Not-so-critical friends: Graduate student instructors and peer feedback

Graduate student instructors (henceforth, instructors) play a crucial role in teaching early STEM courses. Thus, professional development for these instructors addresses an urgent need to improve STEM student success. This paper focuses on a semester-long professional learning community in which six mathematics graduate student instructors engaged in regular cycles of peer observation, feedback, and reflection. In contrast to other professional development work, this approach emphasized that instructors give, not just receive, peer feedback. Analyses of post-semester interviews indicated that all instructors enhanced their noticing of students. The interviews also highlighted the challenges of providing critical, supportive feedback

Three Approaches to Focusing Peer Feedback

Peer assessment has great potential to improve student learning. However, assessment is not an everyday activity for students, and thus providing appropriate guidance to students is a key component of creating a successful peer assessment experience. This paper explores how to structure peer feedback in the guided process Peer-Assisted Reflection (PAR), by comparing the artifacts and practices associated with three different iterations of PAR in undergraduate calculus. The iterations are referred to as the Questions, Critique, and Balanced approaches. Through a detailed analysis of this design-based research project, new insights are generated about how particular artifacts shape the feedback provided by students. In particular, students in the Balanced approach provided more succinct feedback across a greater variety of categories. In contrast, the Questions and Critique approaches had longer, narrative feedback, and it was focused on few categories

Supporting Graduate Student Instructors in Calculus

This paper focuses on the use of the teaching method Peer-Assisted Reflection (PAR) to help graduate student instructors (GSIs) develop as teachers. PAR engages students in analyzing the work of their peers and providing feedback to promote their abilities of communication, collaboration, and persistence. The goals of the PAR activity were taken as goals for instruction generally, and used to support the GSIs to develop student-centered pedagogies. This report provides in depth case studies of two of four GSIs involved in implementing PAR in their introductory calculus recitation sections. Two of the GSIs showed considerable changes in practices and beliefs, while the others showed little growth

A Framework for Transforming Departmental Culture to Support Educational Innovation

This paper provides a research-based framework for promoting institutional change in higher education. To date, most educational change efforts have focused on relatively narrow subsets of the university system (e.g., faculty teaching practices or administrative policies) and have been largely driven by implicit change logics; both of these features have limited the success of such efforts at achieving sustained, systemic change. Drawing from the literature on organizational and cultural change, our framework encourages change agents to coordinate their activities across three key levels of the university and to ground their activities in the various change perspectives that emerge from that literature. We use examples from a change project that we have been carrying out at a large research university to illustrate how our framework can be used as a basis for planning and implementing holistic change.Comment: 15 pages, 0 figures, submitted to Physical Review Special Topics: Physics Education Researc

Developing the DELTA: Capturing cultural changes in undergraduate departments

Departments are now recognized as an important locus for sustainable change on university campuses. Making sustainable changes typically requires a shift in culture, but culture is complex and difficult to measure. For this reason, cultural changes are often studied using qualitative methods that provide rich, detailed data. However, this imposes barriers to measuring culture and studying change at scale (i.e., across many departments). To address this issue, we introduce the Departmental Education and Leadership Transformation Assessment (DELTA), a new survey aimed at capturing cultural changes in undergraduate departments. We describe the survey’s development and validation and provide sugges-tions for its utility for researchers and practitioners

Atopic dermatitis and vitamin D: facts and controversies

Patients with atopic dermatitis have genetically determined risk factors that affect the barrier function of the skin and immune responses that interact with environmental factors. Clinically, this results in an intensely pruriginous and inflamed skin that allows the penetration of irritants and allergens and predisposes patients to colonization and infection by microorganisms. Among the various etiological factors responsible for the increased prevalence of atopic diseases over the past few decades, the role of vitamin D has been emphasized. As the pathogenesis of AD involves a complex interplay of epidermal barrier dysfunction and dysregulated immune response, and vitamin D is involved in both processes, it is reasonable to expect that vitamin D's status could be associated with atopic dermatitis' risk or severity. Such association is suggested by epidemiological and experimental data. in this review, we will discuss the evidence for and against this controversial relationship, emphasizing the possible etiopathogenic mechanisms involved.Univ Brasilia UNB, Brasilia, DF, BrazilFed Dist Hlth State Dept SES DF, Brasilia, DF, BrazilUniv Brasilia HUB UNB, Brasilia Univ Hosp, Brasilia, DF, BrazilSão Paulo Fed Univ UNIFESP, Brasilia, DF, BrazilSão Paulo Fed Univ UNIFESP, Brasilia, DF, BrazilWeb of Scienc