Dynamic Classroom Activities for Engaged Learning Experiences
Teaching Talks include:
- "Figure Facts": An Activity to Help Students' Understanding of Primary Literature - Jennifer Brielmaier -Learning to interpret data from primary research articles is essential for understanding and critically evaluating scientific literature. Undergraduates usually have little experience interpreting figures from research articles. This can hinder their understanding of the research and lead to frustration. This session will describe the use of an activity called Figure Facts, originally developed by Round and Campbell (2013), to enhance students' understanding of research articles. The Figure Facts template requires students to carefully examine each figure in the primary research article that has been assigned for discussion in the next class meeting. This session will explain how Figure Facts has been implemented in an upper-level, writing-intensive neuroscience seminar course in which primary research articles were assigned for reading and discussion. Changes in students' assignment scores over the semester, their attitudes toward Figure Facts, and their self-reported feelings of competency in interpreting data will also be discussed. This session will be beneficial to faculty and graduate student instructors of courses that require students to read and/or write about scientific research.
- Bringing Key Decision Makers into the Classroom - Lynette Leonard - This presentation will share a strategy to enrich a class assignment by engaging key decision makers from campus. The strategy can be a good place to start for faculty interested in increasing engagement in their classroom especially those courses that fulfill a general education requirement. We will describe how faculty at Mason Korea engage the campus leadership and staff in the final presentations for the COMM 101 courses. In addition to providing specifics on the process of identifying key decision makers and scheduling, we will detail the external outcomes and reactions from students, faculty, and leadership/staff. This presentation will benefit instructors wanting to enhance the learning opportunities in their course, but may be constrained by resources, experience, or curriculum. From attending this presentation, participants will learn how providing opportunities to make class assignments feel more “real” can improve student performance and motivation as well as result in tangible external outcomes.
- From Curiosity to Inquiry: “This is about Skyrim?” - Part 1 - Stephanie Grimm - This talk—the first of a two-part series—outlines an approach to undergraduate scholarship that focuses on exploration and expansiveness in research instruction. (Each session presents a concept independently and participants can attend either or both.) Developed collaboratively with a faculty member in Computer Game studies and a subject librarian, this activity was piloted over two semesters in 2023 and 2024. Students begin with a basic question about a well-known video game: “What do scholars talk about when they talk about Skyrim (Bethesda Softworks, 2011)?” Designed as an intentional contrast to the typical research question-to-thesis setup, this activity helps students to become more comfortable and resourceful with library search tools and academic literature while opening their eyes to the broad possibilities of scholarship.
Audience: Instructors and librarians looking to get a sense of students’ struggles with literature searches and to re-energize their engagement with academic research beyond “find X number of peer-reviewed sources” will find this approach useful. Given the focus on digital, real-time collaboration, it is well-suited for delivery in face-to-face and synchronous online courses. This approach can be adapted for any instructors who want their students to value exploration and inquiry, regardless of discipline.
Takeaway:
Instructors will leave this first session with ideas on how they can build library resources into classroom assignments (whether in a library instruction session or otherwise), and to scaffold students’ work with/introduction to /instruction/investigation of subject-specific/disciplinary research sources.
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