by Katherine Blackford, Chemistry Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2021 Each time I have taught organic chemistry, students have come to me wondering why, even after memorizing all of the necessary content, they still struggled to solve exam problems. They have mentioned running out of time after realizing too late that…
by Christopher Jelen, Classics Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2021 After teaching Latin 1, the first semester of Latin, and Greek 15, the intensive Greek workshop, I noticed a recurring problem that arose early in these courses. Many students were deeply uncomfortable making mistakes in class and would avoid situations where…
by Ellis Kennedy, Materials Science and Engineering Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2021 Materials Science & Engineering 104 is a laboratory course taken by not only materials science and engineering students, but also international concurrent enrollment students and students from other majors because it offers hands-on exposure to techniques that are…
by Andrew Estrada Phuong, Education Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2021 A key national and campuswide issue is low persistence and retention rates for underrepresented students in STEM disciplines. Serving as Head Graduate Student Instructor for Computer Science (CS) 370 and 375 pedagogy courses with faculty members Christopher Hunn and Dan…
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…
by Clarissa Towle, Materials Science and Engineering Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2019 Challenge: MSE 45L is an intense materials science laboratory course for which I was a GSI in the Fall of 2017. This was the first university-level class that most of my students had taken, as many of them…
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…
by Thunwa Theerakarn, Mathematics For many concepts in this subject, having geometric intuition is very helpful for a better understanding. However, many students struggle to visualize these concepts because they cannot actually “see” them...To help students develop geometric thinking, I used Mathematica to create interactive applets that can display multiple three-dimensional graphics at the same time and can overlay extra information on those graphics.
by Justin Hollenback, Civil and Environmental Engineering Based on the mistakes the students were making, I felt that the example problems I presented weren’t conveying the material as well as I wanted. Students did not appear engaged or actively learning during lecture. In response, I developed a strategy ... to make the process of working out example problems in class more interactive.
by Daniel Bliss, Molecular and Cell Biology (Home Department: Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute) Their proficiency at internalizing and recalling textbook-level explanations had led them astray. My challenge, I realized, was to help them be able to switch into the thinking mode of an experimenter.