students' attention to self assessment of how they are using their time to accomplish their objectives -- surely an important skill for prospective leaders.

If the improvement of learning is a national priority for higher education in the next century -- and I think it is -- teachers and students need to be primary players in assessment, and they need to be able to use the results of the assessment to improve their own performance. Now, what is it that they need to know?

Returning to the archery analogy, they need to know what and where the target is, and they need prompt feedback on whether they are hitting it or not. Classroom Assessment can be targeted to provide feedback on whether students are accomplishing the goals that the teacher has in mind, but Classroom Assessment can also provide feedback on where student arrows are going astray. Are student arrows hitting the barn to the left of the target, the ground in front, or perhaps students are scattering arrows all over the place. If feedback from the Minute Paper tells a teacher that students have no idea what the major message of the class session was or if student perceptions are distressingly different from teaching intentions, then a teacher wants to know why. For that we need Classroom Research.

When we first started our work, we used the terms Classroom Assessment and Classroom Research almost interchangeably, but we are now beginning to stress important distinctions between Classroom Assessment and Classroom Research. Classroom Assessment usually addresses the status quo or "what" questions of teaching and learning. What is going on in this class today? What did students learn from the day's lesson? What did they fail to understand or what did they have further questions about? Classroom Research, in contrast, attempts to answer questions having to do with understandings -- the "why" and "how" questions about learning. Why did students respond as they did? Why did they hit the barn instead of the target? Why do they seem to have such foggy notions of where the target is? Broadly speaking, Classroom Research attempts to provide some insight into how students learn.

When I use the term "Classroom Research," I am using "research" in the simple dictionary definition of the term to mean, "careful, systematic, and patient study." Classroom Research is the careful, systematic, and patient study of students in the process of learning, and more specifically of how students are responding to our efforts to teach them. The task for Classroom Research is not so much to study learning in general, as to study learning in particular as it takes place -- or fails to -- for your students, in your classroom, and in your subject matter, with your particular teaching skills and preferences.

Educational researchers, for all their technical expertise in research methods, lack the subject matter knowledge that is so critical to teaching in the disciplinary or career specialties of higher education, and they must necessarily draw their conclusions from a sample of students who may or may not have much in common with your students. While educational researchers are beginning to formulate some broad pedagogical imperatives of good teaching -- students must be active rather than passive learners; students must receive frequent feedback about their learning progress, etc. -- educational researchers often lack what Lee Shulman (1987) of Stanford University, has called "pedagogical content knowledge." By pedagogical content knowledge, he means the joining together of what is taught with how it is taught. The job of the teacher is to transform his or her own knowledge of the subject matter into the content of instruction -- that is, to take what he or she knows and make it understandable to others.

An effective way to do that is for teachers to study the effect of their own teaching on the students in their own classrooms. Classroom Research encourages teachers to use their classrooms as laboratories for the study of learning. It differs in many ways from traditional research in or on classrooms. In the first place, it is not an add-on activity. It is embedded in the regular ongoing work of the class. College teachers doing research on learning have everything they need to do first-rate research. Most important, they have easy access to a population of students that is already engaged in just what the researcher wishes to study -- learning a discipline under the realistic conditions of the classroom.

At its best, Classroom Research involves students as collaborators rather than subjects in the research. Knowledge about human learning, especially their own, is of high value and high interest to students. They are eager collaborators and the payoff for them is great in that they gain insight into their own learning while also developing the academic skills of inquiry and analysis. Most importantly, Classroom Research differs from traditional educational research by completing the cycle from formulating the question to making changes in the practice of teaching. The typical pattern in traditional educational research has been for the investigator to do a research project, write up the findings, and publish them along with recommendations for someone else to carry out. This has been a notoriously ineffective design for the improvement of teaching and learning. Teachers are far too busy to read reports of research that seem to result in equivocal findings that may or may not apply to their students or their classrooms. One of the primary advantages of Classroom Research is that it is, by definition, relevant. It calls for the invention of a research question that the teacher finds interesting and important. And it is conducted in the relevant classroom, with the relevant students, in the relevant discipline.

Let me give an example of a Classroom Research project cycle. This example might start with an assessment using a CAT known as the Diagnostic Learning Log. It asks students, usually as part of a homework assignment, to analyze their own learning process by answering a few questions such as these about the homework assignment:

1. Briefly describe the assignment you just completed. What do you think was the purpose of this assignment?
2. Give an example of one or two of your most successful responses. Explain what you did that made them successful.
3. Provide an example of where you made an error or where your responses were less complete. Why were these items incorrect or less successful?
4. What can you do differently when preparing next week's assignment? (Cross & Steadman,1996, p. 69)

The teacher might then prepare a tabulation of the responses, and together teacher and students would analyze the data. How well was the purpose of the assignment understood? Where did misunderstandings occur? What did students consider successful responses and why? Are there some common themes in the successful responses? Where were errors made? Are they common errors? To the extent that the assignment is typical or recurring, students will be interested in knowing how others are responding, and the project itself is both a learning experience and a descriptive study of the processes that are being used by students in the class.

Note that this design starts out fitting the definition of a traditional descriptive study; it tells how students responded to a brief questionnaire about a given assignment. But instead of stopping with the tabulation of the data -- for example, 42 percent of the students misunderstood question 3--Classroom Research gives both teacher and students an opportunity to analyze the learning process. Interested and creative teachers will almost certainly find any number of questions and hypotheses for further investigation.

Consider, for example, the rich research possibilities involved in relatively simple data such as student responses to the question, "What do you think the purpose of the assignment is?" It is my guess that an insightful analysis of students answers' to that question would reveal considerable disparity. Some students would no doubt think the purpose of the assignment was to find the answer or to reproduce the information given in the assignment. Other students might think it was to understand a relationship or to critique an argument. Such observations tie into some interesting research being done in the UK, primarily England and Australia, right now on deep versus surface learning. Surface learning refers to learners' attempts to reproduce information provided by others (often with the least possible effort), whereas a deep approach to learning refers to learners' attempts to understand and apply new information. We would call this critical thinking. I confess that I have been lurking on the internet this summer, as teachers from a wide variety of colleges across an array of disciplines trade insights, observations, and references about deep versus surface learning. (isl@mailbase.ac.uk) The conversations are lively, and the questions these classroom teachers raise and the observations they make about their own teaching experiences furnish ample grist for any number of interesting research projects. Sharing information and insights via publications or the internet is itself a short-term reward, but in carrying out a relatively simple Classroom Research exercise, both teacher and students are engaging in the type of learning analysis that has long term benefits. Research shows clearly that people who are aware of themselves as learners, that is who can watch themselves in the process of learning and analyze their responses, are better learners than those who are less aware of how they learn.

Another source of useful information that is free to Classroom researchers -- and rarely available to professional researchers -- comes to office hours in the form of students with questions. Our usual response as teachers, is to find out what they need explained and set about explaining it--often in the same way that did not work in the assignment or lecture. But that is the response of the teacher. The response of the researcher is different. The researcher is more likely to listen than to talk -- to probe for insights about learning, to try to understand where the "disconnect" is between the presentation and the student's understanding. Sometimes, given half a chance to analyze their own learning, a student will be remarkably insightful and articulate about a learning problem. More often, the researcher may need to launch some probing hypotheses, leading both Fortunately in Classroom Research, an "N of one" may be more valuable than the N of hundreds needed to assure statistical significance in more traditional correlational research. An interview with a single student, or a focus group with a small number of students, or a discussion in a small class or seminar is more likely to result in an understanding of the process of learning than is a statistical study that may only tell us that certain things seem to be related. Worse yet, many traditional research studies are based on what Benjamin Bloom (1980) has called "unalterable variables" -- variables such as age, ethnic background, and gender, that educators can do nothing to change. Granted, we may need to adapt to non-traditional unalterable characteristics, but they are not very helpful in understanding learning as a process. Classroom Researchers are more interested in alterable variables, such as study strategies, teaching techniques, motivation, and other educational variables that can be changed by understanding and a willingness to learn all we can about student learning.

To sum up, I have tried to do three things in these remarks opening your conference on teaching and learning.

1. To point out the exceptional opportunity you have in the service academies to make an educational difference. Your residential campuses with students immersed full time in the traditions and coherence of your curricular and extra-curricular programs is, according to the research, a powerful recipe for learning. You are far more likely than most institutions to accomplish what you set out to do.
2. To hit the high points of recent research on teaching and learning as they are stated in the three broad principles of good practice in the classroom: 1) set high, but realistic, expectations, 2) promote and encourage active learning, and 3) provide prompt assessment and feedback.
3. To illustrate the use of some practical tools for evaluating and improving your own effectiveness as teachers through your active participation in Classroom Assessment and Classroom Research.

I note with great interest the exceptionally rich menu of sessions that await you this afternoon and tomorrow. Hearing from your own colleagues about their experiences and insights into your common endeavors is just what we mean by the effectiveness of collaborative learning.

References

AAHE Bulletin. (1993) "Deep Learning, Surface Learning." April, 45 (3), 10-13.

Angelo, T. A. (1993). A "Teacher's Dozen": Fourteen General, Research-Based Principles for Improving Higher Learning in Our Classrooms. AAHE Bulletin (April), 3-7; 13.

Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K. P. (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, Second Edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987). Seven Principles For Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. AAHE Bulletin (March).

Cross, K.P., & Steadman, M.H. (1996) Classroom Research: Implementing the Scholarship of Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Education Commission of the States (1996). What Research Says About Improving Undergraduate Education. AAHE Bulletin, 48 (April), 5-8.

Gragg, C. I. (1940). Teachers Also Must Learn. Harvard Educational Review, 10, 30-47.

McLeish, J. (1968). The Lecture Method. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Institute of Education.

Pascarella, E. T., & Terenzini, P. T. (1991). How College Affects Students. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Shulman, L.S. (1987) Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57 (February), 1-22.

Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education (1984). Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of American Higher Education. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Education.

Weimer, M. (1993). The Disciplinary Journals on Pedagogy. Change, 25 (Nov/Dec), 44-51.