Category Archives: Research

Turning Deadlines From Enemies to Energizers
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Turning Deadlines From Enemies Into Energizers

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece, James M. Lang and Kristi Rudenga discuss combining intrinsic motivation strategies with extrinsic motivators that have come under scrutiny, like deadlines, grades, and punitive course policies. 

These recommendations speak to the moment many educators find themselves in: We’re no longer in the acute phase of the pandemic, where instructors and students are doing the best they can amidst historically challenging circumstances that necessitated changes to many educational norms. Now, we’re grappling with a gray area that’s just as challenging, as we try to decide which educational norms need to be reinstated and which “pandemic lessons” should be integrated into our practice moving forward.

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Revamping Office Hours

I have a hard time getting students to come to my office hours. When I do have one-on-one conversations with students outside of class, they almost always feel like a breakthrough of some sort, especially when meeting with my online students that I rarely chat with synchronously. As I start to wrap up this quarter at DePaul and make my inevitable list of all the things I want to do differently next quarter, I’m looking for ways to see more students during my office hours. 

I’m not the only one trying to figure this out. Derek Bruff and Beckie Supiano reference the same study led by Jeremy L. Hsu at Chapman University. In Spring 2021, Hsu and his team surveyed 500+ STEM students and 28 instructors to figure out what they think about office hours. Students and instructors both identified “Ask questions or review material, including going more in depth into related concepts” as the top reason to use office hours. 

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Post Once, Reply Twice… But Why?

At some point–even prior to the start of COVID-19–most online instructors have relied on the ‘Post Once, Reply Twice’ formula for their online discussions. It is unclear where this formula originated, but like the Pot Roast Principle, there is no real reason we need to be bound by it. Discussions remain a pain point for most online instructors, so what can be done? How do we make our online discussions something students want to engage in? What alternatives exist?
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Mind Control: Research on how what we think changes the way our bodies respond

Like many others out there, I’ve become a bit of a podcast obsessive. I know that we can’t really multitask, but when I’m able to go for a run and engage in some learning while I’m running, it almost feels like I’m able to get a two-for-one experience.

Last year, Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast introduced me to Dr. Andrew Huberman, whose Huberman Lab podcast introduced me to Dr. Alia Crum. After hearing Dr. Crum describe the different ways she approaches researching the physiological impacts of mindset shifts, I did a deep(er) dive into her work to better understand how she’s able to empirically capture the ways our bodies respond to our brains learning new information.

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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Foundational STEM courses Curated Resources and Action Items

Students watching webinar on computer, studying online.

Authors

Kyle Grice and Margaret Bell

Our faculty learning community (FLC) generated some big ideas to make STEM classrooms more equitable. Below are some big ideas to make STEM classrooms more equitable; we give a brief orientation to the concepts, with links to additional resources, and potential next steps. Of course, this is only a selection of the extensive body of work, and there is more to be done. While there are a lot of ideas within this list, the most important thing is to simply begin. Within some of these ideas are comments from your colleagues at DePaul about their experiences with implementing the ideas. While our FLC focused on STEM, these concepts could be applied to any course at DePaul. Full names of all the participants in the FLC and their contact information are at the end of the document.  

I. Spend some time in social learning and personal reflection

Big ideas: 

Meaningful and sustained change in education and academia can only come from acknowledging several key concepts: 1) Our society was built in a way that disproportionately privileges White / Male / Cis / Hetero / Able-bodied / Young / Neurotypical / Christian / High Socio-economic-status people in education, housing, employment, and health and well-being, at the implicit exclusion or explicit oppression of ‘others’. Therefore, equity, not just equality, is our responsibility in academia. 2) We all have implicit in-group biases developed from existing in our current society and, as instructors, are coming from places of power and privilege. 3) Everyone has equal and infinite potential to learn and grow, and emphasizing a growth mindset in interacting with students can be impactful. Continue reading →

Frame-Switching As a Way to Get Unstuck: A Student Perspective

Authors

Mary Bridget Kustusch, Kyle Benjamin, and Grace Heath

When you are working on a problem and get stuck, how do you get “un-stuck”? Many of us have developed a myriad of tools, some explicit and some implicit, for helping us move past those sticky places in our work, but how did we develop these tools? How do we help our students develop these tools?

This figure illustrates the theoretical framework used in the larger collaboration for exploring epistemic framing. By placing framing along two dimensions (algorithmic to conceptual and math to physics), we can map how an individual or group moves through this framing space. Each quadrant also contains a brief description of what framing in that quadrant might look like, including an image taken directly from our data.
Figure 1. This figure illustrates the theoretical framework used in the larger collaboration for exploring epistemic framing. By placing framing along two dimensions (algorithmic to conceptual and math to physics), we can map how an individual or group moves through this framing space. Each quadrant also contains a brief description of what framing in that quadrant might look like, including an image taken directly from our data.

As a part of a larger collaboration, we are working to better understand the role of epistemological, or epistemic, framing in problem-solving in upper-division physics. Epistemic framing refers to how a task is perceived, particularly with regard to what knowledge and tools are necessary for completing the task. The particular theoretical framework that we are using considers framing along two dimensions: from conceptual to algorithmic and from math to physics. By putting these dimensions along two axes, we can map how an individual or group moves through this framing space (see Figure). For example, if one is discussing the properties of the physics quantities related to the problem at hand, they are framing this as more conceptual than algorithmic and more as physics than math. Thus, they would be somewhere in the upper right quadrant of this space.

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