Neurodivergent Students in Active Learning Classes

A lot of the accommodations that have traditionally been given for students with learning disabilities, like notetaking assistance and extra time on exams, assume that a college course is mostly lectures and tests. That's not as true as it once was, especially for STEM courses where years of research on active learning have directed faculty to structure their courses differently. What is it like to experience an active learning class if you're a student with a learning disability like dyslexia or dysgraphia? Or if you're a student with ADHD or some other kind of neurodivergence?

This week on the podcast, I talk with Mariel Pfeifer, assistant professor of biology at the University of Mississippi. Mariel is a biology education researcher who has studied the experiences of students with ADHD and learning disabilities in active learning STEM courses. In our interview, she shares some of the benefits of active learning for these students, like the opportunities they provide students to pause and process new information and to work with concepts in different modalities (writing, drawing, talking). But active learning can also pose some challenges to neurodivergent students, and Mariel walks us through some of the challenges, as well as strategies instructors can use to mitigate them.

Mariel's position at the University of Mississippi is a new one. She's one of three STEM education research faculty hired into the biology and chemistry departments. These are tenure-track faculty whose promotion and tenure will be awarded based not on their biology or chemistry research but on their biology education or chemistry education research. I am very impressed that these two science departments have invested in this kind of research through these faculty lines, and I'm excited to see what Mariel and her colleagues will be doing in the next few years there!

​You can listen to my conversation with Mariel Pfeifer here, or you can search "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app.

Vanderbilt CFT Teaching Guides Archive

For years, the staff and graduate fellows at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, where I served as executive director, produced guides on a robust array of teaching and learning topics. These guides were well known across higher education and used regularly by faculty and teaching center staff alike. When I would go to conferences and tell someone I worked at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, I almost always heard something positive in response about our teaching guides. I was proud of our work in this area because it reflected the expertise of our staff and graduate fellows and because it served as such a practical resource for so many. I wrote very few of these guides, but I did make sure that the CFT team had the time and resources to produce them.

Last year on the Centering Centers podcast, Mary Wright, author of the book Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education, talked about this kind of external facing work by teaching centers, which can also include publications, presentations, and participation in educational development consortia. She said that some of her teaching center director colleagues were getting pushback about this work, hearing the message that they should be spending their time internally on programs and services for their own institutions. “As our field moves from not just craft- or practice-focused to a scholarly approach,” Mary said in that interview, “it is extraordinarily important for us to be doing this external work, not only for benchmarking purposes, but also to be more cosmopolitan in our practices, to have these external communities and reference points.”

Sadly, the Vanderbilt CFT teaching guides are no longer linked from the CFT website. The guides are actually still online if you link directly to one of them, so if you have webpages linking to them, you don't have to update your links just yet. But I expect that the guides will be taken down altogether sometimes soon, so I'm slowly archiving them on my website. As of this writing, I've reposted eleven of them, including guides on active learning by Cynthia Brame, accessible learning environments by Amie Thurber and Joe Bandy, metacognition by Nancy Chick, teaching adult undergraduate students by Stacey Johnson, and teaching beyond the gender binary by Brielle Harbin and Leah Marion Roberts. I had some really fantastic colleagues at the CFT!

​You can see the entire set of archived teaching guides here. All the teaching guides were release under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license, so you’re free to reuse them as long as you provide attribution to the Vanderbilt University CFT and don’t try to make money from them. And if there are particular guides you'd like me to repost, let me know and I'll them to my queue.

Thanks for reading!

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