Perspectives on Teaching and Learning
STEM-it!: Increasing Success Rates for Our Students
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ellene Tratras Contis
The Innovation Corps program works with K-12 students, both in the classroom and in informal settings to understand scientific concepts in a fun and playful manner. Wearable technology is used to lead students through kinesthetic, activity-based “experiments”. The Creative Scientific Inquiry Experiences (CSIE) initiative is an innovative approach to retain and increase the number of STEM graduates by combining faculty professional development, curricular reform, and student collaboration with STEM faculty, peers, and the community through experiential community-based experiences. The use of an e-learning platform to understand our environment and its chemistry through web-based “research” and to explain it in non-science terms lends itself to university undergraduates globally. This type of on-line courses, both “lecture” and “laboratory” is useful to those undergraduate students who dread taking a required science as part their general education curriculum. Soft-skill workshops help undergraduates, graduate students, and early career faculty add skills beyond their formal STEM training. These workshops address the need to communicate to a general audience, to prepare manuscripts for publishing research, to prepare a successful grant proposal, and to understand various careers in STEM.
Teaching for the Transfer of Learning in Art and Design Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Keena Suh
To explore teaching for the transfer of learning specific to an art and design education, a faculty learning community (FLC) at Pratt Institute investigated learning across studio- and non-studio-based courses, different academic levels and disciplines. Faculty from eleven departments participated in “Transfer Sessions” to share a class project they teach, focusing on learning elements they conceived would transfer into and out of their course. Faculty-led sessions consisted of participants teaching at various levels of learning and across disciplines—art, design, humanities, and sciences—framing cross-disciplinary perspectives. The “Transfer Sessions” empowered faculty to engage in a collaborative and participatory process that expanded their knowledge of content in a variety of courses and stimulated dialogue for sharing teaching strategies and learning processes. Participants identified existing and new opportunities for knowledge transfer in and among their classes to support student learning. The data gathered from these sessions enables the FLC to research how transfer supports students’ abilities to develop research and analytical skills, creative processes, to construct and respond to feedback, translate between visual, spoken, and written languages, and develop self-assessment skills. This paper reflects the FLC’s goals and methodologies as a model for facilitating the study of knowledge transfer within a multi-disciplinary learning environment. The study proposes strategies for how faculty can contextualize their teaching, expand their perspective on teaching through the lens of “transfer,” build a community fostering more effective teaching, and support students in developing metacognitive learning skills that can transfer within an academic environment and beyond.
Teaching Chemistry Concepts through Multiple Analogies
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vasilia Christidou, Marianna Theodosiou, Vassilia Hatzinikita
One of the most important challenges faced in science teaching is students’ pre-existing conceptions about the concepts and phenomena they are taught. These conceptions typically diverge from school science and should be taken into consideration by science teachers when negotiating the construction of scientific knowledge in the classroom. Analogies are a particularly powerful tool for science teaching, since they allow comparison and mapping between different knowledge domains: the source (a domain familiar to the learner) and the target (the domain to be taught and understood by the learner), thus supporting the construction of new knowledge. This study proposes an introductory chemistry teaching sequence about the concepts of chemical element and chemical compound by means of multiple analogies, designed so as to take into account students’ alternative conceptions. An experimental design involving two groups of 8th grade students attending a public secondary school in Greece was implemented. Results indicate that the participants in the Experimental Group achieved significantly higher scores in the post-test than their counterparts in the Control Group. Their responses reflected a significant improvement in their understanding of critical aspects of the taught concepts, concerning the distinction between element and compound as well as between compound and mixture. Moreover, they exhibited a better understanding of a variety of characteristic properties of matter. Implications for teaching of fundamental chemistry concepts with the use of multiple analogies are discussed.
Concept Mapping as a Teaching Tool in Information Literacy Instruction: Moving towards Agility in Higher Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marta Samokishyn
During information literacy instruction, academic librarians often struggle to find a variety of teaching tools to maximize young student engagement in the classroom. This paper will address a unique method of application of the concept mapping as a visual teaching tool in the library instruction, which, due to its versatility and adaptability, can be successfully applied in the library educational setting. We will demonstrate how visual concept mapping, being an authentic and meaningful learning tool, allows students to express their research interest more creatively in the searching tools, thus facilitating more productive searching techniques and contribution of librarians to the knowledge construction and progress in the development of a research question. Using Agile core principles and values, we will show how concept mapping can become a valuable tool for transformation. We will compare the effectiveness of the standard search strategy worksheets with the concept mapping exercises and evaluate the effect concept mapping has on students’ engagement in the classroom. Furthermore, we will show how this method appeals to the millennial students, as a means to promote their creative expression as well as facilitate deeper engagement of the students in the classroom through a more relevant learning experience. This research will lay the foundation for the evidence-based approach to utilizing concept mapping in the information literacy education and movement towards agility and transformation in the Higher Education.
