The Kitchen as a Laboratory

by Naomi Kohen, Materials Science and Engineering
In order to make the demos more relevant and interactive for the students, all of the soft material systems examined were food-based…The promise of a lab that yielded edible results provided an effective motivation for the students to stay for the extra credit labs.

Making It Fun: Framing Literary Discussion as a Social Practice

by James Ramey, Comparative Literature
I was dismayed to find that we had been located in a small, windowless basement room in Haas Pavilion. Claustrophobia heightened my awareness of the need for the students to get along, which led me to wonder how I might structure my course, not only as an intellectual opportunity but also as a social one.

Motivating Students with Choice

by Mary Trahanovsky, Materials Science & Engineering
These methods consume lab and instructor time and neither method is effective in getting students to really think about what will be going on in the lab or how difficult the experiments and lab questions will be. The strategy I used was to make students responsible for deciding what they do in lab.

A New Approach to Teaching and Learning

by Timothy Randazzo, Ethnic Studies
Last summer I made the decision to alter my approach to teaching radically, and the result was the highest level of analytical thinking and enthusiasm among my students that I have ever seen in my six years of teaching…I decided upon three principles to guide my formulation of class activities and assignments: 1) there will be no lectures, 2) there will be no exams, and 3) whenever possible, student work will be reintegrated into the class, rather than being just “for the instructor.”

Improving Writing Skills and Alleviating Grading Confusion

by Christopher Rider, Business Administration
By providing detailed, constructive feedback specific to each student’s essay, my students developed a stronger idea of what was expected. By posing open-ended questions in the feedback emails, I engaged many motivated students to participate in an ongoing email exchange and stimulated many students’ interest in pursuing their topics further.

Strategies to Provide Information Without Providing Answers

by Christie Dowling, Civil and Environmental Engineering
It seemed to me that many students had not come to the discussion section to learn the lecture concepts, but rather to just be told how to do their homework. I was immediately faced with a challenge: how to create meaningful discussion sections that provide useful information without simply giving the answers away.