New Book by NTID's Porter Offers Help with Academic Success of Individual Learners

In order to fulfill higher education’s promise, undergraduate teachers must establish and act on the ideal of supporting the academic success of each and every student by becoming more skilled in individualizing instruction.

That’s the basis of a new book, Promoting the Success of Individual Learners: Teachers Applying Their Craft at the Undergraduate Level, authored by Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf professor Jeff Porter, now available through Bergin & Garvey Publishers.

The book represents a collaborative effort among Porter and eight other undergraduate teachers, representing disciplines ranging from physics to literature to freshman seminar. Anne Coon, professor of language and literature at RIT, is one of these collaborators. This book also represents a wide range of undergraduate institutions from Portland State University to Colorado College to Carnegie-Mellon University.

"This book acknowledges the reality that students learn differently, and an instructional approach effectively supporting and extending one student’s learning will not do so for another," said Porter. "The book provides guiding assumptions and practical approaches for making peace with this reality."

"Promoting the Success of Individual Learners does more than identify issues and problems in undergraduate education," said Myron H. Dembo, Stephen Crocker Professor In Education at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. "This book provides different instructional strategies to deal with the issues and problems we have been discussing for years."

Porter said he hopes the book will serve as a resource for undergraduate teachers in two ways.

"First, both general and specific teaching and assessment strategies for supporting individual learners within a variety of discipline contexts are offered," he said. "Also, contributing authors highlight their guiding assumptions about learning, the roles of teacher and student and the process of instructional problem-solving that gives rise to these instructional strategies."

Porter’s other work focuses on diversity and disability within higher education, and the role of campus life in student development.

For more information about the book, contact Greenwood Publishing Group at www.greenwood.com.

The first and largest technological college in the world for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, NTID, one of eight colleges of RIT, offers educational programs and access and support services to 1,100 students from around the world who study, live, and socialize with 14,000 hearing students on RIT’s campus.

Web address: www.rit.edu/NTID.