Increasing Student Engagement by Using Poll-based Teaching

by Chitraang Murdia, Physics Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2021 Remote teaching has come with its own challenges for everyone. One major challenge faced by most instructors is the lack of student participation and engagement. Traditional teaching styles like lectures and supervised problem-solving sessions have not been successful at mitigating this Continue Reading >>

Teaching Causality through an Experiment

by Ashwin Mandakolathur Balu, Public Policy Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2021 Using experimental methods to establish causal relationships has been the holy grail of research in social sciences. However, it is a challenge to teach these concepts since it requires knowledge about sampling methods, statistics, and probability, as well as Continue Reading >>

Developing Narratives for Aspiring Biologists

by Victor Reyes-Umana, Plant and Microbial Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2019 A game of hot potato, borrowing a book from the library, and how a crowd of people enters a room may not sound like relevant topics to bring up during a Biology 1A discussion—but for my students, these Continue Reading >>

Learning Why and not just How

by Anamika Chowdhury, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2019 “I practiced all the homework questions, attended all classes, and even went over lecture notes multiple times… still failed to score well. I give up!” I was rather perplexed to hear such distraught statements from several students in Continue Reading >>

Making it Matter: Connecting Theory to Reality in Economics

by Jonathan Schellenberg, Economics Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 In the social sciences, we seek to understand all types of human behaviors. Economics, my sub- discipline, formalizes these actions with mathematical models, both to reduce the complexity of the world and to highlight the rules that we believe govern human Continue Reading >>

Why Am I Doing What I Am Doing?

by Varsha Desai, Chemistry Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 Experiments in chemistry laboratories often have complex protocols where students perform several steps sequentially to obtain a “correct” product. Seemingly small mistakes can result in a domino effect that leads to inconclusive end results. For example, students forget to “mix” a Continue Reading >>