Events

Welcome to the September edition of Pedagogical Innovations Journal Club.

We conducted a meta-analysis to test the impacts of one active learning teaching strategy, group work, on student performance by calculating estimates across 91 studies from 53 articles. Our overall estimate indicates that the implementation of group work in biology classrooms increased student performance by 1.00 standard deviation, which we contextualized as a change greater than one letter grade. Moderator analyses revealed that this increase in performance held across all group sizes, class sizes, biology and life science majors and nonmajors, and whether the groups were assigned by the instructor.

Designing and Delivering Online Learning will help you explore and make plans to implement effective pedagogical practices in your online courses. This four module seminar is open to faculty and instructors systemwide and will be delivered completely online, making use of Canvas activities and incorporating Zoom. The four Zoom meetings will be held on Thursdays from 3:30-4:30 pm between September 23 and October 24, 2024. You can expect to spend between 10 and 15 hours on seminar activities during the entirety of the program.

Our chosen title is "Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning," an e-copy of which is available through each campus's library. Individuals can expect to learn about the origins of AI, generative AI's impacts on education, and new strategies and ideas that impact cognition and learning.

Welcome to the October edition of Pedagogical Innovations Journal Club.

Active learning pedagogical techniques are known to be effective in improving student learning outcomes, but many students experience anxiety when these approaches are used in the classroom. The authors of this article describe a study of the coping mechanisms used by undergraduates in response to this anxiety. Some of these mechanisms are more constructive than others, yielding a clear pedagogical message for instructors.  

Our chosen title is "Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning," an e-copy of which is available through each campus's library. Individuals can expect to learn about the origins of AI, generative AI's impacts on education, and new strategies and ideas that impact cognition and learning.

In this interactive webinar, participants will reflect on the importance of pedagogical knowledge alongside knowledge of course content. Participants will also learn how to apply the tool of Bloom's Taxonomy to design student learning outcomes that support effective course design. In addition, participants will explore how student learning outcomes are key to aligning course assignments, content, and learning activities.

Our chosen title is "Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning," an e-copy of which is available through each campus's library. Individuals can expect to learn about the origins of AI, generative AI's impacts on education, and new strategies and ideas that impact cognition and learning.

Welcome to the October edition of Pedagogical Innovations Journal Club.

Preparing for exams in introductory biology classrooms is a complex metacognitive task. Focusing on lower achieving students (those with entering ACT scores below the median at our institution), we compared the effect of two different assignments distributed ahead of exams by dividing classes in half to receive either terms to define or open-ended metacognitive questions. Completing metacognitive assignments resulted in moderately higher exam scores for students on the second and third exams. Metacognitive assignments also improved accuracy (difference between predicted and actual exam scores) for the second and third exam in lower ACT students, but that improvement was driven largely by higher exam scores in the metacognitive group.

Welcome to the October edition of Pedagogical Innovations Journal Club.

Faculty and instructors (and all of us) continue to ask: how can we most effectively use deadlines and extensions to best support student learning? In this session, we'll discuss research that examines the implementation and impact of an explicit penalty-free extension system in a large introductory biology course, focusing on how it fosters an inclusive learning environment. We will consider applications to our own courses, as we aim to balance structure and flexibility in our course policies.