TEACHx 2018

In this poster session, we will introduce our project as a collaborative effort supported by different units. We will quickly go over the concept of a flipped classroom and will show all the different components of the courseware: adaptive grammar, vocabulary, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and pronunciation. We will present the digital tools we are using to create each component: grammar exercises developed by Northwestern University’s Media and Design Studio, integrated Canvas tools such as Quizlet, the lightboard to record videos, and Playposit to create interactive videos.

One of the objectives of the undergraduate physics curriculum is for students to become aware of the connections between the fundamental principles of classical physics and their personal experience. Nonetheless, numerous studies have shown that students’ awareness of such connections tends to deteriorate, sometimes substantially, following instruction. In this poster, which constitutes the first analysis of the effects of contemplative practices on the learning experience in undergraduate physics courses, we present two practices aimed at integrating formal theory with students’ personal, embodied experience: a sensory meditation and a contemplative videography. In written reflections on their experiences with the practices, the students expressed suddenly becoming aware of countless manifestations of formal physics principles in their surroundings, in an important step toward establishing firm connections between the abstract and the experiential. Furthermore, the students reported experiencing a heightened sensory awareness, somatic relaxation, and mental stillness, in significant contrast to their typical experience. Students also described experiencing insight about the essential place of observation in the scientific endeavor, a reawakened sense of curiosity, a natural motivation to understand physical phenomena, and a deepened metacognitive and meta-affective awareness.

Since their debut in the U.S. in 2012, escape rooms have rapidly increased in popularity. These games challenge teams to work together, solving puzzles and using strategy to progress through a plotline and achieve a goal in a limited amount of time. The collaborative nature of these live-action puzzles requires each player to participate in the challenge and prompts even reserved individuals to engage. As a supplement to traditional final exam review strategies, I created an escape room inspired review game for Biology 393: Genetic Analysis that facilitated a fun, unique opportunity for students to apply concepts they learned in class to an abstract challenge. Through the course of the escape room challenge, students solved a sequential series of genetic puzzles, using material objects to represent intangible concepts, each solution unlocking clues to the next prompt. Ultimately, students were challenged to unlock the “Nobel Prize” before the time expired. This type of game proved to be an effective and fun review strategy and can be easily tailored to other subjects.

In my experience, when we teachers are interested in improving our teaching methods by using approaches shown experimentally to be effective, we generally think in terms of either active learning or cognitive science. But we could benefit by thinking these two schools of thought are part of a broader category, evidence-based learning. I propose to offer a definition of evidence-based learning, with an overview of how active learning, cognitive science, and other perspectives are part of a larger multidisciplinary approach. I will point the audience to some key sources for learning more about both the active learning and cognitive science approaches to the evolution of our teaching and learning methods.

This poster will describe the use of an electronic portfolio assessment system to measure behavioral competencies in medical students at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Our system is designed to measure behavioral competencies such as communication, professionalism, and teamwork by utilizing multiple assessments from a wide range of contexts. In particular, we are interested in detecting patterns in behavior across multiple courses and phases of our curriculum. However, this system also collects a large amount of data, which can be unwieldy for our faculty committee to review. Our visual presentation will focus on how the electronic portfolio has helped us to organize and sort our assessment data in a variety of ways so that both students and faculty can review feedback and measure progress. Effective practices include the ability to map our assessments to behavioral competency domains and display the sorted results via a performance dashboard. We have also developed dynamically updated reports for each student organized by feedback type (rating vs. narrative comment) and course or clerkship. Our poster will also describe a future redesign of our portfolio system and how we hope to leverage new technologies to increase efficiency.

This poster is about a new faculty training initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The program is designed for faculty new to teaching online and blended classes. It consists of two online courses that cover major pedagogical and technological competencies necessary for online instructors. The courses were created to help instructors and teaching assistants understand the differences between face-to-face and online and blended teaching, familiarize them with best pedagogical practices and the LMS environment, and develop their technical skills. We will provide an overview of the training courses, along with their structure, content, and technologies used. We will also outline specific technological competencies (e.g., use of communication and assessment tools) and pedagogical competencies (e.g., instructor presence and maximizing course interactions) necessary for teaching online.