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...