Educational Advances
Assessment in a New Age of Pedagogy: Students' Attitudes towards Assessment at an Urban Canadian University
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marsha Barber
At a time when students enrolling in Canadian universities are increasingly international, it's important to assess student attitudes towards key aspects of pedagogy. This is one of the first Canadian studies to explore students’ attitudes towards grading. Specifically, it uses Likert scales and written responses to measure and assess whether a cohort of undergraduate university students, many of whom are international, values Pass/Fail grading systems above traditional numerical grades. Findings suggest that students, especially those from overseas, have a strong preference for traditional grading. This is however tempered by the finding that students value written and oral feedback highly, as a way to contextualize traditional grades. The study may be of use to those who assess grading systems, including faculty and administrators. It also offers new data to researchers interested in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL).
Instructor as Collaborator: Teacher-Student Collaboration in the Classroom View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gargi Bhaduri
The subject of student engagement has been a major topic of interest at educational institutions across the globe. The US Department of Education recognizes student engagement as a key element in creating a positive school climate and acknowledges its links to academic achievement. In this light, collaboration has been shown to be an effective technique that increases student engagement. However, collaboration efforts have largely focused on those among students and those among teachers separately, and the concept of teacher-student collaboration is relatively new. The American Psychological Association makes it clear that students who have ‘close, positive, and supportive relationships with their teachers will attain higher levels of achievement’. Thus, this exploratory study focused on the concept of teacher-student collaboration by implementing a collaborative course project in a class of seven graduate students. Students were asked to collaborate with the instructor, and each prepare a research abstract for a peer-reviewed conference venue. Instead of assigning students a specific topic for their research and grading them on their final output, emphasis was based on how the student worked as a collaborator to collectively come up with the topic and how they shared responsibilities with the instructor, while at the same time taking leadership and ownership of their work. This collaborative effort resulted in seven research abstracts submitted for peer-review, with four out of the seven being accepted for presentation. The remaining three abstracts were further revised based on comments and submitted for another conference.
Applying Human Library in Changing College Students’ Attitudes towards Autistic People: A Study of a Multicultural Education Class in Taiwan View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ta-Wei Wang
Current disabilities research have proposed using a social model or human rights model. Therefore removing the obstacles in the schools and society (such as prejudice and discrimination) that prevent growth and adjustment of people with disabilities should be the priority for researcher and educators. Among types of disabilities, autistic people or people with autism still receive a lot of misunderstanding and stigma. Past research have developed awareness programs to change people’s attitudes towards autistic people, however the results are mixed. The current study was based on the premise of the Contact Hypothesis developed by Gordon Allport, and utilized the concept of Human Library, which invites people with stories as “books” to share their experiences with the audience who are the “readers.” This study invited a duo of a real-life autistic young adult son and his father as “books” to share their life stories. A total of 106 college students were the participants. Qualitative written reflective pieces were collected to analyze their attitudes and feelings after listening to the story-telling. Preliminary analysis indicate that some feelings of discomfort of participants were evoked during and after the story-sharing, and empathic feelings and self-awareness might arise. It is concluded that, using the concept of human library, combining with first-person narratives, images, and videos, might help college students decrease prejudice towards autistic people and their families.
