2006
Dan Bernstein received an A.B. in psychology from Stanford University in 1968 and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at San Diego in 1973. He was a Professor of Psychology at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln from 1973 until 2002, when he became Director or the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Kansas. He is also a Professor of Psychology at KU.
Beginning with a self-paced introductory course that brought a large percentage of learners to high levels of achievement, Bernstein has designed courses at all levels of higher education that make learner understanding the primary goal. He has also worked to promote teaching within the profession through participation in four FIPSE-funded projects at UN-L, including one on peer review of teaching. A book on that project has just been published (see below for details).
Bernstein’s primary research focused on human motivation and learning, including work with adults and children in non-laboratory settings. Most recently he has been exploring and evaluating various uses of technology to promote student understanding. Conventional experimental studies have looked at the impact of multi-media presentations on student cognitive performance, and his ongoing courses are a laboratory for evaluating the impact of out of class web-based activities on deep understanding of conceptual material.
Bernstein served from 1999 to 2003 as Director of a five-university project for implementation of faculty fellowships to generate peer reviews of teaching materials. He is interested in representation of the intellectual work in teaching, especially through the external review of electronic course portfolios centered on student work. He work with colleagues from many fields of study in developing ways to showcase the quality of their student work and the practices that have helped that work emerge. (See http://www.courseportfolio.org/ and also http://www.ku.edu/~cte/gallery/ )
He has received numerous campus awards for teaching, he was a Charter Member of the University of Nebraska Academy of Distinguished Teachers, and he received the 2001 University of Nebraska Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Award. He is a Fellow of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
Recent relevant publications:
- Bernstein, D.J. (1996) A departmental system for balancing the development and evaluation of college teaching: A commentary on Cavanagh. Innovative Higher Education, 20, 241-247.
- Ward, M. C. and Bernstein, D.J. ( 1998) Promoting academic performance among students with special needs. Ethics and Behavior , 8(3), 277-281.
- Bernstein, D.J. (1998) Using assessment in the peer review of effective teaching. In P. Hutchings (Ed.), The course portfolio (pp. 77-83). Washington, D.C.: AAHE.
- Bernstein, D.J., Jonson, Jessica, & Smith, K.L. (2000) An examination of the implementation of peer review of teaching. New Directions for Teaching and Learning (no.83), pp 73-85.
- Mason, B.J., Patry, M., and Bernstein, D.J. (2000) An examination of the equivalence between non-adaptive computer-based and traditional testing. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 24 (1) 29-38.
- Bernstein, D. and Edwards, R. (2001) Rigorous peer review of teaching. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 Jan, p. B24.
- Bernstein, D. (2002) Representing the intellectual work in teaching through peer-reviewed course portfolios. In S. Davis & W. Buskist, (Eds.), The teaching of psychology: Essays in honor of Wilbert J. mcKeachie and Charles L. Brewer (215-229). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Bernstein, D. and Bass. R. (2005) The scholarship of teaching and learning. Academe, 91(4), 37-43.
- Bernstein, D., Burnett, A.N., Goodburn, A. and Savory, P. (2006). Making teaching and learning visible: Course portfolios and the peer review of teaching. Bolton, MA: Anker.
