Instructors’ Perspectives of Challenges and Barriers to Providing Effective Feedback

Instructor perspectives regarding the challenges they experience in enacting effective feedback processes have not been the focus in the literature on effective feedback processes. This study investigated the challenges that instructors experienced in providing effective feedback to students between January and April 2020, particularly considering campus closures and the shift to online learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study consisted of six focus groups held between January and April 2020 with five instructors from different disciplines at the same institution with class sizes ranging from 14 to 82. Through a thematic analysis using a constant comparison method, it was found that the biggest challenges instructors experienced in providing effective feedback was their own workload, the disruption that student inaction on feedback brought to the feedback process, and how the instructors managed their own affective responses and mindsets towards feedback. These findings are discussed within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and based on these findings, recommendations for instructors include considering their own limitations when designing feedback processes and checking their beliefs about feedback with their students’ perspectives on feedback in order to align understanding.

Promoting Critical Thinking and Learning in a Large-Enrolment Humanities Class

To promote the development of critical thinking abilities in an introductory undergraduate humanities course in the context of mass higher education, we implemented a course design that employed a series of scenario-based multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and informal peer discussions. Using an online survey to gather perception data and self-reported behavioral data, this study examines the extent to which the course design was effective at promoting critical thinking and student experience. Deductive analysis of students’ qualitative responses indicate that the course design was successful in promoting students’ development of critical thinking. Both deductive and inductive analysis of students’ qualitative responses also suggest that students largely had favorable attitudes towards this course design, though there are also some who express concerns. Our design may be useful for instructors and instructional designers aiming to promote critical thinking and learning in university courses.

Teaching & Learning Inquiry Reviews

A Teaching & Learning Inquiry website review.

Scaffolding Understanding of Scholarly Educational Research Through Teacher/Student Conferencing and Differentiated Instruction

This article reports the results of a qualitative study of the effectiveness of a critical reading instructional intervention based on differentiated instruction (DI) and teacher/student conferencing (TSC) in improving the participants’ understanding and evaluation of published educational research. A cohort of eleven (n = 11) novice graduate students took part in a 15-week course during which they critiqued several self-selected journal articles and reflected on their experience. Results of the thematic analysis of the participants’ reflection logs revealed that their’ initial feelings of apprehension and anxiety transformed into growth in their self-efficacy as consumers and designers of educational research. Likewise, the participants benefitted from scaffolding their challenges and the provision of feedback in becoming more proficient readers and in developing supportive relationships. The study implications, limitations, and suggestions for further research are discussed.

The Effect of Collaborative Learning on Academic Motivation

This paper explores the effect of collaborative learning on academic motivation among students from 17 institutions throughout the United States. Even in the presence of a wide array of potential confounders, collaborative learning exerted a statistically significant and positive influence on students’ academic motivation levels across four years of undergraduate education. Tests for the presence of interaction effects suggest that the relationship between collaborative learning and academic motivation is similar for all students, regardless of racial or ethnic background.

The Role of Self-Efficacy in the Thesis-Writing Experiences of Undergraduate Honors Students

Writing a thesis is often the culminating experience for undergraduate students enrolled in university honors programs in the United States. Because writing a thesis is one of the most difficult academic tasks that an undergraduate student may undertake, it requires a high level of self-efficacy, or belief in one’s capabilities to achieve certain results. However, the factors that contribute to students’ efficacy expectations when writing a thesis are not fully understood. This qualitative study followed 11 honors students over the course of several months in order to understand their experiences as they completed their theses. Data was gathered through a series of four questionnaires and two interviews. Analysis revealed six themes: previous research experiences, emotions, project timelines, structure, advisors, and support networks. These themes suggest that students’ abilities to manage their emotions and employ self-regulatory strategies play a critical role in their self-assessments of efficacy during work on challenging academic tasks, findings which have implications for a variety of academic programs and campus support services. In addition, this study reveals that faculty mentoring of undergraduate students may require greater attention to cultivating emotional awareness and regulation than does the mentoring of graduate students.

Becoming Teaching & Learning Inquiry

An introduction to volume 10 of Teaching & Learning Inquiry.

Audience Matters

There is growing attention to student assessments designed to reach beyond the classroom, including assessments with an immediate or future audience. The impact of audience, however, has not been examined in multimodal assessments across continents, institutions, disciplines, and teaching contexts. Using qualitative data, this article examines the impact on student learning of incorporating audience and awareness of audience in diverse settings through multimodal projects. These include a core assignment in an interdisciplinary, semester-long graduate class in the United States, a year-long capstone project for geography undergraduates in Northern Ireland, and a supplemental assignment for graduate and undergraduate biology students in Norway. This article investigates the impact of audience through multimodal assessments across these three settings and concludes that it can positively influence student learning, motivation, and skill development.

SoTL and the Humanities

In this article, we share themes and tensions experienced by humanities faculty undertaking a scholarship of teaching & learning (SoTL) project as part of a multi-campus, grant-funded initiative. Faculty participants in the project iteratively transformed a course to improve one or more aspects of their students’ learning over a three-year period and documented the process and results in a course portfolio. To support their individual and collaborative work, each of the four campuses had a local leader, and participants met regularly with campus teams, convening with the full group annually for cross-campus knowledge exchange and peer review. At the project conclusion campus leaders gathered participant reflections and discovered a pattern of tensions that included: disciplinary ways of knowing, ways to represent knowing, and ways of writing and sharing. These tensions are similar to those identified elsewhere and can be potential impediments to this work for some in the humanities. Explicitly addressing those potential tensions while helping faculty see how their own disciplinary approaches can help them investigate their course practices is a useful first step toward more contributions from humanities scholars.

Breaking the Binary

The need to make higher education curricula gender-inclusive is increasingly pressing as student cohorts diversify. We adopted a student-staff partnership approach to design, integrate, and evaluate a module that taught first-year science students the difference between biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation in the context of genetics concepts at an Australian university. This module aimed to break the binary in misconceptions of both sex and gender, emphasising that both exist on separate spectra. Data triangulation was used to evaluate students’ attitudes towards the module and their learning of module concepts. Students’ attitudes were positive overall, and evaluation of students’ learning indicated that the majority of students understood and retained key concepts, while also identifying common misconceptions. Perhaps the most important finding was that students who identified as belonging to a minority group had significantly more positive attitudes towards the module than non-minority students. This finding supports previous research that has found inclusive curricula have greater benefit for students from minority backgrounds, indicating the importance of making such curriculum enhancements. Our results speak to both the co-creation process and students’ learning outcomes, providing valuable insights for practitioners both within science and beyond.