Abstract: College has a lot of unwritten rules, and some of our students matriculate knowing those rules while others don’t. Research has shown that revising homework assignments to make these unwritten rules explicit can help students’ academic confidence and sense of belonging. These revisions don’t change the intellectual content, they just provide the meta information that we assume that students already know. Come to the session for a crash course on making your assignments transparent! We hope you’ll decide to join us this summer in a community to support each other in revising our assignments to be more transparent! We understand if people need to come late or leave early!
Learning outcomes: At the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Identify transparent teaching practices that apply to their course(s)
- Find relevant resources for making their course(s) transparent.
- Critique example course materials and identify ways they do and do not meet transparent teaching practices
- Adapt course materials to meet transparent teaching guidelines
Facilitators
Jenny Amos is a Teaching Professor of Bioengineering and Laura Hahn Faculty Fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research emphasizes the need for robust assessment practices to understand students’ processes of learning in BME Education and Medical Education. Amos has been PI and co-PI of many NSF-funded engineering education projects centered around understanding students’ pathways to the profession of engineering and the development of professional skills in engineering curricula. Amos also performs medicine-related research to understand decision-making processes in surgical planning using virtual reality (VR). She is an ABET Executive Committee member, a fellow of BMES and AIMBE, and the Chair of the BMES Education Committee.
Colleen Lewis is an Associate Professor of computer science (CS) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. At the University of California, Berkeley, Lewis completed a PhD in education, an MS in computer science, and a BS in electrical engineering and computer science. Her research seeks to identify and remove barriers to CS learning and understand and optimize CS learning. Lewis curates CSTeachingTips.org, a NSF-sponsored project for disseminating effective CS teaching practices. Lewis has received the NSF CAREER Award, the NCWIT.org Undergraduate Mentoring Award, and the AnitaB.org Emerging Leader Award for her efforts to broaden participation in computing.
