Beyond Memorization: Exercises that Help Students Forge, Remember, and Apply their Knowledge

Abstract

Synopsis This personal retrospective describes what I consider to be the two most important learning practices in my classroom: A form of interactive engagement that I call collaborative exercises and general principles exercises. The power of interactive engagement had already been described and evaluated in the pedagogical literature of the physical sciences, but was not yet used widely in biology when I began teaching. Here, I discuss practical suggestions for implementing IE successfully and strategies for inviting students to try a new way of learning. General principles are everywhere we look—in lectures, titles of textbooks, and in our own minds as we process new information. Many of our students, however, are only marginally familiar with how general principles can revolutionize the way they learn, remember information, and solve novel context problems. The general principles exercise stimulates students not only to engage actively with received general principles from lecture, reading, and other sources, but also to develop the transferable skill of discovering (not just being told about) the patterns that permeate the natural world and our study of it.