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Eberly Center

Teaching Excellence

Eberly Center

Carnegie Mellon's Eberly Center distills research on learning for faculty and graduate students — fostering an environment where students have access to the best possible learning experience.

How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching is a new book centered on this research and published by current and former Eberly Center staff members — Susan Ambrose, Michael Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha Lovett and Marie Norman.

"It's a book based on the research we've been using for a long time to help faculty and graduate students teach better, design better courses and more effective classroom pedagogy," said Ambrose. "The larger issue really was to bridge this gap between research and practice."

Ambrose says what they set out to do in 1982, when the center was created by Ted Fenton, is what they continue do in their work — to help colleagues do things educationally that are more sound or solid because they are based on research.

"There's a lot of research out there on learning that never gets translated into practice, at least at the university level," she said. "On the other side, many books have techniques and strategies for teaching but aren't grounded in research."

It's the first book published by the group.

"We all have individual works. But this was a collaborative effort: We had five different authors who brought diverse backgrounds with perspectives that included cultural anthropology, history, cognitive psychology, social psychology and statistics," Ambrose said. "We're really happy with the book, and I don't know of any place other than Carnegie Mellon where people could have pulled this off."

Ambrose says one of the reasons the Eberly Center was founded was because faculty and graduate students are too busy to find and read the research on learning.

"Our job has been to stay abreast of research into education, understand it and translate it into practices the faculty can use," she said. "'How Learning Works represents what the center is all about, which is making it easier for faculty to access information."

The center works with faculty across the university from the very new to the very senior. People who come to Eberly are typically driven by a problem, frustration or concern they have, Ambrose says.

"Or they come here because they want to try something different, they're creating a new course or they want to use a new kind of pedagogy. We really see people from all across the spectrum and all seven colleges."

Ambrose says the Eberly Center staff recognizes the time demands on faculty members and graduate students at a research university like Carnegie Mellon.

"Everything we do is geared toward helping them be more effective while being more efficient," she explains. "When we first set up the center, we were very careful to design so that it wasn't a place for bad teachers to come; it was a place where a community of educators and scholars who are interested in teaching as an intellectual activity could gather."

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