Assessment is generally not a favorite subject for many teachers, and this is likely due to a perceived tension between the goals they wish to accomplish as educators and the methods of assessments prescribed by accrediting agencies. With even President Obama calling for improvements in assessing education, this paper seeks to develop an innovative phenomenological-hermeneutic model of assessment, one that focuses on the first-person interpretation of one’s transformative educational experience. After the theoretical framework for developing this model is explained, I present an application of the model through the introduction of “mindful reading assignments.”
Tag: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Putting It All Together: Incorporating “SoTL Practices” for Teaching Interpersonal and Critical Thinking Skills in an Online Course
Views of critical thinking were culled from the literature and developed into a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) model that was implemented into the Internet course, “The Politics and Psychology of Hatred.” Assessment of student course postings demonstrated a strong relationship between interpersonal skills (referred to in the curriculum as “course etiquette”) and advancement on the levels of critical thinking. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Integrating Service-Learning Pedagogy: A Faculty Reflective Process
Research on service-learning has focused mainly on student outcomes. However, this study addresses the transformative change that three faculty members from different disciplines experienced during a semester-long fellowship on service-learning as a pedagogical method. Through their personal reflections, the authors show how service-learning and the scholarship of teaching were intertwined as they engaged in course redesign. This experience went beyond creating an academic service-learning course to transforming the teachers into reflective practitioners actively engaged in systematically improving their teaching practice.
Applying the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Pursuing a Deeper Understanding of How Students Learn
The research discussed within is one example of how to move from scholarly teaching to the scholarship of teaching and learning. This transition began with a desire to better understand the teaching and learning process and evolved into the development of an empirically-based emerging theory called Mutual Engagement (ME). Mutual Engagement reinforces how group formation and a safe learning environment can benefit teaching and learning. Mutual Engagement embraces classroom research with the goal of making teaching and learning more visible for others to critique and to build theory and pedagogy.
Beyond Boyer: SoTL in the Context of Interesting Scholarly Things
The positive effects of Ernest Boyer’s broader definition of scholarship have been attenuated by stress on published outcomes as indicators of all his scholarships, including the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). At universities outside the research university sector, we need to find ways to recognize and reward a wide variety of interesting scholarly things related to teaching that are not likely to meet the formal assessment criteria that have come to define the SoTL category of scholarship. The faculty’s scholarliness in teaching should be recognized and evaluated directly.
“Hey, I Can Do This!” The Benefits of Conducting Undergraduate Psychology Research for Young Adult Development
Many undergraduate programs require students to complete an independent research project in their major field prior to graduation. These projects are typically described as opportunities for integration of coursework and a direct application of the methods of inquiry specific to a particular discipline. Evaluations of curricular projects have usually found that they positively impact students’ knowledge and skills in that discipline. However, little attention has been devoted to the impact that these projects have on broader aspects of psychosocial development. The current study describes the results of a focus group conducted with students who had recently completed their senior research project in psychology. Results of the focus group interview were transcribed and coded according to grounded theory principles. Five developmentally-specific categories emerged from the analysis. These included a greater sense of competence attributed to completing a large-scale project, an experience of being in a professional role relative to research participants as well as to the audience presented with their study results, and a sense of ownership and pride in completing their project. Universities that either require or are contemplating requiring senior projects should consider these broader benefits to young adult development.
The Growth of Higher Educators for Social Justice: Collaborative Professional Development in Higher Education
In this article, we investigate what happened when, contrary to the typical isolation of faculty in higher education, a group of higher educators from various disciplines in a graduate school of education met regularly to discuss issues related to our teaching and social justice. More specifically, we explored the following research question: How does collaboration among higher educators from various disciplines shape their beliefs and practices of teaching for social justice? Over three years of collaboration and conversation, not only did we expand our own knowledge and understandings of notions of social justice, but we began to take important steps towards increasing our social justice actions in our teaching. This article explores our efforts to create a self-directed professional development group of higher educators and provides suggestions for similarly interested higher educators.
Student Reported Growth: Success Story of a Master of Science in Education Learning Community Program
Quantitative and qualitative data collected from students who have completed a Master of Science in Education Learning Community Program support the effectiveness of the learning community model in facilitating professional growth and transformation. Instructors model constructivist theory. Peer review, collaboration, and reflective analysis of theory and practice are essential components of the model. The program facilitates growth as educators build their understanding about teaching and learning, transfer their ideas and processes into the classroom, and take an active leadership role in promoting change in classrooms, school, and larger community.
Teaching & Learning for International Students in a ‘Learning Community’: Creating, Sharing and Building Knowledge
This article considers the culture of learning communities for effective teaching. A learning community is defined here as an environment where learners are brought together to share information, to learn from each other, and to create new knowledge. The individual student develops her/his own learning by building on learning from others. In a learning community approach to teaching, educators can ensure that students gain workplace skills such as collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving. In this case study, it is shown how an active learning community, introduced into a blended teaching environment (face-to-face and virtual), effectively supported international undergraduates in the building of knowledge and workplace skills.
Traceable Recursion with Graphical Illustration for Novice Programmers
Recursion is a concept that can be used to describe the phenomena and natural occurrences in many different fields. As many applications utilize computer software to model recursion, recursion is a particularly important concept in the computing discipline. However, it is a difficult concept for many undergraduate students to master. A Recursion Graph (RGraph) is one visualization method for representing recursion. This paper extends our previous work on RGraphs to include a tool for automatically generating complete and partial RGraphs from an arbitrary recursive program. Use of this tool allows for more flexibility in demonstrations and more focused pedagogical interactions on the part of students, thereby improving student learning in recursion.