With generous support from the Teagle Foundation, the ACM will sponsor a Collegium on Student Learning over the next two years. The opening conference in this project will take place on Friday-Sunday, November 21-23, at Monmouth College.
The Collegium seeks to deepen faculty members’ understanding of how students learn, and more specifically, of how students acquire the skills and knowledge that are the hallmarks of a liberal education: critical thinking and analysis, integration across disciplines, reflection about the goals of education, and development of expertise through focused research with faculty. Recent research on metacognition—learners’ abilities to predict their performance, to monitor their learning, to reflect on progress, and to make adjustments to achieve their goals—is particularly provocative for liberal arts faculty and will be a specific focus of the Collegium.
The Collegium Conference will begin Friday evening with a keynote address by Patricia M. King, Professor of Higher Education at the University of Michigan. King’s teaching and research focus on learning and development among late adolescents and adults, including college students. Professor King’s keynote will offer a broad overview of new cognitive research on learning and the brain, with particular focus on metacognition.
Interested faculty should contact their Academic Dean no later than Wednesday, October 1, 2008. Deans should identify participants to Betsy Hutula <ehutula@acm.edu> at ACM by Monday, October 6, 2008. Contact John Ottenhoff <jottenhott@acm.edu> with questions.
