Using empirical research this text gives faculty and graduate teaching assistants the tools for understanding why certain teaching practices work and how to adjust their teaching to changing classroom room and online environments.

An essential guide to organizing and offering mental health services on campus. Stressed by increasing student demand for mental health services, campus counseling centers across the country are grappling with how best to deliver ethical, effective, and efficient service. Hampered by limited budgets, most centers find it deeply challenging to address growing college mental health service needs. Yet little conceptual training is provided to student affairs, higher education, health, and mental health professionals who deliver campus mental health services. In Delivering Effective College Mental Health Services, psychologist Lee Keyes aims to change that. He offers sound, field-tested advice for creating a congruent, cross-division, and service-oriented college counseling enterprise that best fits its campus culture and students. This useful handbook for administering counseling services • poses questions and offers practical advice to help college counseling centers form a consistent philosophical model • lays out conceptual groundwork for constructing college counseling services, from training activities to counseling/psychotherapy processes • takes into account the pressures (time related, economic, political, cultural) that strain universities • explains how to cultivate an accurate and empathic response to each individual, their entire history and context, and their possible life trajectory Written by a leading provider of college mental health services, Delivering Effective College Mental Health Services is an essential guide to organizing and offering mental health services on university and college campuses.

College Success for Adults: Insider Tips for Effective Learning is a concise, user-friendly guide to college success for the adult college student. In it, readers learn to master the rules, vocabulary, and expectations of the college environment. They’ll discover how to balance their work and personal lives with college-level study, develop the mindset of the successful college student, take notes effectively, conquer testing anxiety, win over their professors, and much more. Armed with the knowledge this book provides, readers will emerge with a deeper understanding of what it takes to succeed in college—and how they can achieve this success. They’ll learn how to take their own experience and wisdom as adults and translate it into success in the college classroom. Readers also receive helpful supplementary resources that will aid them on their journey to college success, including a college vocabulary glossary, college knowledge quiz (with answer key), a list of scholarships exclusively for adult students, and a suggested course syllabus (with detailed course calendar).

What makes a great teacher great? Who are the professors students remember long after graduation? This book, the conclusion of a fifteen-year study of nearly one hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities, offers valuable answers for all educators. The short answer is—it’s not what teachers do, it’s what they understand. Lesson plans and lecture notes matter less than the special way teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning. Whether historians or physicists, in El Paso or St. Paul, the best teachers know their subjects inside and out—but they also know how to engage and challenge students and to provoke impassioned responses. Most of all, they believe two things fervently: that teaching matters and that students can learn. In stories both humorous and touching, Ken Bain describes examples of ingenuity and compassion, of students’ discoveries of new ideas and the depth of their own potential. What the Best College Teachers Do is a treasure trove of insight and inspiration for first-year teachers and seasoned educators.

When it comes to the hotly disputed topic of college admissions, the one thing everyone agrees about is that it’s unfair. But there is little agreement on what a fair process would be. Rebecca Zwick takes a hard look at the high-stakes competition of U.S. college admissions today. Illustrating her points using analyses of survey data from applicants to the nation’s top colleges and universities, she assesses the goals of different admissions systems and the fairness of criteria—from high school grades and standardized test scores to race, socioeconomic status, and students’ academic aspirations. The demographic makeup of the class and the educational outcomes of its students can vary substantially, depending upon how an institution approaches its task. Who Gets In? considers the merits and flaws of competing approaches and demonstrates that admissions policies can sometimes fail to produce the desired results. For example, some nontraditional selection methods can hurt more than help the students they are intended to benefit. As Zwick shows, there is no objective way to evaluate admissions systems—no universal definition of student merit or blanket entitlement to attend college. Some schools may hope to attract well-rounded students, while others will focus on specific academic strengths. What matters most is that a school’s admissions policy reflects its particular educational philosophy. Colleges should be free to include socioeconomic and racial preferences among their admissions criteria, Zwick contends, but they should strive for transparency about the factors they use to evaluate applicants.

Analyzes and defines the parameters of effective college outreach programs.

Even on good days, teaching is a challenging profession. One way to make the job of college instructors easier, however, is to know more about the ways students learn. How Humans Learn aims to do just that by peering behind the curtain and surveying research in fields as diverse as developmental psychology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience for insight into the science behind learning. The result is a story that ranges from investigations of the evolutionary record to studies of infants discovering the world for the first time, and from a look into how our brains respond to fear to a reckoning with the importance of gestures and language. Joshua R. Eyler identifies five broad themes running through recent scientific inquiry--curiosity, sociality, emotion, authenticity, and failure--devoting a chapter to each and providing practical takeaways for busy teachers. He also interviews and observes college instructors across the country, placing theoretical insight in dialogue with classroom experience.

Prospective college students and their parents have been relying on Loren Pope's expertise since 1995, when he published the first edition of this indispensable guide. This new edition profiles 41 colleges—all of which outdo the Ivies and research universities in producing performers, not only among A students but also among those who get Bs and Cs. Contents include: Evaluations of each school's program and "personality" Candid assessments by students, professors, and deans Information on the progress of graduates This new edition not only revisits schools listed in previous volumes to give readers a comprehensive assessment, it also addresses such issues as homeschooling, learning disabilities, and single-sex education.

This book turns the traditional approach to student success on its head by examining the learning habits of successful students based on what they have told us about their learning strategies, on what they do to succeed in college, and on the teaching practices they think best foster their learning. This approach is in stark contrast to most recent studies of learning at the college level which focus on what students need to do to succeed, but are written from the point of view of "experts" who provide advice to struggling students. Learning from the Learners: Successful College Students Share Their Effective Learning Habits is based on what "expert" students tell us about what they - as learners - do to succeed. It is grounded in a 10-year study that rests on a rich qualitative data set that includes open-ended survey responses gathered on a term-by term basis and in depth interviews during the freshman and junior years with over 700 students of diverse backgrounds. Additionally, since many students interviewed were the first in their family to attend college and from backgrounds traditionally underserved by higher education, the book's insights will be of particular interest to educators elsewhere who are increasingly expected to help similar students succeed. Themes include student success, academic challenges, diversity, pedagogy, and technology in the classroom. No other book on the widely discussed subject of student success relies on such a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data about what works from the point of view of students themselves.

Why we need to stop wasting public funds on education Despite being immensely popular—and immensely lucrative—education is grossly overrated. Now with a new afterword by Bryan Caplan, this explosive book argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to signal the qualities of a good employee. Learn why students hunt for easy As only to forget most of what they learn after the final exam, why decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for average workers, how employers reward workers for costly schooling they rarely ever use, and why cutting education spending is the best remedy. Romantic notions about education being "good for the soul" must yield to careful research and common sense—The Case against Education points the way.