Extra Credit Post #3

One study performed by Behar Horenstein and his colleagues, "Mentoring Undergraduate Researchers: An Exploratory Study Of Students' And Professors' Perceptions” provides interesting insight about the influences professors may have on individual students.  Horenstein and his colleagues explored “students' perceptions of the mentoring process and students' beliefs about how it impacted their experiences as undergraduate researchers and their development as scientists” (Horenstein, 2010).  Looking into the impressions left by those professors who taught through the “flipping” process is an interesting direction to take.  Were students influenced by “flipping” professors more successful in the long run?  Or was a traditional teaching method more appropriate for the growth of the individual?  Dan Berrett would have to argue that traditional teaching methods do indeed limit the growth of the student.  In Berrett’s article "Teaching:  Harvard Seeks to Jolt University” he explains how “Lectures set up a dynamic in which students passively receive information that they quickly forget after the test. The traditional lecture also fails at other educational goals: prodding students to make meaning from what they learn, to ask questions, extract knowledge, and apply it in a new context” (Berrett, 2012).  If these institutions have not learned to provide the tools needed to successfully apply information, the progress of their students will remain constant.  Students will have to begin to learn how to apply information in the real world where these skills should already have been learned.  Developing these analytic skills should be a priority of university professors. Terry Barrett and Sarah Moore provide professors with a set of blue prints for incorporating these skills in the classroom in their book “Approaches to Problem-based Learning: Revitalising Your Practice in Higher Education”.  Their book expands on the concept of a student oriented classroom.  Once professors gain insight into the cognition of students and the effective ways hands on engagement can have within the classroom, undergraduate students may potentially carry and apply the learned information to novel situations becoming scholarly problem solvers.