ENGAGED SCHOLARS CIRCLE ADDS TWO MEMBERS

The latest inductees to be recognized by the Teaching+Learning Center for student engagement excellence are Dr. Marcella Hackney and Jamie Gurt, Esq. Dr. Hackney is an associate professor of science in the STEM Division. Mrs. Gurt is Paralegal Program Manager and an instructor for the program, part of the Business, Social Sciences, and History Division.  Both faculty are big proponents of active learning methods and use the full teaching toolkit to get the most out of their students. As we made the presentation of the coveted green t-shirts to them during class, their students were very excited. Many of their students came up to us to validate the honor as they spoke of ways in which each of these teachers created strong relationships that nurtured learning. Congratulations to Jamie and Marcella who join Paul Guidry, Sandra Guzman, Wes Harris, Mary Miller, and Amy Pinero as examples of faculty who not only believe in the power of engagement as a retention strategy but creatively introduce methods that promote student success.

Dr. Marcella Hackney

Paul Guidry and Jamie Gurt

JOINING THE ELEARNING REVOLUTION
I received a number of positive comments on the Tech Tuesday Tip sent this week. I wanted to follow that with a new article by Dr. Maryellen Weimer about the online learning conversation. She notes, "Is it time to change the online learning conversation? The debate about whether online courses are a good idea continues with most people still on one side or the other. Who’s right or wrong is overshadowed by what the flexibility and convenience of online education has offered institutions and students. Those features opened the door, and online learning has come inside and is making itself at home in most of our institutions. No doubt the debate over the value of online learning will continue, but perhaps it’s being judged by the wrong criteria." Read more here.

CRITICAL THINKING CAN BE TAUGHT
Carlos Sanchez, Silvia Rivas, and Sonia Moral, in their article Collaborative Learning Supported by Rubrics Improves Critical Thinking, report that critical thinking can be improved by paying attention to instructional design. If you are looking to redesign your course with learning experiences aimed at improving the critical thinking abilities of your students, this article is a good start. The authors write, "In previous works we developed and assessed a teaching program with which we aimed to improve the fundamental skills of critical thinking. The results obtained were positive, but modest. After analyzing the limitations of the program we introduced certain modifications and assessed the new version. The changes involved designing the activities programmed by means of rubrics and making the students perform them with less direct orientation from the instructor. In sum specificity and initiative proved to be the key variables in the improved program, ARDESOS v.2. The data collected pointed to a significant improvement of the new version over the old one in the following aspects: a) version 2 improved all the fundamental dimensions, mainly in the pre- and post-test measurements, to a significant extent; b) the effect size was significantly higher, and finally c) these improvements in the program elicited better performance. Accordingly, an improvement in critical thinking can be achieved via an instruction design that attends to the factors that really induce change. Currently, these results have allowed us to successfully add a new improvement to the instruction, which we have re-evaluated." You can read more here.