U N I V E R S I T Y  O F  P I T T S B U R G H

Volume XI, Number 2

Linda Winkler, Natural Sciences, University of Pittsburgh at Titusville

Photo courtesy of Linda Winkler

The goal of all academic programs is learning, but specific desirable outcomes vary among disciplines and among courses within a discipline. Since I teach in both the health sciences and in anthropology, the focus of my courses varies widely. For example, in my anatomy courses, the emphasis is on memorization of structure and understanding relationships. However, although this information is important to physiology (which I also teach), in physiology greater emphasis is placed on analyzing and understanding process. Nevertheless, despite differences between the outcomes I seek in my health science courses versus those in anthropology, there are general outcomes that I seek in all courses. These outcomes include:

1. Learning and comprehending course materials.
2. Generating student interest in and excitement about course materials and learning within the course.
3. Teaching students how to find and analyze material within a discipline, essentially giving them the ability to do research and to continue their learning on their own.
4. Enhancing students’ understanding of a discipline including what it means to be to have a career within that discipline.
5. Expanding students’ world view with the introduction of new materials and relating course material to students’ own lives. This outcome includes promoting understanding of the relationship of the material to students’ own career path or experiences.

These outcomes are discussed in the first class meeting of the courses I teach and readings and hand-outs are distributed or posted on CourseWeb (Blackboard) to help inspire successful accomplishment of these outcomes. I also include extensive personal examples or photographs from my own research or experiences, clinical presentations, guest speakers or course field trips, and discussion and analysis of student perceptions and experiences in classroom or course interactions. In addition, almost all of my courses require some sort of personal research paper or topical presentation to promote student interest or involvement in learning.

The outcomes I mentioned are widely seen as important to the educational success of students in secondary and post secondary education. As students are exposed to new disciplines or academic areas, their success is always enhanced by their ability to learn new ways of thinking about the information at hand and the resource materials appropriate to the field. And, one of the most successful learning strategies to help students retain and retrieve information in the future is to relate new material to the experiential base of students, essentially to help them understand the material in terms of what they already know. For instance, textbooks frequently use analogies in describing the actions of immune system cells in the body such as “fighting off disease” or armies of antibody producing cells. These sorts of analogies or examples are useful at all levels of instruction in helping explain new concepts and relating them to common knowledge. As the new concepts are assimilated, the students’ understanding expands. And, although expanding the world view of students seems a natural extension of the cross-cultural approach embraced by anthropology, this approach is equally well suited to teaching students about international health issues or disease processes in the body.

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