Fostering Student Awareness of Team Skills: A Participative Team Formation Process for Class Projects

This essay outlines a participative team formation process for class projects with resources to support instructors in implementing this process. This hybrid process, integrating self-selection and teacher assigned methods, includes four touch points that foster students’ awareness of effective team behaviors and the presence (or absence) of these behaviors within themselves and in team members. The awareness can provide students the foundation for developing team skills—beneficial in both team projects and in organizational teams.

Teaching Rhetorical Praxis in a Post-Truth World: An Undergraduate Course on Detecting and Analyzing Bullshit, Fake News, and Alternative Facts

We are living in an era where reality, truth, and facts are being turned upside down and inside out. Fake news and falsehoods are being spewed out in increasing exponential rates. I was prompted to do something about the propensity of fake news through post-truth discourse and designed an undergraduate course that I titled: Bullshit, Fake News, and Alternative Facts. In this piece, I critically reflect on and share my theoretical frames for constructing the course, the design of it, my experience in teaching it, and report on a survey about the class—and I call all of you to work at least some material on post-truth into your classes or into a full course as I have.

The Strategy Project: An Exploration of Enhancing Self-Regulated Learning in an Introductory Psychology Course

College success requires development of self-regulated learning skills. This study describes a self-regulated learning strategy intervention in a large general education Introductory Psychology course, focusing on the second exam. Students' reflection responses across five time periods were compared with exam performance. Increased self-regulated learning strategies usage correlated with decreased passive learning strategies usage, increased hours of study, and increased academic performance. Strategy project interventions can be effective for introductory courses. However, because students may revert to passive strategies that worked in the past, strategy instruction should be extended throughout a course.

Exploring Value Variations in Instructor Presence Techniques for Online Students

This study sought to define and measure online undergraduate students' perceived value of instructor presence techniques across five communication mediums per pedagogical goal (connection to course content, connection to classmates, connection to the instructor, foster interest, and facilitate immediate feedback). Students found personalized written messages from an instructor (M=4.61) as most valuable due to their ability to provide immediate feedback. Interactive phone calls (M=3.24) were the least valuable in the area of familiarity. Results indicate all instructor presence techniques had value, but some were more valuable than others.

Service Learning: A Multidimensional Approach to Meaningful Learning Outcomes in a Practice Profession

A service learning project was used to encourage social work student engagement with older adults, support a community need, and meet the course objectives, one being conducting a social work assessment. Paired with an older adult resident, students applied theoretical concepts to a practice experience to meet student learning outcomes and expand comfort levels. Fourteen students participated in the convergent-mixed methods study. Assessment scales regarding bias and knowledge were administered and written reflections were recorded. Findings suggest students experienced deeper learning from applying theory and skills and had a positive shift in perspectives of older adults through the service-learning experience.

Collaborative Autoethnography: Best Practices for Developing Group Projects

Collaborative Autoethnography (CAE) is an emerging practice that combines group interaction with qualitative research. Group projects are often deployed in course design to maximize the value of collaborative learning environments. Using existing scholarship, we describe best practices for group projects that apply principles of CAE. To advance the premise of the paper beyond descriptive summaries of pedagogical inquiry, we utilize a best practices mechanism to present a coherent guide for project collaborators to use in various classroom settings. The best practices proposed are research validated by existing CAE and project management literature.