Team-designed improvement of writing and critical thinking in large undergraduate courses

Helping students achieve advanced critical thinking and writing skills in large undergraduate classes is a challenge faced by many university faculty members. We addressed this challenge in a three-year project using team course design, built around a cognitive apprenticeship model, to enhance undergraduates’ writing, critical thinking, and research skills in courses ranging in size from 70 to over 400 students. Faculty members partnered with specialists from the university library, writing center, and teaching center, and with graduate student fellows who received supplemental training in those units. Together they designed progressive learning activities and written assignments based on meaningful, situated critical thinking scenarios. Instruction teams also developed rubrics for tracking students’ progress on each step, and they used this information to inform the next wave of course enhancements and generate continual and iterative improvement. Assessments developed by the instruction teams showed that students in the team-designed courses improved in their critical thinking and writing skills from the beginning to the end of the semester. Furthermore, an evaluation of student work from the team-designed courses using the AA C&U Value rubrics showed that these students displayed more advanced critical thinking and writing skills than students in roughly comparable but conventionally designed courses. Our results demonstrate that team design involving specialists and graduate students can be a feasible and worthwhile strategy for engaging faculty members in developing advanced instructional and assessment designs that enhance high-end learning in a large university setting

More than pretty pictures? How illustrations affect parent-child story reading and children's story recall

Previous research showed that story illustrations fail to enhance young preschoolers' memories when they accompany a pre-recorded story (e.g., Greenhoot and Semb, 2008. In this study we tested whether young children might benefit from illustrations in a more interactive story-reading context. For instance, illustrations might influence parent-child reading interactions, and thus children's story comprehension and recall. Twenty-six 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds and their primary caregivers were randomly assigned to an Illustrated or Non-Illustrated story-reading condition, and parents were instructed to “read or tell the story” as they normally would read with their child. Children recalled the story after a distracter and again after 1 week. Analyses of the story-reading interactions showed that the illustrations prompted more interactive story reading and more parent and child behaviors known to predict improved literacy outcomes. Furthermore, in the first memory interview, children in the Illustrated condition recalled more story events than those in the Non-Illustrated condition. Story reading measures predicted recall, but did not completely account for picture effects. These results suggest that illustrations enhance young preschoolers' story recall in an interactive story reading context, perhaps because the joint attention established in this context supports children's processing of the illustrations

Aligning Practice to Policies: Changing the Culture to Recognize and Reward Teaching at Research Universities

Recent calls for improvement in undergraduate education within STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines are hampered by the methods used to evaluate teaching effectiveness. Faculty members at research universities are commonly assessed and promoted mainly on the basis of research success. To improve the quality of undergraduate teaching across all disciplines, not only STEM fields, requires creating an environment wherein continuous improvement of teaching is valued, assessed, and rewarded at various stages of a faculty member’s career. This requires consistent application of policies that reflect well-established best practices for evaluating teaching at the department, college, and university levels. Evidence shows most teaching evaluation practices do not reflect stated policies, even when the policies specifically espouse teaching as a value. Thus, alignment of practice to policy is a major barrier to establishing a culture in which teaching is valued. Situated in the context of current national efforts to improve undergraduate STEM education, including the Association of American Universities Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative, this essay discusses four guiding principles for aligning practice with stated priorities in formal policies: 1) enhancing the role of deans and chairs; 2) effectively using the hiring process; 3) improving communication; and 4) improving the understanding of teaching as a scholarly activity. In addition, three specific examples of efforts to improve the practice of evaluating teaching are presented as examples: 1) Three Bucket Model of merit review at the University of California, Irvine; (2) Evaluation of Teaching Rubric, University of Kansas; and (3) Teaching Quality Framework, University of Colorado, Boulder. These examples provide flexible criteria to holistically evaluate and improve the quality of teaching across the diverse institutions comprising modern higher education

Team-Designed Improvement of Writing and Critical Thinking in Large Undergraduate Courses

Helping students achieve advanced critical thinking and writing skills in large undergraduate classes is a challenge faced by many university faculty members. We addressed this challenge in a three-year project using team course design, built around a cognitive apprenticeship model, to enhance undergraduates’ writing, critical thinking, and research skills in courses ranging in size from 70 to over 400 students. Faculty members partnered with specialists from the university library, writing center, and teaching center, and with graduate student fellows who received supplemental training in those units. Together they designed progressive learning activities and written assignments based on meaningful, situated critical thinking scenarios. Instruction teams also developed rubrics for tracking students’ progress on each step, and they used this information to inform the next wave of course enhancements and generate continual and iterative improvement. Assessments developed by the instruction teams showed that students in the team-designed courses improved in their critical thinking and writing skills from the beginning to the end of the semester. Furthermore, an evaluation of student work from the team-designed courses using the AA C&U Value rubrics showed that these students displayed more advanced critical thinking and writing skills than students in roughly comparable but conventionally designed courses. Our results demonstrate that team design involving specialists and graduate students can be a feasible and worthwhile strategy for engaging faculty members in developing advanced instructional and assessment designs that enhance high-end learning in a large university setting

Comparison and Explanation in Learning Causal System Categories

The ability to notice relational patterns across situations is crucial to learning. An important question is how people build transferable and generalizable knowledge by learning from examples. The study investigated the conditions that make comparison and explanation beneficial to learning by comparing learning outcomes of engaging in explanation or comparison in a categorization task and examining how varying degrees of instructional support affect these two processes. The results showed an advantage of comparison over explanation; however, this was specific to combination of relational labels and definitions and prompts to compare. These results add to existing research and extend our understanding of how best to support college students learning relatively difficult material. The findings also inform ways educators can support learning by developing instructional designs that support learning through analogical reasoning

Making Sense of Traumatic Memories: Memory Qualities and Psychological Symptoms in Emerging Adults with and without Abuse Histories

This study explored the connections between multiple measures of meaning making and psychological adjustment in people with and without histories of abuse. Young adults (n =177), recollected their three most stressful memories and rated them on importance and emotional and sensory qualities. We analysed the narratives for lexical markers of meaning making and explicit references to meaning or meaning-making attempts. There was little overlap between self-reported qualities and narrative content, and they were differentially predictive of psychological symptoms and transient emotional reactions. Consistent with the PTSD literature, more salient self-report memory characteristics (e.g., visceral emotions), and negative emotion and sensation terms predicted more symptoms. The narrative indices provided the best prediction to psychological adjustment, with several meaning indices (e.g., references to positive impact) predicting reduced symptoms, particularly for the Abuse group. Contrary to meaning-making models, resolutions predicted more symptoms, suggesting that aversive feelings during memory telling may trigger on-the-spot sense making to cope with distress

sj-docx-1-pss-10.1177_09567976221108941 – Supplemental material for Early Impacts of College, Interrupted: Considering First-Year Students’ Narratives About COVID and Reports of Adjustment During College Shutdowns

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-pss-10.1177_09567976221108941 for Early Impacts of College, Interrupted: Considering First-Year Students’ Narratives About COVID and Reports of Adjustment During College Shutdowns by Jordan A. Booker, Mikayla Ell, Robyn Fivush, Andrea Follmer Greenhoot, Kate C. McLean, Cecilia Wainryb and Monisha Pasupathi in Psychological Science</p

Aligning Practice to Policies: Changing the Culture to Recognize and Reward Teaching at Research Universities.

Recent calls for improvement in undergraduate education within STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines are hampered by the methods used to evaluate teaching effectiveness. Faculty members at research universities are commonly assessed and promoted mainly on the basis of research success. To improve the quality of undergraduate teaching across all disciplines, not only STEM fields, requires creating an environment wherein continuous improvement of teaching is valued, assessed, and rewarded at various stages of a faculty member's career. This requires consistent application of policies that reflect well-established best practices for evaluating teaching at the department, college, and university levels. Evidence shows most teaching evaluation practices do not reflect stated policies, even when the policies specifically espouse teaching as a value. Thus, alignment of practice to policy is a major barrier to establishing a culture in which teaching is valued. Situated in the context of current national efforts to improve undergraduate STEM education, including the Association of American Universities Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative, this essay discusses four guiding principles for aligning practice with stated priorities in formal policies: 1) enhancing the role of deans and chairs; 2) effectively using the hiring process; 3) improving communication; and 4) improving the understanding of teaching as a scholarly activity. In addition, three specific examples of efforts to improve the practice of evaluating teaching are presented as examples: 1) Three Bucket Model of merit review at the University of California, Irvine; (2) Evaluation of Teaching Rubric, University of Kansas; and (3) Teaching Quality Framework, University of Colorado, Boulder. These examples provide flexible criteria to holistically evaluate and improve the quality of teaching across the diverse institutions comprising modern higher education