Another in Jossey-Bass's series called New Directions for Teaching and Learning, this volume contains some things that will be useful to teachers, but it promises more than it delivers. There are several slightly disquieting features. It is one of the shortest books in the series, about a hundred pages counting notes and bibliography. One of the chapters is about K-12 teaching, and though some of its lessons apply, arguably, to university teaching and of course K-12 teachers are prepared at universities, it still seems an odd fit.

But what is valuable here?

"Successful Lecturing: Presenting Information in Ways That Engage Effective Processing" by Patricia Ann deWinstanley and Robert A Bjork makes useful suggestions under the headings of Attention, Interpretation and Elaboration, Generation and Retrieval Practice, Spacing Repetitions of Information Within and Across Lectures, Inducing Encoding Variability (this seems to mean using more than one teaching style over the same material), Providing Structure, Using Visual Images, Mental Imagery, and Other Mnemonic Techniques to Enhance Effective Processing, and Interrogating for Elaboration.

Readers untrained in the science of cognitive psychology, of course, may already know about many of these practices. This points to a dissonance in this book. It seems to have been written to show that the field of instructional improvement suffers from a tragic ignorance of the findings of the psychology of learning. One chapter is called "Cognitive Psychology and College-Level Pedagogy: Two Siblings That Rarely Communicate."

And yet the findings from cognitive psychology, when revealed, are hardly revolutionary, as the subheadings under "Successful Lecturing" show.

There is a chapter on designing multimedia presentations to encourage deep learning, and, considering the too-frequent alternative--designing multimedia presentations to exploit maximally the features of PowerPoint--this is a step in the right direction. There is a chapter on "Issues, Examples, and Challenges in Formative Assessment," which shows two approaches to continuous formative assessment, both of them based on computer interfaces with feedback programs.

The concept which was most interesting to me was about the "theory of successful intelligence," deployed in an attempt to explain why successful adults (examples are Bush and Gore) do poorly in college: "The theory of successful intelligence suggests that students' failures to achieve at a level that matches their potential often result from teaching and assessment that are narrow in conceptualization and rigid in implementation." The remainder of the chapter provides suggestions for change in teaching and in assessment and includes the salutary reminders that "There is no one right way of teaching and learning" and "There is no one right way of assessing."

I profited from this chapter and, to some extent, from others. But as a person interested in college pedagogy but untrained in cognitive psychology, I was disappointed and conclude that the collection promised more than it delivered.

Merritt Moseley
UNC Asheville