literature Archives - Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Preparing my course “Teaching for Sustainability” with the support of Noah (2025)’s brilliant book

August 5, 2025

In preparation for this fall’s online course on “Teaching for Sustainability“, I was looking into what kind of methods I want to model. And then — perfect timing — I…

Currently reading about cooperative & collaborative learning (Oakley et al., 2004; Møgelvang, 2023; Wieman et al., 2014)

November 14, 2023

iEarth’s current journal club paper deals with collaborative exams as learning opportunities, and this fits perfectly with Anja Møgelvang’s recent article on cooperative learning, where we can find inspiration for…

Derivatives and Concept Images — a guest post by Kirsty Dunnett

July 12, 2023

Another guest post by Kirsty Dunnett about the difficulty of applying skills from a maths course in the context of geoscience courses, and what can be done to make it…

Currently reading “Bicycle model on climate change education: Presenting and evaluating a model.” by Cantell et al., 2019

June 30, 2023

Came across this model, had to share! You know I love me a good visualization of a model, and I think this one is brilliant to help support thinking about…

Currently reading: “Beyond open book versus closed book: a taxonomy of restrictions in online examinations.” by Dawson, Nicola-Richmond, & Partridge (2023)

June 28, 2023

If we want to do a valid assessment of what a specific student can do, we need to know what information they had available when producing the artifact we are…

“Supporting students in higher education: proposal for a theoretical framework” Kirsty Dunnett summarizes De Ketele (2014)

April 18, 2023

Who are you travelling with? A guest post by Kirsty Dunnett. A summary and some thoughts on: Supporting students in higher education: proposal for a theoretical framework By J.-M. De Ketele…

Currently reading: Relationship-rich education (Felten & Lambert, 2020)

February 2, 2023

I read the book “Relationship-rich education. How human connections drive success in college” by Felten & Lambert (2020) almost a year ago and found it super inspiring, but also very…

Teaching sustainability: Reading about how to turn frustration into action

November 23, 2022

One reoccurring topic in all discussions around how to teach sustainability is how we can turn frustration into constructive action. I haven’t found a comprehensive answer, but I’ve been reading!

Currently reading: The impact of content co-creation on academic achievement (Doyle et al., 2021)

September 29, 2022

One part of co-creation — letting students create learning content for each other — has always been fascinating to me. The idea is that in order to create meaningful materials…

Currently reading Flett et al. (2022) on “anti-mattering”

September 21, 2022

As we are continuing working on our “sense of belonging” project at UiB (read more about my thoughts on students’ sense of belonging and what we can do about it here;…

Currently reading: “Hope dies, action begins?” The role of hope for proactive sustainability engagement among university students. (Vandaele & Stålhammar, 2022)

September 20, 2022

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked to many people that are in one way or other involved in teaching about sustainability at high school or university level. One…

Currently reading: “Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice” (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006)

September 2, 2022

Somehow a print of the “Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice” (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006) article ended up on my desk. I don’t…

Currently reading: JUTLP special issue on belonging in an anxious world (articles 1-7)

August 30, 2022

In response to my blog post about belonging, I was made aware of the current issue of the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice (JUTLP) on “Pedagogies of belonging in…

Students’ sense of belonging, and what we can do about it

August 28, 2022

Last week, Sarah Hammarlund (of “Context Matters: How an Ecological-Belonging Intervention Can Reduce Inequities in STEM” by Hammarlund et al., 2022) gave a presentation here at LTH as part of…

Currently reading: “Bringing an entrepreneurial focus to sustainability education: A teaching framework based on content analysis” (Hermann & Bossle, 2019)

August 19, 2022

A lot of the work I am doing at LTH is related in one way or other to teaching (how to teach) sustainability, so here are my notes on an…

Current reading: “Syllabus Language, Teaching Style, and Instructor Self-Perception: Toward Congruence” by Richmann, Kurinec & Millsap (2020)

July 16, 2022

Yes!! People are actually responding to my “send me an article that is currently inspiring you!” request! In a comment to my blog post “Summaries of two more inspiring articles…

The Curious Construct of Active Learning: A guest post by K. Dunnett (UiO) on Lombardi et al. (2021)

May 24, 2022

‘Active Learning’ is frequently used in relation to university teaching, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects where expository lecturing is still a common means of instruction, especially…

Using peer feedback to improve students’ writing (Currently reading Huisman et al., 2019)

May 7, 2022

I wrote about involving students in creating assessment criteria and quality definitions for their own learning on Thursday, and today I want to think a bit about involving students also in…

Three ways to think about “students as partners”

May 3, 2022

As we get started with our project #CoCreatingGFI, we are talking to more and more people about our ideas for what we want to achieve within the project (for a…

Using student evaluations of teaching to actually improve teaching (based on Roxå et al., 2021)

March 6, 2022

There are a lot of problems with student evaluations of teaching, especially when they are used as a tool without reflecting on what they can and cannot be used for.…

Just published: Co-Creating Learning in Oceanography

December 15, 2021

Kjersti and I just had an article published: “Co-Creating Learning in Oceanography” (Glessmer & Daae, 2021)! In this article, we discuss ways in which to share responsibility for learning between…

Students as partners as a threshold concept for students and teachers?

December 9, 2021

One of my goals as a teacher is to change culture towards responsibility for student learning being shared equally between teachers and students. This is an idea that is met…

Kaur & Noman (2020): A study applying self-determination theory on Students as Partners

December 9, 2021

I love using self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000) as a framework against which I check all teaching I develop. Is it even possible for students to feel competence, autonomy,…

A review of change theory in STEM higher ed (Reinholz et al., 2021)

November 14, 2021

More reading for my “leading educational change” course run by iEarth and BioCEED! Today on how change theory has been used in STEM higher education over the last 25 years…

Communities of practice

November 14, 2021

Summarising my reading on “communities of practice”, and my views on how this framework might be useful for thinking about change in our context, for our iEarth/BioCEED-led course on “leading…

Currently reading: “Leveraging Multiple Theories of Change to Promote Reform” (Kezar & Holcombe, 2019)

November 4, 2021

I am attending a course on “leading educational change”, run by two Norwegian centres for excellence in education, iEarth and BioCEED. The course brings together people working on educational change…

The story of Robert and Susan (Biggs, 1999)

October 22, 2021

I attended iEarth’s GeoLearning Forum today and yesterday, and had a lot of great conversations with amazing students from the four iEarth institutions: Universities of Bergen, Oslo, Tromsø, and UNIS.…

Co-creating learning and teaching (Bovill, 2020)

July 2, 2021

Maybe it was because of the contexts in which I encountered it, but I always perceived “co-creation” as an empty buzzword without any actionable substance to it. I have only…

The learning styles myth (based on Pashler et al., 2008; Nancekivell et al., 2020)

June 25, 2021

One idea that I encounter a lot in higher education workshops is the idea of learning styles: that some people are “visual learners” that learn best by looking at visual…

Building gender equity in the academy (Laursen & Austin, 2020)

June 24, 2021

After being “invited” to do some service work because someone noticed “that there was nobody on the committee without a beard” (gee, thanks for making me feel like you appreciate…

Why it’s important to use students’ names, and how to make it easy: use name tents! (After Cooper et al., 2017)

June 21, 2021

One thing I really enjoy about teaching virtually is that it is really easy to address everybody by their names with confidence, since their names are always right there, right…

A tool to understand students’ previous experience and adapt your practical courses accordingly — by Kirsty Dunnett

June 11, 2021

Last week, I wrote about increasing inquiry in lab-based courses and mentioned that it was Kirsty who had inspired me to think about this in a new-to-me way. For several years,…

Increasing inquiry in lab courses (inspired by @ks_dnnt and Buck et al., 2008)

June 4, 2021

My new Twitter friend Kirsty, my old GFI-friend Kjersti and I have been discussing teaching in laboratories. Kirsty recommended an article (well, she did recommend many, but one that I’ve…

“Wonder questions” and geoscience misconceptions.

June 1, 2021

Recently, as part of the CHESS/iEarth Summer School, Kikki Kleiven lead a workshop on geoscience teaching. She gave a great overview over how to approach teaching and presented many engaging…

Why should students want engage in something that changes their identity as well as their view of themselves in relation to friends and family?

May 31, 2021

Another iEarth Teaching Conversation with Kjersti Daae and Torgny Roxå, summarized by Mirjam Glessmer “Transformative experiences” (Pugh et al., 2010) are those experiences that change the way a person looks at…

#WaveWatching as “transformative experience”? (Based on articles by Pugh et al. 2019, 2011, 2010)

May 27, 2021

I was reading an article on “active learning” by Lombardi et al. (2021), when the sentence “In undergraduate geoscience, Pugh et al. (2019) found that students who made observations of…

What does “sensemaking” really mean in the context of learning about science? (Reading Odden & Russ, 2019)

May 11, 2021

I read the article “Defining sensemaking: Bringing clarity to a fragmented theoretical construct” by Odden and Russ (2019) and what I loved about the article are two main things: I realized…

“Invisible learning” by David Franklin

April 18, 2021

Several things happened today. I had a lovely time reading in the hammock I tried to kill two birds with one stone (figuratively of course): writing a blog post about…

Metaphors of learning (after Ivar Nordmo and the article by Sfard, 1998)

April 17, 2021

On Thursday, I attended a workshop by Ivar Nordmo, in which he talked about two metaphors of learning: “learning as acquisition” and “learning as participation”. He referred to an article…

Student evaluations of teaching are biased, sexist, racist, predjudiced. My summary of Heffernan’s 2021 article

March 11, 2021

One of my pet peeves are student evaluations that are interpreted way beyond what they can actually tell us. It might be people not considering sample sizes when looking at…

An overview over what we know about what works in university teaching (based on Schneider & Preckel, 2017)

March 2, 2021

I’ve been leading a lot of workshops and doing consulting on university teaching lately, and one request that comes up over and over again is “just tell me what works!”.…

Even though students in the active classroom learn more, they feel like they learn less

November 13, 2020

If you’ve been trying to actively engage students in your classes, I am sure you’ve felt at least some level of resistance. Even though we know from literature (e.g. Freeman…

#TeachingTuesday: Student feedback and how to interpret it in order to improve teaching

May 26, 2020

Student feedback has become a fixture in higher education. But even though it is important to hear student voices when evaluating teaching and thinking of ways to improve it, students…

“Continue. Start. Stop.”. An article supporting the usefulness of my favourite method of asking for student feedback on a course!

December 17, 2018

I’ve been recommending the “Continue. Start. Stop.” feedback method for years an years (at least since my 2013 blog post), but not as a research-backed method but mostly based on…

“A brief history of climate in the Nordic Seas” — A #scipoem

October 16, 2017

A brief history of climate in the Nordic Seas* Understanding of climate change explaining a record’s full range playing the cause-and-effect game needs a closed, mechanistic frame data: proxies or…

#scipoem on an Darelius et al. article about ice shelves

September 18, 2017

“Observed vulnerability of Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf to wind-driven inflow of warm deep water”* Let’s talk ab’t a favourite paper “Observed vulnerability of Filchner- Ronne Ice Shelf to wind-driven inflow of…

How our experiments relate to the real Antarctica

September 14, 2017

After seeing so many nice pictures of our topography and the glowing bright green current field around it in the tank, let’s go back to the basics today and talk…

I am missing institute seminars! Or: Why we should talk to people who use different methods

August 22, 2017

You probably know that I have recently changed my research focus quite dramatically, from physical oceanography to science communication research. What that means is that I am a total newbie…

What you know about science is not necessarily what you believe about science

June 7, 2017

I’ve been working in science communication research for a good half a year now, and my views on outreach are constantly evolving. When I applied for this job, I was…

On the impact of blogging — or how far does my message mix?

March 21, 2017

What is the impact of this blog? And who am I writing it for? Those are not questions I regularly ask myself. The main reason I started blogging was to…

Nonlinear effects in shallow water waves

March 14, 2017

I recently googled for something related to the shape of waves and came across a photo of a wave that caught my eye, and it took me to a journey that…

Outreach is about more than about the perfect presentation (or even the perfect hands-on tank experiment!)

July 7, 2016

In most of my blog posts on outreach I focus on how to run the _perfect_ experiment. And while I still think that’s awesome, I recently read an article by…

Waves on Pinnau in Mölln. By Uwe Glessmer

You learn better when you explain to yourself

July 5, 2016

I just read a really interesting article on explaining to yourself as a mechanism for learning by Tania Lombrozo. We have talked about peer instruction being valuable because explaining to others helps…

Mirjam Glessmer and Timo Lüth leading a workshop for university instructors

You learn better when you think that you will have to teach

June 30, 2016

Have you ever worked as student tutor? Then you’ve probably felt like you understood the content of the course you tutored a million times better after tutoring it. Or at…

How to know for sure whether a teaching intervention actually improved things

March 10, 2016

How do we measure whether teaching interventions really do what they are supposed to be doing? (Spoiler alert: In this post, I won’t actually give a definite answer to that…

How to learn most efficiently when participating in a MOOC

March 3, 2016

How to learn most efficiently when participating in a MOOC? Yes, I’ll admit, that title promises quite a lot. But there is a new article by Yong and Lim (2016)…

How your behavior as an instructor influences how your students behave during peer instruction phases

December 17, 2015

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you that how you behave as an instructor influences how your students work during peer instruction phases. But do you know what…

How your students might be hurting themselves by skipping classes

December 10, 2015

Mandatory attendance is seldomly done in german higher education. The system relies on a series of examinations, and whoever passes those get the degree, no matter how much or how little time…

Why you should shuffle practice problems rather than blocking them

December 8, 2015

We like to get into the flow when practicing something, and we like to have our students concentrate on one particular type of problem at a time until they have…

Does multitasking hurt learning? Show ’em!

October 7, 2015

I am reading the “Faculty Focus” mailing list, and a side-note in one of their recent posts, “Why policies fail to promote better learning decisions” by Lolita Paff, really struck…

And even more on motivation

September 21, 2015

Last week we talked about motivation quite a bit: First about why do students engage in academic tasks?, then about how motivation is proportional to the expectation of achieving a…

Motivation proportional to the expectation of achieving a goal?

September 16, 2015

In the last post I talked about a paper on “Motivating Learners: A Primer for Engineering Teaching Assistants” by Torres-Ayala and Herman (2012). Today, I want to present a different…

Motivation: dangle a carrot rather than threaten with a whip!

September 14, 2015

Why do students engage in academic tasks? Next week I am giving a workshop on teaching large classes at TU Dresden. I gave a similar workshop there in spring, but…

Can there be “too much” instruction? Apparently yes!

September 7, 2015

I recently, via the blogpost “lessons from a toy” by Eyler (2015), came across the article “The Double-edged Sword of Pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery” by Bonawitz, Shafto, Gweon, Goodman, Spelke and Schulz (2011).…

When math hurts

August 31, 2015

One of the larger projects I am currently working on deals with connecting the math courses, which are compulsory for all freshmen at my university and taught for most students together,…

Drawing to learn II

August 10, 2015

From reading the paper on “Drawing to Learn in Science” in my last blog post, I got browsing the literature and I came across the paper “Drawing to learn: How…

Drawing to learn

August 7, 2015

On the sciencegeekgirl blog (which, if you don’t follow it already, you should definitely start now!) there recently was a post on “drawing to learn sketching and peer instruction“. She…

Of the importance of giving opportunities to practice

July 31, 2015

When you are short on time and want to teach as much as possible in a given time, how do you allocate time to different activities and are there any…

How do you make sure your students come prepared to your flipped course?

July 29, 2015

As I mentioned a while back, we are preparing a flipped course. And the biggest question always is how to make sure students actually prepare for class. Because if they…

Why care about ocean literacy?

June 8, 2015

Ocean literacy, the “understanding of the ocean’s influence on you – and your influence on the ocean”, is obviously a topic near and dear to my heart. But a recent paper by…

Multiple representations – a better chance to understand what’s going on?

June 1, 2015

I’m currently advising a team of teachers who have taken great care to make sure they all use the same representations of a problem. They use the same symbols, have…

Importance of designing experiments

May 29, 2015

At work, we are currently editing a brochure on designing and carrying out lab courses, and we are working on a lot of projects which aim at redesigning labs. And…

Facilitating student group work

May 18, 2015

Grouping students together for collaborative work is easy, but how do we make them work as a team? Collaborative learning is often propagated as the ultimate tool to increase learning…

Finding the right instructional method for different kinds of knowledge

May 8, 2015

When reading Anderson & Krathwohl’s 2001 revised taxonomy of educational objectives, I really liked how they made clear that different kinds of knowledge require different instructional approaches as well as…

Currently reading: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives

May 6, 2015

I am currently reading the Anderson & Krathwohl (2001) revised taxonomy of learning outcomes. They modified some of the higher levels of the original Bloom (1956) taxonomy and now use a continuum of cognitive processes from…

Teaching: intentional and reasoned act

May 4, 2015

I’ve talked about Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives before but I have to admit that I’ve only gone back and read the original Bloom (1956) book and the revised taxonomy by Anderson…

Conceptual change and wooly hats

April 22, 2015

“Conceptual change” is one of the big words that gets thrown into every conversation on teaching and learning these days. But most people I talk to don’t really have a…

Peer instruction! Combine it with individual thinking or discussions with the whole class?

April 15, 2015

Make sure it stays silent during the first step of the clicker process. When using clickers in class, there are many different possible ways of implementing clicker questions and peer…

How theories influence the scientific process

March 11, 2015

Observations are not as objective as we thought they were. Today I want to talk about the paper “The theory-ladenness of observations and the theory-ladenness of the rest of the scientific…

Desirable difficulties

January 30, 2015

Initial harder learning might make for better longterm retrieval. A lot of the discussions at my university on how to improve learning focus on how to make it easier for…

What do I want from my students – sense-making or answer-making?

January 7, 2015

On different approaches to peer-instruction and why one might want to use them. Having sat in many different lectures by many different professors over the last year, and having given…

What’s your perspective on good teaching?

December 3, 2014

Taking a test as a basis for reflection in teaching beliefs, intentions and actions. I am always looking for ways to make teachers think – and talk – about best practice in…

Oceanographic concepts and language, reloaded

November 12, 2014

How we might misunderstand our students and therefore diagnose misconceptions where there are none. Imagine you are in an Earth Sciences class and your teacher talks about glaciers and how they…

On purpose and aim of hands-on experiments.

October 22, 2014

Why it is important to make clear the purpose of experiments in teaching. As you all know by now, I am a big fan of hands-on experiments in teaching. One…

All learning is relearning

October 15, 2014

Where did the concept of “elicit, confront, resolve” come from? We often imagine that ideal learning happens the same way we often imagine ideal teaching*: We enter a room, students are…

Kolb’s learning cycle

October 8, 2014

A very brief history of learning theories. Discussing a paper on learning theories with a friend last week, I realized how far I have come from when I first started reading those…

Development of student attention over time

October 1, 2014

Do we really know how student attention develops over time? One thing that is shown over and over again in teachers’ trainings is the curve of how student attention peaks…

Why talking to your neighbor might help more than listening to the lecturer

September 24, 2014

Why does learning through peer instruction work? As you might have noticed by now, I’m a big fan of concept questions combined with “talk to your neighbor” peer instruction. And…

Learning with fluid toys

September 22, 2014

How fluid toys can be used to demonstrate principles of fluid mechanics. I guess every attempt to hide that I LOOOOVE fluid toys of any kind is futile. So imagine…

Making science topics relevant to students’ lives increases interest and performance

September 17, 2014

Duh! That students are more interested, and hence perform better, when they are motivated to learn something sounds not terribly surprising. But did you know that you can actually increase…

Will getting it wrong help or hinder future learning?

September 3, 2014

A study shows that unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning. I’ve talked about how testing drives learning a while back, and today’s post is on a similar topic. If testing…

The structural complexity of learning outcomes

August 22, 2014

The Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome taxonomy. I talked about the classification of learning outcomes according to Blooms’s taxonomy recently, and got a lot of feedback from readers that the…

Testing drives learning.

August 20, 2014

Once you’ve tested on something correctly once, you will remember it forever. Right? In a study on “The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning” by Karpicke and Roediger (2008), four different…

Classifying educational goals using Bloom’s taxonomy

July 30, 2014

How can you classify different levels of skills you want your students to gain from your classes? Learning objectives are traditionally categorized after Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy. Bloom separates learning objectives in…

Giving feedback on student writing

July 9, 2014

When feedback is more confusing than helpful. The other day I came across a blog post on Teaching & Learning in Higher Ed. on responding to student writing/writers by P. T. Corrigan.…

Why might students not learn from demonstrations what we want them to learn?

June 6, 2014

More potential pitfalls to avoid when showing demonstrations. Kristin and I have been invited to lead a workshop on “Conducting oceanography experiments in a conventional classroom” at the European Marine Science…

So what exactly are we testing?

June 2, 2014

Asking the right questions is really difficult. Last week, a paper by Gläser and Riegler was presented in the journal club at my work (can’t find it online yet, so…

How to make demos useful in teaching

June 1, 2014

Showing demonstrations might not be as effective as you think. Since I was talking about the figures I bring with me to consultations yesterday, I thought I’d share another one…

Should we ask or should we tell?

May 31, 2014

Article by Freeman et al., 2014, “Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics”. Following up on the difficulties in asking good questions described yesterday, I’m today presenting…

On asking questions

May 30, 2014

How do you ask questions that really make students think, and ultimately understand? I’ve only been working at a center for teaching and learning for half a year, but still…

Learning by thinking

May 29, 2014

Di Stefano et al. find that reflection is an important step in the learning process. I’ve always liked learning by teaching. Be it in sailing as a teenager or more…

Letter tubes and hydrostatic pressure

February 5, 2014

How less than 25% of the tested students give consistent answers to these problems. This is already the third blog post talking about the paper “Identifying and addressing student difficulties…

Barometer problem.

January 31, 2014

Still talking about hydrostatic pressure. Yes, I am not done with hydrostatic pressure yet! One of the problems students were given in the study “Identifying and addressing student difficulties with…

Hydrostatic pressure

January 29, 2014

What are students not understanding about hydrostatic pressure? Tomorrow (today by the time this post will go online, I guess) I will present the paper “Identifying and addressing student difficulties…

Cartesian divers – theoretical considerations

January 27, 2014

A bit more reflection on cartesian divers. When I wrote the two previous posts, I had known cartesian divers for a very long time in many contexts, for example as…

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