More Like this

1. Impact of Student Produced Audio Narrative (SPAN) assignments on students’ perceptions and attitudes toward science in introductory geoscience courses.

   https://doi.org/10.1080/10899995.2021.1969863  

   Kraal, E. R.; Sirrakos, G.; Guertin, L.; Epstein, A.; Simmens, G. (March 2021, Journal of geoscience education)

   An important challenge for the geoscience community is developing engaging, accessible, and effective experiences within introductory courses, which are often gateways to geoscience majors. This study evaluates low-barrier-to-entry and flexible assignments focused on a pedagogical innovation: faculty replaced one of their usual course components (research paper, lab, etc.) with a Student-Produced Audio Narrative (SPAN) assignment. SPAN assignments require students to engage with geoscience content by telling a scientific story using simple audio-recording and production techniques. The hypothesis is that SPAN assignments will increase students’ personal connection to geoscience course content. The pilot study included 8 faculty and 693 students across a range of institution types, course structures, class sizes, and content topics during the control and implementation semesters. The study evaluated student responses to SPAN assignments both quantitatively, using a pre/post survey, and qualitatively, using semi-structured interviews. Survey results show that students experienced positive changes in the categories of personal relevance, sense of curricular innovation, and future intentions to study science. Interview results indicate that much of the increased senses of innovation and personal relevance came from the creativity and choice the students experienced during the SPAN assignment. Taken together, these results indicate that SPAN assignments are innovative to students and effective pedagogical tools that can positively change students’ perceptions of their learning environment and attitudes toward science. 

   more » « less
2. Integration of Research-based Strategies and Instructional Design: Creating Significant Learning Experiences in a Chemistry Bridge Course

   Villalta-Cerdas, A. (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   null (Ed.)

   Bridge courses are often created to provide participants with remediation instruction on discipline-specific content knowledge, like chemistry and mathematics, before enrollment in regular (semester-long) courses. The bridge courses are then designed to impact student’s academic success in the short-term. Also, as a consequence of the bridge course experience, it is often expected that students’ dropout rates on those regular courses will decrease. However, the bridge courses are often short (ten or fewer days) and packed with content, thus creating challenges for helping students sustain their learning gains over time. With the support of the NSF funded (DUE - Division Of Undergraduate Education) STEM Center at Sam Houston State University, we are designing a course for entering chemistry students that consists of a one-week pre-semester intensive bridge component, which then flows into a one-month co-curricular support component at the beginning of the semester. The primary goals of the bridge component of the course are to strengthen student academic preparedness, calibrated-self-efficacy, and to foster networking leading to a strong learning community. The goal of the co-curricular extension is to help students sustain and build upon the learning gains of the initial bridge component. We plan to extend the co-curricular portion of the course in future years. A key measure of success will be improved participant course grades in the introductory chemistry courses for majors. Our design process has been centered on weekly meetings that alternate between literature review and course design. The design process was initiated with backward design principles and continues with ongoing revision. The goals, design strategy, and design process of this new course will be presented along with the achieved student outcomes during the implementation of the past summer 2020. 

   more » « less
3. Integration of Research-based Strategies and Instructional Design: Creating Significant Learning Experiences in a Chemistry Bridge Course

   Villalta-Cerdas, A. (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   null (Ed.)

   Bridge courses are often created to provide participants with remediation instruction on discipline-specific content knowledge, like chemistry and mathematics, before enrollment in regular (semester-long) courses. The bridge courses are then designed to impact student’s academic success in the short-term. Also, as a consequence of the bridge course experience, it is often expected that students’ dropout rates on those regular courses will decrease. However, the bridge courses are often short (ten or fewer days) and packed with content, thus creating challenges for helping students sustain their learning gains over time. With the support of the NSF funded (DUE - Division Of Undergraduate Education) STEM Center at Sam Houston State University, we are designing a course for entering chemistry students that consists of a one-week pre-semester intensive bridge component, which then flows into a one-month co-curricular support component at the beginning of the semester. The primary goals of the bridge component of the course are to strengthen student academic preparedness, calibrated-self-efficacy, and to foster networking leading to a strong learning community. The goal of the co-curricular extension is to help students sustain and build upon the learning gains of the initial bridge component. We plan to extend the co-curricular portion of the course in future years. A key measure of success will be improved participant course grades in the introductory chemistry courses for majors. Our design process has been centered on weekly meetings that alternate between literature review and course design. The design process was initiated with backward design principles and continues with ongoing revision. The goals, design strategy, and design process of this new course will be presented along with the achieved student outcomes during the implementation of the past summer 2020. 

   more » « less
4. Investing in Instructors: Creating Intelligent Feedback Loops in Large Foundational Courses for Undergraduate Engineeringg

   Grohs, J.R.; Knight, D.B.; Soledad, M.M.; Case, S.W.; Murzi, H.G.; Smith, N. (June 2018, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   The drive to encourage young people to pursue degrees and careers in engineering has led to an increase in student populations in engineering programs. For some institutions, such as large public research institutions, this has led to large class sizes for courses that are commonly taken across multiple programs. While this decision is reasonable from an operational and resource management perspective, research on large classes have shown that students suffer decreased engagement, motivation and achievement. Instructors, on the other hand, report having difficulty establishing rapport with their students and a growing inability to monitor students’ learning gains and provide quality individualized feedback. To address these issues, our project draws from Lattuca and Stark’s Academic Plan model, which incorporates a thorough consideration of factors influencing curricular activities that can be applied at the course, program, and institutional levels, and assumes that instructors are key actors in curriculum development and revision. We aim to revitalize feedback loops to help instructors and departments continuously improve. Recognizing that we must understand both individual and systems level perspectives, we prioritize regular engagement between faculty and institutional support structures to collaboratively identify problems and systematically establish continuous improvement. In the first phase of this NSF IUSE Institutional Transformation project, we focus on specifically prompting and studying the experiences of 8 instructors of foundational engineering courses usually taught in large class sizes across 4 different departments at a large public research institution. We collected qualitative data (semi-structured interviews, reflective journals, course-related documents) and quantitative data (student surveys and institution-provided transcript data) to answer research questions (e.g., what data do faculty teaching large foundational undergraduate engineering courses identify as being useful so that they may enhance students’ experiences and outcomes within the classes that they teach and across students’ multiple large classes?) at the intersection of learning analytics and faculty change. The data was used as a baseline to further refine data collection protocols, identify data that faculty consider meaningful and useful for managing large foundational engineering courses, and consider ways of productively leveraging institutional data to improve the learning experience in these courses. Data collection for the first phase is ongoing and will continue through the Spring 2018 semester. Findings for this paper will include high-level insights from Fall interviews with instructors as well as data visualizations created from the population-level data characterizing student performance in the foundational courses within the context of pre-college characteristics (e.g., SAT scores) and/or other academic outcomes (e.g., major switching within or out of engineer, degree attainment). 

   more » « less
5. Sedimentsketch, teaching tool for undergraduate sedimentology to provide equitable and inclusive learning for hispanic students.

   Stepanova, Anna; Anwar, Saira; Laya, Juan C; Alvarez-Zarikian, Carlos; Martinez, Nancy E; Hammond; Tracy (June 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   Hispanic student performance indicators are markedly different from students of other ethnicities, with Hispanic students consistently having lower GPAs at graduation. SedimentSketch application will be a visual, personalized, and dual language tool that will combine new curricular materials and sketch recognition algorithms to improve student learning through sketching exercises and automatic, instantaneous feedback. We are currently working on development of SedimentSketch software, and only control group data are being collected. We hypothesize that SedimentSketch can transform the higher-education geoscience curriculum for Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) by enabling geoscience students to interact with the material and receive helpful feedback outside of class and by cultivating a more inclusive learning environment. The goal of this project is to use SedimentSketch application to help close the gap between Hispanic and non-Hispanic students’ GPAs, situational interest in geoscience courses, and STEM career trajectories. 

   more » « less