2015 RTL Conference

Like most first year CS courses, UTSC's Introduction to Computer Science (CSCA08) has always struggled with issues around community building, and differential learning in a course where the prior experience levels of students can vary wildly. Either students with prior programming experience would find the course boring, or novice students would find the material too intimidating. The TrAcademic system replaced the traditional lab based approach with gamified practical sessions, where students could earn points for completing various tasks, which were set relative to their experience level. Experience points are earned every time a student attends a practical session, challenge points are awarded for anything from solving complicated problems to weekly logic puzzles, and (perhaps most interestingly), teaching points are awarded for helping fellow students with material, or demonstrating a solution to the group.

This allows more advanced students to spend their time either completing challenge questions where they can push themselves, or helping their fellow students, while novice students get help from their peers rather than waiting for the TA. With this system, practicals have evolved from a traditional lab system where some students were bored, some were frustrated, and most were waiting passively for the TA to get around to them, into a facilitated study group, where students are helping one another learn. Students are more engaged, and have motivation to work together to build a community, rather than succumb to the traditional stereotype of the isolated computer scientist.

Fitting with this year's conference theme of "Cultivating Community" we describe a recently initiated Impact Fellowship program at McMaster University, designed to generate evidence of high-impact teaching practices and to enhance teaching and learning at McMaster Universit. The Impact Fellowship model has been conceptualized using a socio-cultural perspective and aligns with a distributed leadership model. The primary goal of the Impact Fellowship program is to build community capacity within the Faculties whereby Impact Fellows serve as mentors and advocates in sharing impact assessment strategies. Drawing from the work of Martensson & Roxa (2015) the program aims is to increase the potential for development of local teaching and learning cultures. While such models have shown to enhance leadership at the local level, there is some research that specifically investigates how these construct enhance educational development (Martenesson & Roxa, 2015). The purpose of this research is to explore in what ways the Fellowship program supports or challenges learning, capacity development, and scholarship.

In this interactive short paper presentation, we will discuss the evolving process of developing the Impact Fellowship program model, as well as strategies for exchanging ideas, broadening conversations about teaching and learning, building community networks. We will facilitate a broad discussion on the direct and indirect benefits of such a process on cultivating leadership.

References:

Martensson, K., & Roxa, T. (2015). Leadership at the local level – Enhancing educational development, Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 1-16.

Applied Statistics for Business is taught as a required course in the second year of the DeGroote School of Business. The course provides an introduction to the application of statistical analysis in managerial decision-making. One major component of the student evaluation is a semester long project, in which students are required to work in groups to perform statistical analysis on real-world data sets.

The students from this class began approaching the Data Specialist and Business Librarian with high-level questions related to their project, while some could be answered with the help of traditional resources and others through highly specialized data sets. Nearly every group came to the library seeking help for their project. It became apparent that a unique collaboration between the library services professionals and the faculty member should be established to build resources and to provide support for this group project.

Thousand, Villa and Nevin (2006) identified this process of collaboration in teaching and learning between faculty and library professionals as consultative and stop-in support. Assessing needs for any modifications to existing supports or curriculum are currently evaluated. During the presentation, after discussing both the formal and informal structure of our collaboration, its benefits and challenges, the audiences will be encouraged to share their experience of such collaborations. Continuous improvements that were made to the original collaboration model will also be highlighted.

References

This workshop is an opportunity for hands-on investigation into quantitative and qualitative research methods in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

More specifically, the workshop focuses on an on-going SoTL project regarding feminist identity development. By using the research project as a case study, the aim is to actively engage participants in both research methods. The idea is to have participants critically reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of both methodologies.

 A breakdown of the workshop:

1) 10 minute introduction to our quantitative study on feminist identity development

2) 5 minutes to write poetry as a qualitative method of research

3) 5 minutes to share poetry with class, trying to identify if the poems fit on the feminist identity development scale

4) 5 minutes-questions 

Laboratory research is at the heart of the science education, yet many undergraduates will have little direct exposure to our research labs during their studies. True, most will be enrolled in a few large course-based labs, but space, resources and, importantly, time, dramatically limit student access to an authentic, independent research experience. As enrollments increase and research funding tightens, the proportion of our students participating in substantial laboratory experiences is decreasing, with the few available spaces restricted to the fourth year. This means that a vital complement of skills and attitudes essential to modern science – critical yet creative thinking, experimental design, data interpretation, even career planning – are only experienced, if at all, toward the end of a student's undergraduate studies. Indeed, the majority of our students will simply not have this opportunity.

Given this observation, we are developing tools and opportunities for researchers so that they can engage multiple undergraduate students early and often in original, publishable research.  The goal is to bring the successful elements of peer-based learning and teaching into thesis experiences. One core tool is an iBook lab manual that walks young researchers through some of the basics of lab research on their own and with their peers, with modest personal supervision by faculty, graduate students, and postdocs. To be clear: this manual would not replace the value of a mentor in the lab, but it will dramatically ease the workload on lab mentors, thus allowing faculty to bring more undergraduates into an authentic lab experience.

Our department is undergoing a transformation. We are at a precipice: and aim to leap unswervingly into an unknown so vast it cannot be perceived.  The end intention; to build a tightknit learning community adept at self-directed learning …. in an online milieu.

And so we set upon a path of designing a high-quality online course inspired by the following advice of Puzziferro and colleagues in their eloquently stated definition of quality online courses:

“Quality online courses are well-organized into learning units; have clear learning goals and objectives; engage the learner through interaction with content… Most of all, online courses should be fun, engaging, pedagogically sound, and relevant.”(1)

We adopted a community-based approach to our online course design. Funded by the Ontario Online Initiative (OOI) - and in collaboration with MIIETL, Pearson and other faculty at Western University - we produced a preliminary prototype of our desired online course.

But what of the student experience? How do we provide a safe, nurturing environment on a platform so technologically advanced it can render the participant devoid of such community-based feelings of belonging? And so, to develop the sought-after online learning community we are employing a rather progressive approach: we want you. We seek YOUR input and YOUR ideas on what constitutes a nurturing environment in an online milieu.  This manifests as a 2-hour immersive Community of Practice (CoP) workshop.

This is a resolute immersion in the learning process at all stages of the learning journey. It will start out small and unassuming in order to adjust to such a thought, but our end intent is to gain momentum throughout the workshop. The end result? We cannot even fathom. The journey? Priceless….

While students are learning the important content and concepts in a university course, they are also developing essential skills in academic research, critical thinking, and information literacy. These skills are sometimes considered secondary, or it is assumed that students should be learning these outside of class with minimal instruction and no clear marks or credit given.

In this workshop, we will discuss academic research, critical thinking, and information literacy (IL) by providing instruction and guidance on developing, emphasizing, assessing, and providing feedback on research skills, all in the context of the essential content and concepts of a university course.  The workshop will be led by librarians with experience in designing curriculum that employ Backward Design, the new IL Framework from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), and a variety of assessment practices.

Faculty, TAs, librarians, archivists, and writing centre staff will benefit from discussing considerations and aspects of teaching and assessment of skills in academic research, critical thinking, and IL.  Participants will consider the benefits of being intentional and transparent in communicating with their students the goals of teaching and assessing these skills.  By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Develop strategies for incorporating teaching of these skills into their courses, including through collaboration across the university 
• Develop a process for collecting and documenting evidence of learning for assessing these skills 
• Determine actions they can take based on evidence of learning
• Create a lesson plan working through learning activities, assessment, and post-assessment actions

In this workshop, we will initiate a discussion of the journal peer review as a specific genre that plays a significant role in defining the SoTL community. These brief writings have enormous power in defining the boundaries of the community, as they can ostracize potential members or facilitate a sense of belonging.  They can also affect the work itself, guiding manuscript content in one direction or another.

Workshop Activities

1. The workshop will begin with our analysis of a random sampling of reviews from Teaching & Learning Inquiry. 
2. Participants will be invited to identify the common characteristics of these reviews.
3. Participants will consider how peer review in SoTL differs from peer review in their disciplinary contexts and reflect on how such reviews contribute to the identities of both author and reviewer. 
4. Next, through a discourse analysis of a selection of reviews from TLI, participants will identify specific rhetorical moves and language choices that encourage both rigor and persistence--that effectively support revision for better writing while also cultivating a positive identity and a sense of belonging in the SoTL community. 
5. Ultimately, workshop participants will draft a set of guiding principles for SoTL reviews. 

This workshop welcomes participants new to SoTL or to reviewing, as well as seasoned SoTL practitioners and reviewers.

In STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and other disciplines, laboratory experiences are typically valued as opportunities for students to gain experience by applying concepts they have learned in a hands-on environment. Beyond giving a framework for the concepts, labs are seen as critical to the development of scientific and engineering problem solving skills. However, the structure and implementation of typical laboratories focus on a straight-forward procedure implementation that questions some of those basic assumptions on the utility of labs. As various possibilities for a virtual or online delivery of very similar content arise, fundamental questions around what labs are for, how they are structured and how resources should be allocated begin to gain greater importance in science and engineering education.

In this session, we will discuss the implications of transitioning laboratory experiences from a traditional physical setting to a virtual one in an online course in the context of the Faculty of Engineering at McMaster. In particular, we will examine the questions that the possibilities of going virtual raises within the context of existing simulations and other resources on the Internet. Participants will be invited to engage in a facilitated discussion on the implications of using virtual tools to substitute physical experiments. The facilitators will welcome feedback on possible assessment tools on the pedagogy and engagement nexus.

There is an emerging emphasis on “community” in post-secondary education, with increased attention to community-engaged learning and fostering community in the classroom. However, not all students can access these versions of “community” or feel welcome in them. In particular, individualized approaches to mental health on campus that send Mad students away from community to receive treatment services and academic accommodations suggest to these students that they are not wanted in our learning “communities” as currently envisioned.

This presentation will highlight the intentional peer support community that Mad students at McMaster have been hanging out and creating since 2012, thanks to hundreds of years ofmental patient social movement organizing. In this crazy sub-community, values of accessibility, creativity, reciprocity, friendship, consent, and privacy offer different possibilities for connection and learning than traditionally found in the classroom. The co-curricular learning that occurs in the Hamilton Mad Students Collective helps protect students from inaccessible and sanist classrooms and curricula. But what if some of this community creativity spilled over into the rational/“professional” spaces of academia?

Drawing on our collective experiences as classroom and community educators, Mad(ness) Studies and Social Work Pedagogy researchers, service users, and students, this presentation will explore how neglected and subversive “fun” can open up possibilities for education. We will share how Fun Parties, blanket forts, and craftivist hallway decorations instigated by Mad students offer new ways of relating – to ourselves, to each other, to spaces, to social justice work, to academia – in the School of Social Work at McMaster University.

Classroom response systems (CRS, such as iClickers) are widely recognized as tools that increase attendance and participation and promote active learning in the classroom (Graham et al., 2007; Heaslip, Donovan& Cullen, 2014). CRS are largely associated with large lecture classes in the sciences and are currently underutilized in second language instruction (Cardoso, 2011; McCloskey, 2012; Serafini, 2013). To address an increased enrolment cap of 100 students in each of 7 lecture sections in 2015-2016, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese is piloting the use of a CRS (TopHat) in its first-year language course (SPA100Y). It is anticipated that this will:

• increase student attendance and class preparation.
• increase student participation in individual and group classroom learning activities. 
• improve classroom management (attendance and participation monitoring)

The success of CRS use will be examined from both the learner’s and the instructor’s perspective. Their experiences are examined through (i) an anonymous survey administered to the students and (ii) open-ended oral interviews conducted with the 4 course instructors. Both groups will respond to questions regarding their perception of the effectiveness of CRS use on student learning, engagement, attendance and participation. The instructors will also evaluate whether the benefits of CRS use outweigh any additional training and increased preparation time required. The students will comment on the cost of purchasing CRS access.

This paper presents results from the initial surveys and interviews to be conducted in November, 2015 and includes an interactive presentation of TopHat where participants try out some of the available question types.

References

Cardoso, W. (2011). Learning a foreign language with a learner response system: The students' perspective. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 24(5), 393-417.

Graham, C.R., Tripp, T.R., Seawright, L., & Joeckel, G.L. (2007). Empowering or compelling reluctant participators using audience response systems. Active Learning in Higher Education, 8(3), 233-258.

Heaslip, G., Donovan, P., & Cullen, J. (2014). Student response systems and learner engagement in large classes. Active Learning in Higher Education, 15(1), 11-24.

McCloskey, K. (2012). Using clickers in the second-language classroom: Teaching the passé composé and imparfait in French. GSTF Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS), 2(1), 235-239.

Serafini, E.J. (2013). Learner perceptions of clickers as a source of feedback in the classroom. In K. McDonough & A. Mackey (Eds.), Second language interaction in diverse educational settings (pp. 209-226). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

This short paper will address the impact of violence in the lives of students and how it affects their learning, their sense of academic potential and vision for their future. Session participants will be invited to engage with how we as teachers and administrators can collaborate to create learning environments that are responsive and flexible in addressing students' diverse learning needs.

Over the past two decases there has been an increased commitment to create safe university and college campuses and to address issues of violence in intimate or dating relationships. Yet little has been done proactively to acknowledge and address the needs of students who have experienced violence in their home. Women students and those who identify as LGBTTQ are particualrly affected by the trauma of violence in their lives. They are often not able to concentrate, complete assignments, feel confident or engage in class or co-curricular activities

Teachers are often the first people students share their experience with, yet we are not trained to response to such trauma. Responding to the harm and violence in students' lives is critical to the success of our increasingly diverse student populations - it's a new dimension to our roles in cultivating a welcoming and comprehensive learning community.

Several authors have suggested that disciplinary cultures play an important role in shaping the teaching and learning practices of their members (Fanghanel 2013; Mårtensson, Roxå & Olsson 2011). Trowler (2008), for instance, argues that disciplines create powerful ‘teaching and learning regimes’ (TLRs) that govern pedagogical values, emphases, and approaches. This study seeks to explore the extent to which such TLRs influence the teaching and learning of creativity.

It is often asserted that universities have an obligation to foster creativity in their students (Walsh et al., 2013; Zacher & Johnson, 2014), yet studies have shown that creativity is only rarely incorporated into courses and curricula as an intentionally facilitated learning outcome (Jackson, 2008, Authors 2012; Authors 2015). By conducting an examination of undergraduate course outlines, this research provides a preliminary picture of the extent to which this finding holds across disciplinary communities at one institution. Using a modified version of an analytical tool developed by Jackson & Shaw (2006), we conducted a close reading of all publicly available outlines for the 2013-14 academic year. The intent was to determine how commonly instructors named creativity or related constructs amongst their learning objectives or assessment criteria, and whether the frequency of these references varied across disciplines, levels, and class structures. We also scrutinized the outlines for information about how, if at all, creativity is taught and assessed in these contexts. This presentation will discuss the results and limitations of this study, and encourage attendees to consider the place of creativity within their own institutional and disciplinary communities.

Context: Interdisciplinary (i.e. University-wide programming) and discipline-specific (i.e. training open students from one field) teaching development programs have been used for many years in higher education. Currently, research on the benefits of these teaching models remains scant in terms of a contextualized and operationalized understanding. To fill this gap, empirical studies are needed. The purpose of this study was to determine graduate students’ perspectives related to interdisciplinary and discipline-specific teaching and learning experiences.

Method: There were two online surveys created with Qualtrics software and distributed at different points throughout the research process: a quantitative pilot survey and a qualitative follow-up survey. Three participatory focus groups with graduate students were conducted to allow for further in-depth exploration in both an interdisciplinary and discipline-specific group setting that represented 7 distinct colleges/ faculties at a mid-sized, comprehensive university in Ontario. The number of graduate student responses included: (a) 177: quantitative survey, (b) 48: qualitative survey, and (c) 13: focus group discussions.

The School of Social Work at McMaster University is committed to improving our capacity to incorporate indigenous approaches to social work.  In 2014 we began a process of gathering interested faculty (both full-time and sessional) to discuss how we might build capacity and reconciliation among instructors  in  the  McMaster  School  of  Social  Work  for  teaching  and learning about Indigenous-Settler relations;  and  to  enhance  instructors’  abilities  to  appropriately  integrate  Indigenous  practices  of  healing, helping, community building and activism into the curriculum.   As with so many such initiatives, the stated intentions are one thing... the actualities are another, more provocative and more complicated.

In this presentation we reflect on our learning during our involvement in the process of planning monthly gatherings for seventeen (full and part time) social work instructors. We will talk about our dual paths as an indigenous person and a settler as we have tried to navigate the complications of an historical relationship that continues to impact our capacities to teach and learn.  The emphasis in this presentation will not be on objectives and destinations but rather the relational work that must be done in order to even realistically begin to think about how we can incorporate indigenous ways of knowing, doing and being.

Fit or foil? Aligning principles of community engagement and pedagogical best practices through community engaged learning and SOTL

This presentation will highlight the foundational principles of community engaged scholarship (CES) and illustrate ways in which these principles both guide and are challenged in community engaged learning (CEL) and in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL). Examples of CEL used in a large first year undergraduate course as well as in 4th year seminar courses will be provided. Research on some of the benefits and challenges of CEL for community partners, students, teaching assistants and faculty will be reviewed as well as Dr. Morton’s preliminary research findings related to a new model of CEL called “Community Focused Learning”.  Examples of other SOTL projects connected with the University of Guelph will also be highlighted. Experiences and insights from conference participants will be sought via questions about how to balance and align principles of CES (i.e. community identified need, mutual benefit & reciprocity, social change) pedagogical best practices (i.e. Constructive Alignment, High Impact Practices, Authentic Assessment) and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

 
Bio:

Dr. Mavis Morton, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and a Faculty Affiliate with the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute (CESI) at the University of Guelph. She is a community engaged scholar and has worked for 25 years with rural and urban community partners on issues related to violence against women and their children and other social justice issues. Other areas of interest and focus include feminist criminology, criminal justice and social policy, feminist participatory action research (FPAR), community based participatory research (CBPR), the scholarship of teaching and learning and community-engaged learning (CEL). She integrates CEL into all of her junior and senior undergraduate courses. For this work she received the UGFA Distinguished Professor Award for Innovation in Teaching in 2014.

Students and instructors typically view tests as dreaded but necessary tools for assessment, with little or no intrinsic learning value. Yet an accumulating body of research indicates that test-taking is a potent pedagogical tool from both a formative and summative perspective. In particular, two-stage collaborative testing, wherein students 1) complete a test alone as they normally would, then 2) form small groups to discuss the same questions and resubmit answers for credit, has recently received much attention from researchers and instructors alike. Each stage contributes to a student’s total test score; generally, the individual stage is more heavily weighted to allay fears of “social loafing”.  This collaborative testing format has many advantages over traditional individual testing. Namely, students are incentivized to consider peer feedback while the information is still fresh in memory, learn to effectively convey their logic to others, and gain the opportunity to incorporate many different perspectives on the same topic. At McMaster alone, collaborative testing has been successfully implemented across a range of grade levels, course sizes, and disciplines, including Engineering, Kinesiology, Nursing, Physics, and Psychology—bringing together instructors from different disciplines to collaborate and refine the theory behind collaborative testing while enhancing the experience from a student viewpoint. Qualitative reviews from students are overwhelmingly positive.

1. engaging students with different fields of scientific research at the university;
2. introducing students to scientific methodologies, reasoning and thought processes; and
3. developing skills applicable to their undergraduate degrees and beyond.

In this interactive session, we will provide a detailed guide to Action Learning Sets  (McGill and Brockbank, 2004). Action Learning Sets (ALS) is a structured approach designed to support groups of 5 to 7 people who are working on individual or institutional problems. Participants support each other in finding solutions to what might otherwise seem intractable problems while at the same time building community using a sustainable approach. The same approach may be used with students in a classroom or with faculty in a professional development session or in senior management fora.

We will take participants through an ALS cycle so that they experience the process for themselves. We will facilitate discussion of the benefits, pitfalls and potential problems that ALS may involve before closing with an overview of examples of ALS in action, in particular with regard to cultivating a SoTL research community.

We will invite participants to take part in a research project in which anyone who chooses to implement ALS in their institution will be able to take part in an evaluative study of the efficacy of ALS in Canadian institutions.

For this hands-on session we will require a computer with PowerPoint, internet connection, and audio.

References

McGill, I. and A. Brockbank (2004) The Action Learning Handbook, London, Routledge  Falmer.

Our relationships with those we teach and learn from are often pushed into limited spaces in which our relational dynamics – listening, collaborating, awareness - become more routine and technical and less embodied and meaningful; we often see these dynamics as inherent to our work, allowing them to go unnoticed and become disengaged.   When our relationships with learners, teachers and community members are created and remain within this limited and inactive space, the rich complexities of human life and the many different ways of understanding the world and our relationships, are marginalized.

I will use arts-based practices, particularly improvisation, to provide an experience that allows us to make active the relational dynamics that have become the routine parts of being with people - in the classroom and in community settings. Engaging with the creative, un-scripted, in the moment, foundations of improvisation can challenge us to go outside of a limited way of understanding, experiencing relational dynamics as an active way into connection.  I am proposing a workshop that uses improv-based exercises and discussions to explore different ways of understanding everyday concepts of relating; in particular, the concepts of support, collaboration and awareness. This artful engagement results in meaningful experiences and discussions that connect personal reflection, relational dynamics, and larger, social change.

Rather than introducing a specific approach to teaching or a particular method of community-building, this research-informed workshop encourages a reflexive, active, and dialogic exploration between the facilitator and the participants and provides a reflexive and engaging approach to relational dynamics.

For early career higher education instructors, teaching in a large institution can be a solitary task. Although we are surrounded by other teachers, we often find ourselves working alone, unable to access learning and teaching communities developed for both students and full time faculty members. This is especially true of educators in positions of precarious employment—an increasingly significant proportion of the teaching staff at most large universities.

This workshop will use games, structured small group discussions, and collaborative brainstorming to provide some hands-on strategies for building a community that can support and enrich the teaching approaches of early career educators. We will also explore and test a framework for putting that community to work in a collaborative way.

Participants will address the following questions: what are the strengths and weaknesses of working together, what kind of teaching work best lends itself to collaborative approaches, and how can you ensure that the process goes smoothly and has great results?

By the end of the workshop, participants will have practiced on the spot community building, analyzed factors that contribute to a successful collaboration within a community, and created a plan for collaboration that is specific to their own teaching context.

In service-learning courses, students play a vital role as active community researchers through application of praxis. Intentions of service-learning education serves as pedagogical means to amplify student learning through implementation of their studies into practice. As active learners in the community, students generate application of praxis and adopt community based knowledge. Through course assigned reflection activities, students can apply knowledge from communities back to the University. Fueling dual roles as a University student and active community agent, students can serve as a medium to reversing praxis by rotating practice back into theory; acting as producers of knowledge. Through reflection and conceptualization of their field learning experience, students can generate community knowledge and bring it back into the University and inform curriculum of community initiatives and agency.

For this paper, I aim to distinguish the role of students as knowledge producers. Students who share their experiences to peers and faculty members amplify community-based knowledge didactically and reflectively back into the institution. To demonstrate this, I will interview instructors of service-learning courses on how their course curriculum stimulates student reflection of their community learning and how students are able to reflect their experience back to the classroom. I aim to analyze whether students play a vital role of bridging field knowledge back to the University through reflective learning experiences.

The SOTL literature suggests that undergraduate education – especially in less “accessible” areas such as research methods – benefits from application of “real” projects involving experential models tied to communities outside the university. The literature supporting these models emerged first in the work of John Dewey (1938) and has been developed around PSE more recently (c.f. Hamilton, 1980; Smith 2001, and Kolb and Kolb, 2005).

Starting in 2010, 60-100 students in the McMaster University Communication Studies core 2nd year research courses have participated annually in a range of qualitative and quantitative research on the communication outcomes of education components of local school boards in partnership with a local environmental group (BARC). The pedagogical process of learning and applying social research methods involved a re-focusing of course delivery, the development of instructor and graduate students teaching teams, and a range of institutional community relationships.

Evidence shows that students conducting experiential community research were more engaged in designing and executing a mix of social research techniques such as surveys, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and textual analysis when they worked with community partners (alongside faculty and graduate students conducting their own related research). 

This short presentation will tell the story of the process and outcomes in terms of teaching & learning best practices and improvements over a five-year period of implementation and development. It will be led jointly by faculty member Dr Philip Savage in conjunction with two recent CSMM MA graduates, Mr. Steve Watts and Mr Tom Wiercioch (who also at different points acted as TA’s in CMST 2A03/2B03). Follow up discussion will be moderated to discuss audience members' own experiences with similar projects.

Objective:

To investigate the effectiveness and utility of the peer-to-peer model of student-led tutorial (SLT) as a learning strategy to build knowledge and skills for pharmacy students across various years.

Methods:

Year 4 pharmacy students delivered SLTs on infectious diseases, patient self-care and cardiovascular diseases online and live to both third- and fourth-year students in preparation for their experiential placements and the licensing exam. Retrospective self-assessment surveys were administered after each session. Five knowledge domains were assessed. A paired t-test was utilized to evaluate the survey data. Thematic analysis was applied to the qualitative comments on the survey.

Results:

A total of 81 students comprised of third and fourth year students responded to the survey. Prior to the SLTs, 46.8% of students rated their knowledge ‘Average’ (3 of 5) while 33.1% rated their knowledge ‘Above Average’ (4 of 5) in all knowledge domains. After the SLTs, 53.6% of students rated their knowledge to be ‘Above Average’ (4 of 5), while 27.5% rated ‘Excellent’ (5 of 5) in all knowledge domains. There was a statistically significant increase (p≤0.01) in all five knowledge domains post-SLTs for both third- and fourth-year students. Useful components of the SLTs were drug charts and case discussions.

Conclusions:

The SLT was an effective learning strategy for students across third and fourth year.  Students perceived an increased level of therapeutic knowledge after attending the SLTs. Student presenters developed public speaking skills while consolidating knowledge.  The peer-to-peer mentoring model is beneficial for student life-long learning and professional practice.

For instruction librarians, teaching information literacy (IL) skills is often an important aspect of any lesson plan. One area of IL includes the critical evaluation of sources, an essential skill that students need to succeed as aspiring scholars and researchers. This ability to differentiate “good” from “bad” information is beneficial to students beyond their academic careers, and will help them navigate the “sea of information” for the rest of their lives. Typically, such evaluation skills are taught through applying the CRAAP test: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose. While humorous and memorable, the name of this test devalues the usefulness of IL and falls into the realm of “edutainment”.

An alternative - the RADAR test - sounds more serious, has more value as a research tool, and is both a memorable acronym and palindrome. The RADAR framework was conceptualized by Jane Mandailos of the American College of Greece, and it stands for Relevance, Authority, Date, Appearance, and Reason for Writing (2013). We taught RADAR as the framework for evaluating sources in a series of one-shot IL workshops, and assessed students’ reactions during the session as well as through a workshop assessment tool. We will present our findings on this framework for evaluating sources through an informal, anecdotal poster session, with suggestions and plans for future research. With the pervasiveness of misinformation and the rise of Web 2.0, information literacy is more important now than ever, and we must conceptualize that by framing it as a serious and important research skill.

Mandalios, J. (2013). RADAR: An approach for helping students evaluate Internet sources. Journal of Information Science, 39(4), 470–478

Uncertainty and error analysis is considered a “threshold concept” in the scientific community (i.e., a difficult but basic skill required to achieve success). However, there are relatively few studies related to undergraduate students’ understanding of this concept (Allie et al., 2008; Day et al., 2014; Holmes and Bonn, 2013; Macdonald et al., 2013). The main purpose of this study is to explore students’ understanding of data reporting, error analysis and propagation, and graphical tools. Pre- and post-surveys were conducted at the start and end of term, respectively, in three undergraduate introductory physics courses in the Physical Sciences, Integrated Sciences, and Arts and Sciences programs.  We aim to identify potential strengths and differences between these communities as they relate to physics.

The above surveys assessed students’ capabilities and confidence levels with a relatively new standardized instrument on uncertainty analysis (the Concise Data Processing Assessment; Day and Bonn, 2011) and a more-established instrument on Newtonian mechanics (the Force-Concept Inventory; Hestenes, Wells and Swackhamer, 1992; Huffman and Heller, 1995; Hake, 1998; Savinainen and Scott, 2001).  Students’ understanding of uncertainties is also compared to various other factors, including incoming high-school grades, program, and gender of the student.

Community engagement is an effective pedagogical method that has been shown to have a wide range of positive impacts on student development (see review in Furco, Jones-White, Huesman & Gorny, 2012). The present study investigated the effects of community engagement on students in an undergraduate clinical neuroscience course with an enrollment of 130 students in the Faculty of Science at McMaster University. The community engagement component consisted of a mandatory group assignment called MacEngaged that required students to design and implement an outreach project in neuropsychology. Pre- and post-survey questionnaires used a 5-point Likert agreement scale to assess student perspectives under four general themes: academic enhancement and development, civic responsibility, professional and personal skill development. It was hypothesized that the community engagement experience would promote student development in all four of the themes. Based on previous research, the largest impact was expected in the areas of professional and personal skill development (Astin & Sax, 1998; Furco et al., 2012). Descriptive statistics suggested changes in 7 out of 25 categories of student development, including scores for independence, dependability, academic value, interest in course content, understanding of course content, importance of reflection, and value of reflection. Increases in the spread of post-survey agreement scores suggested that not all students found this experience to be beneficial. Findings from this preliminary study can be used to guide further areas of research and improve the course design for future offerings. 

Astin, A. W., & Sax, L. J. (1998). How undergraduates are affected by service participation. Journal of College Student Development, 39(3), 251–263. 

Furco, A., Jones-White, D., Huesman, R., & Gorny, L. (2012). Development of a model of the influence of service-learning on academic and social gains with the SERU survey.

Conceptions of quality and approaches to quality assurance of academic programs have been receiving a great deal of attention both globally and locally (Altbach, 2010). Discussions surrounding quality and quality assessment at the postsecondary level are reverberating throughout the academy. With rapidly increasing student enrollment, educational stakeholders demanding greater accountability, and the increased desire for international recognition, discussions have intensified and led to the need for greater clarification with regards to how quality is defined, experienced and assessed.

This poster reports the results of two recent qualitative investigations, which focus on quality and quality assurance in Canadian higher education. These studies were conducted to better understand university administrators’ and faculty members’ conceptions of quality and experiences with institutional quality assurance processes. The following research question guided both studies: What conceptions of quality do university administrators/faculty members hold?

Aiming to explore notions of quality, both studies utilized a phenomenographic approach. Phenomenography is the “empirical study of the differing ways in which people experience, perceive, apprehend, understand, and conceptualize various phenomena in an aspect of the world around us” (Marton, 1994, 4428). To collect the qualitative data, open-ended interviews were conducted with administrators and faculty members in Ontario postsecondary institutions.

This poster outlines the background of the study and the methods utilized. Additionally, the poster will compare the results and present the two models that emerged from each study.

References:

Altbach, P. G. (2010). The realities of mass higher education in a globalized world. In D.B. Johnstone (Ed.), Higher education in a global society (pp. 25-41). Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Marton, F. (1994) Phenomenography: A research approach to investigating the different understandings of reality. Journal of Thought, 21(3), 28-49.

As teaching and learning centres within Canada have rapidly evolved and expanded within the last few decades, various aspects of these institutes have been researched and described, such as the history of centres, the work of staff members, and both the function and offerings which they provide. However, information has not been gathered with regards to the diversity of social identities of those personnel working within Canada’s teaching and learning support centres. Existing literature identifies the importance of diversity in postsecondary institutions and especially within teaching and learning spaces (Stanley, 2001; Mighty, Ouellett & Stanley 2010).

This current project seeks to address this gap in the literature. The study aims to explore conceptions of diversity within Canada’s teaching and learning centres, and seeks to document the various identities that are present within these organizations. More specifically, this investigation utilizes an online survey questionnaire and in-depth interviews to collect demographic data and to gather faculty, staff, student and administrators' perceptions of diversity. In addition, this exploratory, national study aims to determine areas for improving diversity and inclusivity within Canada’s teaching and learning centres, as well as put forth recommendations for future research.

As this study is a work in progress, this poster presentation will outline the background of the study, its significance, methods utilized, preliminary findings, and suggestions for future research.

References:

Mighty, J., Ouellett, M., and C. Stanley. (2010). Unheard voices among faculty developers. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 122, 103-112.

Stanley, C. (2001). A review of the pipeline: The value of diversity in staffing teaching and learning centers in the new millennium. Journal of Faculty Development, 18(2) 75-86.

The potential of a life science course seminar course that was administered at McMaster on science education which focused on the significance of active and deep learning to serve as a conceptual model for post-secondary education will be analyzed in this presentation. The design and execution of the course will be explained using Seligman’s model of flourishing based on the theory of wellbeing based on five pillars- positive emotion, engagement, meaning, relationships, and accomplishment. The presentation will analyse the course using this conceptual framework focusing on students’ wellbeing in the learning process. The design of wellbeing is considered as a construct based on the positive relationship between the five major pillars and the poster will elaborate on how the course elements aligned or misaligned with the framework. By enabling them to be a part of a collaborative learning enterprise, students received the opportunity to establish a strong connection to their own learning wherein they could analyze their own strengths and weaknesses, and find value in what they did. In fact, the presentation will elaborate on how the course attempted to demystify the concept of education by proposing a shift from an authoritative paradigm where students act as passive consumers of education, to a co-operative enterprise where students act as change agents actively engaged in the development and execution of the curricula to result in phenomenally improved learning outcomes. 

Direct observation tools (DOTs) are used to help preceptors assess students’ clinical competence by systematically observing them engage in a clinical encounter. Miller’s Pyramid of Assessment (separating knowledge from competence from performance from action) provides the theoretical basis for this evaluation method. These tools allow for evaluation in natural settings, assess soft skills, minimize recall bias and improve accuracy of judgement. This literature review appraises the psychometric properties, strengths and weaknesses of DOTs to make recommendations for use in ambulatory clinical training settings.

Clinical encounter cards (CECs) are pocket-sized cards that involve 1) assessment of different competencies pertinent to a clinical encounter and 2) a single global rating on all domains assessed. Encounter cards have good validity properties and reach high reliability after only a few encounters. They have garnered support from learners and teachers due to their exceptional ability to promote formative feedback. The Mini-Clinical Evaluation Exercise is a frequently-used tool that requires ratings on six domains of clinical competence along with open ended feedback. It has consistently strong construct validity and reliability but is only moderately able to predict performance on other measures of competence.

This project aims to further understand and alleviate the problems caused by the mismatch between the expectations of high school students about university and the academic realities of first year in science. This project builds upon surveys administered during the last academic year (2014/2015) that focused on the transition of students into first year.   The previous surveys will be adapted to create new surveys suitable for both the current grade 12 high-school students and first-year undergraduate students.  Using the collected survey data to inform follow-up questions, we will develop focus groups for high-school students facilitated by upper-year science mentors.  Results from all surveys and focus groups will translate into the creation of a resource guide that will eventually be distributed to the greater community - high-school students, undergraduate students, and instructors.  This presentation will describe the results from the 2014/2015 data, provide further details of the instruments being developed, and discuss our larger goals to support existing McMaster transition programs and ultimately facilitate more communication between high schools and universities.

Citations:

Bone, E. K., & Reid, R. J. (2011). Prior learning in biology at high school does not predict performance in the first year at university.Higher Education Research & Development, 30(6), 709–724. http://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2010.539599

Briggs, A. R. J., Clark, J., & Hall, I. (2012). Building bridges: Understanding student transition to university. Quality in Higher Education, 18(1), 3–21. http://doi.org/10.1080/13538322.2011.614468

Pancer, S. M., Hunsberger, B., Pratt, M. W., & Alisat, S. (2000). Cognitive complexity of expectations and adjustment to university in the First year. Journal of Adolescent Research, 15(1), 38–57. http://doi.org/10.1177/0743558400151003

Student2Scholar (S2S) is a fully online and open course that aims to teach academic literacies and research skills to social science graduate students.  Set to launch in December 2015, S2S was conceived of and created by a diverse and distributed team of academic librarians, faculty, graduate students, and staff from three Ontario Universities: Western, the University of Toronto, and Queen’s.  Members of the project team brought with them varying degrees of experience and expertise across a range of disciplinary and teaching and learning backgrounds, including: adult education, information literacy, and online learning (to name only a few).

S2S serves as a standout example of what can be achieved when a teaching and learning project is resourced to leverage the time and talent of a cross-section of the academic community whose professional goals and educational interests are shared, despite working in seemingly disparate and often disconnected areas of campus or institutions of higher education.

This poster presentation will highlight the pedagogical (i.e., conceptual and theoretical) framework used in the design S2S, and make explicit the connections between the design of the course and the human resources required, and ultimately assigned to contribute to the development of the course (e.g., organizational development, design and development of modules and assets, writers, etc). Using S2S as a case study in online, module-based, interdisciplinary course development, MIIETL conference delegates will learn how to leverage established and yet-to-be formed relationships across academic units and institutions to realize mutually beneficial teaching and learning outcomes.

MCYU in the City is a year-long community engagement initiative that invites undergraduate and graduate students from all Faculties at McMaster to apply their research interests to public issues (namely those inspired by the needs of Hamilton’s priority neighborhoods). Students are trained to create and facilitate inquiry-based workshops in multidisciplinary teams to children and youth in the Hamilton community. Importantly, the program provides McMaster students with training in community engagement, knowledge translation, inquiry-based learning along with significant teaching and outreach experience.

We would like to present results of our pilot study, and to discuss our research design as we move into our second year. We successfully executed our first ‘MCYU in the City’ event in May 2015 in the Hamilton community of McQuesten with much acclaim from families. Approximately 20 McMaster undergraduate and graduate students presented their inquiry based workshops to approximately 60 students from neighbourhoods across Hamilton.

This is a new model of outreach for conducting community engagement, as we are the first Canadian university that is apart of the European Children's University Network. MCYU in the City is the also the only institution in the network to train students to develop and deliver their workshops as an outreach initiative. Our program is working in collaboration with MIIETL, to develop our research design. As MCYU in the City moves into its second year, the program will be expanding into more Hamilton neighbourhoods, increasing McMaster student involvement, with a vision to empowering students by demonstrating the value of their education using workshop development and community engagement.