The speakers for the TeachT@lk Webinar on February 21, 2017 were Matthew Robinson , Senior Instructional Designer, and Jennifer Stanley , Instructional Designer, for the ASU School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. Tuesday's webinar focused on how to create "Instructor Presence" in an online or face-to-face course. Although we can't be everywhere at all times, there are some strategies and tips you can use to create an environment that builds connections between students and instructors. Instructor presence can take form in 3 ways: Persona - instructor personality, interests, etc. Social - instructor connections and student-to-student connections to create community Instructional - instructor guidance of students through the learning The webinar went through a number of strategies to create presence, including: introduction videos that share personality and interests different forms of contact information setting clear expectatio...

Today's guest blog is by Anna Krieg, an undergraduate researcher in Sara Brownell’s Biology Education Research Lab. She is a senior Barrett honors student who is pursuing an honors thesis that examines student academic self-concept in physiology. Learning student names is often promoted as a good teaching practice. Although learning student names has been linked to positive course evaluations and positive impacts on the students themselves, such as increased student participation and even student learning, there have been no studies specifically looking at the impact of learning student names. Researchers from Arizona State University have set out to fill this gap and explore the impact of this instructional practice. Do students even care? In short, yes. 85% of students thought that instructors using student names was important in a large class. Nine specific reasons as to why this was the case were identified that could fall into three broad categories: an instruct...

Exploring how the decisions instructors make when crafting exams impact students Last week, our Evidence-Based Teaching Seminar series welcomed Christian Wright, PhD. Christian shared his research on assessments, and how instructors should be making careful decisions when writing exams. Faculty must consider a wide variety of areas when creating exams. Depending on their choices, they may be unknowingly causing students to drop out of biology programs. There were a number of questions faculty consider when building exams: The breadth and depth of the content- Do you cover less in order to deepen student learning in a specific area? Certain collaborative activities help students learn better, but the cost is that faculty may not be able to cover as much content The level of the content- Bloom's Taxonomy is often thought to move students from lower to higher cognitive levels. However, if a professor is asking a multiple choice question that requires students to memorize s...

This week we were honored to have Chris Pagliarulo, PhD from UC Davis speak at our Evidence-Based Teaching Seminar Series. He shared his insights on how graduate TAs learn to teach, and shared a program that UC Davis uses to prepare them better. Teaching is a complex skill that requires repeated cycles of deliberate practice and feedback to master. He said teaching needed to be like "muscle memory". The program consists of deliberate practice of structured drills along with accountability and feedback through observations. They were drilled with 4-8 different teaching practices, and then assessed on whether they consistently used those techniques throughout the semester. He also discussed having grad students build "warm up" exercises based on pre-tests, to help students prepare for the activities in class. Below is a short clip of his presentation. (If you are interested in the full presentation, please send an email to amy.pate@asu.edu ) There are also some...