Course Projects to Promote Student Learning

The focus of this project is to build upon previous work that CEITL has done by incorporating prior science of learning findings into class activites that will promote peer to peer engagement with course content and student preparation before coming to class. This project involves providing students with reading assignments and assessing their preparedness for in-class peer instruction.

CRITERIA FOR PARTICIPATION

1. The course you teach should be face-to-face at the undergraduate level.
2. You assess learning throughout the semester with interim quizzes and scheduled in-class exams.

Ensuring that students read course material in preparation for class lecture/activities can be challenging. The focus of this project is to promote student reading and active engagement of reading materials through online prompted student responses. This project involves providing students with reading assignments and assessing their learning through quizzes/exams.

Criteria for Participation

1. The course you teach should be face-to-face at the undergraduate level.
2. You assess learning throughout the semester with interim quizzes and scheduled in-class exams.

The amount of assigned reading for college students can at times be overwhelming. Course materials may vary in topic, form and complexity, and, compounding this, students vary in reading ability, interest and motivation. One point of consideration for faculty is the task and/or purpose of the reading assignments. For example, are your students reading to learn, to identify facts, to evaluate/critique, to extract the essence, or for some other purpose? This project involves providing your students with reading assignments for varying purposes, and assessing their learning with quizzes/esams and/or papers.

1. The course you teach should be face-to-face at the undergraduate level.
2. You asses learning throughout the semester with quizzes/exams and/or papers.

Quizzes and exams are traditionally given to assess learning, but cognitive science has shown (both in the laboratory and in authentic course settings) that the retrival of information (otherwise known as "retrieval practice") that occurs during testing promotes long-term retention of that information beyond that of additional reading.

We will work with teachers to design, implement and assess the educational impact of quizzing used in their courses.

Criteria for Participation

1. The course you teach may be either at the undergraduate or graduate level.
2. The course you teach may be either face-to-face or online.
3. You are willing to assess learning throughout the semester with interim quizzes and two or more exams.

The focus of this project is to build upon previous work that CEITL has done demonstrating the powerful effects of retrieval practice on student performance in a variety of courses throughout the university.

We will work with teachers to design, implement and assess the educational impact of quizzing used in your courses. This project also involves the administration of a test-anxiety measure. In this project we aim to exlore whether test anxiety impacts retrieval practice and assess the benefits of potential teaching methods.

Criteria for Participation

1. The course you teach should be face-to-face at the undergraduate level.
2. You assess the learning throughout the semester with interim quizzes and a minimum of three scheduled in-class exams.

Team-based learning (TBL) is a learner-centered, instructor-led collaborative learning strategy that is designed to facilitate student engagement in course content on an applied level. With TBL, students achieve course objectives through motivating attendance and participation and by promoting ritical thinking, all while learning how to function in teams through problem solving. The focis of this prokect is to build upon previous work that CEITL has done with UNH faculty demonstrating learning benefits of student performance in courses that used TBL as a learning strategy.

Criteria for Participation

1. The course you teach may be either at the undergraduate or graduate level.
2. The course may be either face-to-face or online.
3. You assess learning through at least two exams.

Projects for instructors intersted in incorporating or extending the use of multimedia into courses. We will work with teachers to design, implement and assess the educational impact of the multimedia used in their courses.

Multimedia projects

7A

You use, or want to use a Lecture Capture Platform (Tegrity) or online videos for use outside the classroom and you would like to work with project staff on assessing the educational impact of these out-of-class learning activities on student performance in a course you will teach.

7B

You would like to work with project staff during the semester on developing PowerPoint (or another presentation format like Keynote) slides for a course.

7C

You would like to work with project staff on developing, using and assessing the impact of student response devices (clickers) in the classroom.

Criteria for Participation

1. The course you teach may be either at the undergraduate or graduate level.
2. The course may be either face-to-face or online (clicker projects should be face-to-face).
3. You are willing to work with project staff to incorporate multimedia principles into the course and to assess their impact.
4. You are willing to regularly assess student learning in the course. For example, clicker questions; administration of a brief end-of-presentation (usually end of class) learning assessments; transfer/conceptual/applied questions on midterm and final exams.

The combination of pre- and post-testing is a powerful tool for evaluating both background knowledge and acquired course material understanding. We can work with you to develop and implement pre- and/or post-assessments designed to provide information on both incoming and learned material tailored to your teaching aims.

Types and Purposes of Pre- and Post-Assessments

8A

You have students with variable incoming knowledge in the subject area, and you want to determine their level of background knowledge to inform your teaching. This can be accomplished through a background knowledge test at the beginning of your course.

8B

You want to identify which course content students are effectively learning and which material may be targeted for learning strategy modifications in future course iterations. This can be evaluated with combined beginning and end of semester course content questions (or only end of semester) to track learning gains for individual course material elements.

Criteria for Participation

1. The course you teach may be either at the undergraduate or graduate level.
2. The course may be either face-to-face or online.
3. You are willing to work with project staff to design, implement and assess the pre- and/or post-assessments.
4. You are willing to implement and/or end of semester assessments.

Proficiency in domain-specific conceptual organization is a characteristic of deep understanding. One way this can be examined is with a card sorting task. We can work with you to develop and implement a conceptual organization task to assess your students conceptual mastery in your subject area.

Criteria for Participation

1. The course you teach may be either at the undergraduate or graduate level.
2. The course may be either face-to-face or online.
3. You are willing ot work with project staff to design, implement and assess the beginning and end of semester conceptual organization assessments.
4. You are willing to implement the beginning and end of smester assignments.