The Thesis Statement as The Key to Unlock Essay Writing

by Julia Lewandoski, History Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 After several semesters as a GSI and Reader for history classes, it has become clear to me that a concise, clear, and specific thesis statement is essential to a successful student paper. Developing a strong thesis statement enables students to frame Continue Reading >>

Collaborative Grading Rubrics for Assessing Student Writing

by Rosalind Diaz, English Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 Grading rubrics are an invaluable teaching tool. Ideally, they promote fairness and transparency in assessment, and help students set reasonable goals, develop metacognition, and practice self-assessment. But a rubric can also act as a gatekeeper of knowledge. Vague, abstruse, or circularly Continue Reading >>

Constructing Live Knowledge from Dead Civilizations

by Eduardo A. Escobar, Near Eastern Studies Recipient of the Teagle Foundation Award for Excellence in Enhancing Student Learning, 2016 Related Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay: Live Digital Translation for Dead Languages Benno Landsberger, one of the founders of modern Cuneiform Studies, believed that to examine a cuneiform tablet from ancient Continue Reading >>

Live Digital Translation for Dead Languages

by Eduardo A Escobar, Near Eastern Studies Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 The problem of translation remains one of the most enduring challenges for scholars of literary cultures. Translating texts from any historical period can be a challenge, but reading texts from the “dead” civilizations of the ancient world, including Continue Reading >>

Tweeting Sociological Theory as Situated Learning

by Shelly Steward, Sociology Recipient of the Teagle Foundation Award for Excellence in Enhancing Student Learning, 2015 Related Teaching Effectiveness Award essay: Integrating Sociology into Students’ Lives through Twitter In order to make theory a way of understanding the world, students need to be reminded of it outside class. While Continue Reading >>

Learning from the Periphery: Collaboration and the Uses of History

by Jesse Cordes Selbin, English Recipient of the Teagle Foundation Award for Excellence in Enhancing Student Learning, 2014 Related Teaching Effectiveness Award essay: Empowered Learning: History, Collaboratively When I designed a collaborative project for my Reading and Composition course last year, my primary goal was to increase participation. Having observed Continue Reading >>

How Research on Student Learning Explains the Effectiveness of Empirically Driven Classroom Activities

by Elise Piazza, Vision Science Recipient of the Teagle Foundation Award for Excellence in Enhancing Student Learning, 2014 Related Teaching Effectiveness Award essay: Achieving Widespread Participation through Evidence-Based Classroom Discourse As a GSI for Introduction to Cognitive Science, I developed several empirically driven activities to increase student participation by engaging Continue Reading >>

The Semester-Long Research Project Reimagined

by Tammy Stark, Linguistics
As a solution to the related problems of limited time and a lack of incentive to carry out scholarly research on final papers, I decided to make the final project a Wikipedia assignment, in which students worked in groups to significantly improve Wikipedia pages related to sociolinguistic topics relevant to their independent research interests…