Carnegie Mellon University Website Home Page
 
Skip navigation and jump directly to page content
Learning/Teaching Principles
Design & Teach a Course
Solve a Teaching Problem
Students’ background knowledge and skills vary widely
Use Educational Technology
Try Something New
Research Projects
Other Resources
Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence
Office of Technology for Education
Step 2: Identify Reasons

Identify possible reasons for the problem you have selected.
To find the most effective strategies, select the reason that best describes your situation, keeping in mind there may be multiple relevant reasons.

My students’ background knowledge and skills
vary widely.

Many courses, especially survey-level courses, enroll students with a broad range of backgrounds, previous educational experiences, majors, interests, motivations as well as levels of important prior knowledge and skills. In many instances, this diversity is manageable and if handled skillfully can provide substantial benefits to the educational context of the classroom. However, when the distribution of the class is such that there are two distinct groups of students with radically disparate levels of knowledge and skills (a bi-modal distribution), there is a limited range of solutions that instructors may use to manage this difficult situation.

The course has no specific prerequisites.

The course draws students across majors.

The course is cross-listed as graduate and undergraduate.

Students have different high school experiences.

International students have different (stronger or weaker) cultural and language knowledge and skills.

Students range from first-years to seniors.

Students have varying motivations for taking a course.

The course is offered as a summer course and attracts students with radically different skills and motivation.

This site supplements our 1-on-1 teaching consultations.
CONTACT US to talk with an Eberly colleague in person!
  1. Prior knowledge can help or hinder learning.  |  MORE >
  2. Motivation generates, directs, and sustains learning behavior.   |  MORE >
  3. The way students organize knowledge determines how they use it.  |  MORE >
  4. Meaningful engagement is necessary for deeper learning.  |  MORE >
  5. Mastery involves developing component skills and knowledge, and synthesizing and applying them appropriately.  |  MORE >
  6. Goal-directed practice and targeted feedback are critical to learning.   |  MORE >
  7. Students must learn to monitor, evaluate and adjust their approaches to learning to become self-directed learners.  |  MORE >
  8. Students develop holistically and their learning is affected by the social and emotional aspects of the classroom climate.  |  MORE >

learning principles