Lectures, discussions, essays, quizzes, midterm, final. These are the tools of the trade for most college professors. Used in various combinations, college students navigate their way through most college history courses. However, the question arises: do the students learn this way? Plenty of current research makes clear that each human learns best in different ways. Some learn best through lecture, others through visual means and so forth. Many of our colleagues today recognize this diversity and, to a lesser or greater extent, craft their coursework to accommodate student needs.

Having participated in the University of Nebraska, Lincoln’s Peer Review of Teaching Program, I have grappled with the problems of whether I am teaching what I assess for, or assessing what I actually teach, and whether my students are learning anything at all! I have had some success in refining my courses to better serve my students based on the way they learn, but another question arises: How does the way I learn and think impact the way I create my course AND assess my students?

I found an online pedagogy workshop at Brown University’s Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning very useful and enlightening. The short “quiz” that starts the Teaching to Variation in Learning Workshop assesses your own cognitive preferences and offers insights based on your answers to a short set of questions/activities. These insights highlight ways in which your own learning style and preferences might impact how you design your courses, assess student work, and evaluate success.

Essentially, the tools this workshop provides serve to illustrate something we all probably know at some level: how we approach learning ourselves often determines how we gauge our students’ success. If a student shares our cognitive characteristics, then they will usually thrive. Those who do not, might not—unless we build into our courses the means for ameliorating the situation.

Frankly, the little quiz nailed my learning style and preferences on the head and made me realize that though I have come a long way from the first courses I taught, I have some work to do. First off, I think I will use this cognitive assessment on my own students. I teach face to face courses, but also online and I would like to have some real data to tell me each semester how students learn. Once I have a few courses worth of information, I will consider how what I currently do in my courses matches up with how my students learn. It may be that I must in some ways step out of my own comfort zone as an instructor to better serve my students. I will let you know how that goes!