by Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez, South and Southeast Asian Studies Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 The annotated bibliography is an important component of a research-based undergraduate course. But in most of my experience as a student and as a teacher, I found the exercise to complete it empty. Even after providing…
by Alexander Roehrkasse, Sociology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2017 Challenge: The volume and difficulty course readings can sometimes intimidate and discourage students. Such was the case in a course on the history of sociological theory. Facing dense and sprawling texts, students were discomfited by their unexpectedly low levels of comprehension.
by Frank Ong, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2017 The undergraduate digital signal processing class, EE123, was a class that introduced mathematical theory about data processing together with a series of hands-on programming assignments. These programming assignments were based on real-life applications and demonstrated the principles…
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…
by Auyon Siddiq, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research While the content in a typical operations research course is usually technical, the field itself is actually quite practical… I viewed it as part of my job to help convey the idea that the seemingly abstract methods taught in class could in fact have a significant positive impact on how decisions are made in a wide variety of domains.
Elaine Yau, History of Art I have often noted that students who have never had an art history course can be overwhelmed by a commonplace assumption that artistic “masterpieces” are self-evidently great. This point of departure usually results in hackneyed discussions about beauty, perfection, or “pinnacles of civilization.” I wanted my first writing assignment to provide a structured, accessible process for formal analysis that would equip students with a vocabulary from which to build their own interpretations confidently — to treat paintings as primary sources from a moment in history.
by Jesse Cordes Selbin, English I believe that education functions best when students are not merely passive recipients, but collaborative creators, of knowledge. To that end, I designed an ongoing assignment wherein students used online software to contribute to a collective historical timeline of the nineteenth century...The function of the timeline was primarily informational: it was intended to give a deeper understanding of a historical era. But its crucial secondary function was to ask students to reconceptualize their own role as creators and perpetrators of historical narrative.
by Jordan Axelson, Chemistry During 2012, I served as head GSI for both first and second semesters of organic chemistry (Chemistry 3A and 3B). Despite the utility of resonance in solving problems presented during these classes, I found that at the end of Chem 3B, many students still struggled to understand and apply resonance...To alleviate this challenge, I built a kit that included a stainless steel “whiteboard,” dry-erase markers, and colored magnetic pieces meant to represent a single lobe of a p-orbital.
by Laurence Coderre, East Asian Languages and Cultures My...students were having difficulty understanding how to approach literary texts beyond the simple recapitulation of plot. Focusing on what a given reading said, they rarely considered the significance of how it was conveyed....Ming dynasty xiao pin wen, or “short personal essays,” in which authors write in great detail about frivolous or mundane things, offered me an opportunity to address this concept, and students’ difficulties in grappling with it, head on.
by Sonja Schwartz, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management My goal for this laboratory was to engage students of all learning styles by using a combination of passive and active, visual and auditory, and conceptual and applied activities. By reinforcing the material this way, I wanted to get beyond endless bean counting to more effectively teach my students key concepts of evolution.