Author: Jeff Coon Department of Cognitive Sciences Editor-in-Chief: Alex Bower February 20, 2022 Statistics courses are fundamental to virtually every STEM major, yet they are often viewed as a necessary evil. Students generally choose their major...
Course design
High Stakes Assessments vs. Reflective Journaling
Jordan C. Grasso, School of Social Ecology Professors across disciplines often rely on high-stakes summative assessments in multiple-choice or short-answer exams or lengthy final papers. However, these assessments negatively impact students’ ability to learn...
Critical Latinx Pedagogy: Empowering Latinx Students at a Hispanic Serving Institution
Julybeth Murillo, School of Social Sciences Hispanic Serving Institutions Aguilar- Smith states that a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) is a “public and private 2- and 4-year postsecondary institution in which at least a quarter of the institution’s full-time...
Gamification and the Classroom: A Short Review
Christopher Chacon, School of Humanities In this short review, I will consider the role student motivation plays in the effectiveness of gamification as well as the role gamification plays in enhancing student participation and knowledge retention. I will also...
Implementing Active Learning in Large-Enrollment Courses
Claire Freimark, School of Biological Sciences Introductory undergraduate science courses can be intimidating. Large class sizes, long lectures, and cumulative exams can lead to high stress levels, poor student attitudes, and low retention rates in STEM majors. Many...
Covid-19, Educational Inequity, and Student Outcomes
Alisson Rowland, School of Social Sciences The US’s poor welfare infrastructure, combined with the devastation of Covid-19, has perpetuated racist educational inequities (Kyeremateng, Oguda, Asemota 2022; Johnson-Agbakwu et al. 2022). Sonya Douglass Horsford,...
Implementing Curative Pedagogy in Teaching Theatre History
Talin Abadian, Department of Drama Theatre history courses are generally offered through survey courses where future theatre professionals are exposed to essential historical knowledge and vocabulary (Smith et al 113). Yet even though these courses are often...
Welcome to This Week’s Episode on….Student-Produced Podcasts
Mutsumi Ogaki, School of Social Ecology In social science classes, it's not uncommon for instructors to integrate podcasts into course materials. In this post, I will go a step further and discuss benefits of implementing student-produced podcast as a class project....
Using Flipped Classrooms in Health Sciences Education: The Latest Evidence, and Recommendations
Babak Saatchi, PhD Student, Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing, University of California, Irvine Using the flipped classroom model has become a popular approach in higher education within the past years. In contrast to traditional classrooms in which the knowledge...
Sharing Teaching-as-Research at a Discipline-Specific Conference
Daniel Bergman, Department of Mathematics In January 2020, I attended my first Joint Mathematics Meetings, the single biggest math conference in the world. The conference lasted five full days and took place in the spacious Colorado Convention Center in downtown...