Feedback about Teaching in Higher Ed: Neglected Opportunities to Promote Change

Despite ongoing dissemination of evidence-based teaching strategies, science teaching at the university level is less than reformed. Most college biology instructors could benefit from more sustained support in implementing these strategies. One-time workshops raise awareness of evidence-based practices, but faculty members are more likely to make significant changes in their teaching practices when supported by coaching and feedback. Currently, most instructional feedback occurs via student evaluations, which typically lack specific feedback for improvement and focus on teacher-centered practices, or via drop-in classroom observations and peer evaluation by other instructors, which raise issues for promotion, tenure, and evaluation. The goals of this essay are to summarize the best practices for providing instructional feedback, recommend specific strategies for providing feedback, and suggest areas for further research. Missed opportunities for feedback in teaching are highlighted, and the sharing of instructional expertise is encouraged.     

A Library Compliance Strategy for Regional Accreditation Standards: Using ACRL Higher Education Standards with NEASC Standards

The Commission on Institutions of Higher Education (CIHE) of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) standards places less emphasis on quantifiable and arbitrary inputs and more emphasis on institutional effectiveness and assessment of student learning. NEASC includes the library throughout the standards and also has a long section specifically for the library. The authors advocate use of the ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) Standards for Libraries in Higher Education alongside the NEASC standards to ensure a focus on outcomes and assessment of libraries in the context of other areas of the institution. An effective strategy for streamlining the assessment of library resources and services is provided.     

No assignment? Just flip it: The flipped classroom in first-year library instruction

Abstract

Receiving library instruction is essential for first-year students. In many colleges and universities, students enroll in an orientation-type class and receive library instruction. However, at William Paterson University, students taking this class do not have a research-based assignment – a challenge for librarians in making the content meaningful to students. To remedy this situation, the librarians implemented the flipped classroom in which students watched instructional videos prior to their library class and participated in active learning activities in class. This method proved to be an engaging way for students to learn information literacy skills, even in the absence of a graded research assignment.     

It Takes a Village to Raise an Information Technology Project: Suggestions on Collaboration From Our 10-Community-College Consortium

This article describes the collaborative evolution of the Midwest Center for Information Technology (MCIT)—which is a consortium of 10 different community colleges across the four states of Nebraska, Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota—that was established to improve information technology (IT) education across the region. MCIT has been funded as a Regional Center by the National Science Foundation in three different grants from the Advanced Technological Education program (ATE) due to its successful collaborative model, alignment with research and best practices, focused regional interventions, and data driven decision-making. The fiscal agent for the consortium is unique. It is not one of the community colleges, but rather it is the Applied Information Management Institute (AIM), a business driven nonprofit focused on IT improvement in the midwestern region. The MCIT model, thus, builds a close partnership with local IT businesses and the IT programs in the 10 participating community colleges. This article describes the MCIT model for collaboration, the joint activities undertaken by the 10 colleges and AIM and the results to date of these shared institutional efforts. This article also discusses challenges associated with such a large-scale collaborative effort, and it provides suggestions for collaborative practice for other community colleges seeking to work together in larger consortiums.     

Metaverse-Based Learning Through Children's School Space Design

Metaverse is understood with technological terms such as augmented reality, lifelogging, mirrored worlds, and virtual worlds, and using a metaverse platform is considered an emerging form of learning. Yet, its pedagogical features, such as self-learning, collaborative learning, and learning-by-doing, are identical to those of online learning. In this study, we argue that metaverse-based learning refers to a new reality learners create by assuming that the existence of reality is different in the metaverse. We extracted six educational values in epistemological and ontological senses, reviewing the four realities of the metaverse, including virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and extended reality, which is a way to avoid technological determinists'; approach to education. Based on the values – bottom-up, collaboration, authorship, ownership, interconnectivity, and community, primary school children's (year 5 & 6) groups (n = 20) redesigned 20 assigned school spaces such as classroom teacher office, science room, and music room on their chosen metaverse platforms. Throughout the thematic analysis of design artifacts, activity scenarios, and reflection & presentation, we discovered four themes: collaborative learning with co-ownership and co-authorship; being interconnected with all living and non-living things; co-participants with different roles; and transdisciplinary research-driven learning, which is used to articulate a framework for metaverse-based learning, which is different from online learning.     

Stability of psychometric questionnaires

In 1999, Wilson and Batterham proposed a new approach to assessing the test–retest stability of psychometric questionnaires. They recommended assessing the proportion of agreement – that is, the proportion of participants that record the same response to an item – using a test–retest design. They went on to use a bootstrapping technique to estimate the uncertainty of the proportion of agreement. The aims of this short communication are (1) to demonstrate that the sampling distribution of the proportion of agreement is well known (the binomial distribution), making the technique of ‘bootstrapping’ redundant, and (2) to suggest a much simpler, more sensitive method of assessing the stability of a psychometric questionnaire, based on the test–retest differences (within-individuals) for each item. Adopting methods similar to Wilson and Batterham, 97 sport students completed the Social Physique Anxiety Scale on two occasions. Test–retest differences were calculated for each item. Our results show that the proportion of agreement ignores the nature of disagreement. Items 4 and 11 showed similar agreement (44.3% and 43.3% respectively), but 89 of the participants (91.8%) differed by just - 1 point when responding to item 4, indicating a relatively stable item. In contrast, only 78 of the participants (80.4%) recorded a difference within - 1 point when responding to item 11, suggesting quite contrasting stability for the two items. We recommend that, when assessing the stability of self-report questionnaires using a 5-point scale, most participants (90%) should record test–retest differences within a reference value of - 1.     

Lexical ambiguity: making a case against spread

We argue for decreasing the use of the word spread when describing the statistical idea of dispersion or variability in introductory statistics courses. In addition, we argue for increasing the use of the word variability as a replacement for spread.     

Repeatability of three-dimensional thorax and pelvis kinematics in the golf swing measured using a field-based motion capture system

Field-based methods of evaluating three-dimensional (3D) swing kinematics offer coaches and researchers the opportunity to assess golfers in context-specific environments. The purpose of this study was to establish the inter-trial, between-tester, between-location, and between-day repeatability of thorax and pelvis kinematics during the downswing using an electromagnetic motion capture system. Two experienced testers measured swing kinematics in 20 golfers (handicap < or =14 strokes) on consecutive days in an indoor and outdoor location. Participants performed five swings with each of two clubs (five-iron and driver) at each test condition. Repeatability of 3D kinematic data was evaluated by computing the coefficient of multiple determination (CMD) and the systematic error (SE). With the exception of pelvis forward bend for between-day and between-tester conditions, CMDs exceeded 0.854 for all variables, indicating high levels of overall waveform repeatability across conditions. When repeatability was compared across conditions using MANOVA, the lowest CMDs and highest SEs were found for the between-tester and between-day conditions. The highest CMDs were for the inter-trial and between-location conditions. The absence of significant differences in CMDs between these two conditions supports this method of analysing pelvis and thorax kinematics in different environmental settings without unduly affecting repeatability.