A tool developed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis shows whether chemistry students tend to extrapolate from concepts or rely on memorization. The difference can predict how well they fare academically.
Over 50 years ago, the “My Last Lecture” award was established to honor a UCLA professor who inspired students. Every year, the Alumni Scholars Club asks students from all over campus to vote for their favorite professor, the one whose teaching has inspired them the most. These notable UCLA professors were given the chance to put all of their life lessons and advice for students into one “last lecture.”
Hosted by the Alumni Scholars Club (ASC), this year’s award ceremony and lecture took place on Tuesday, May 16 from 7-9pm in the De Neve Auditorium.
Congrats, Professor Samani, and thank you for your inspirational teaching!
To see past recipients of this award and watch their lectures, please see the UCLA Alumni website here.
While e-books have entered some classrooms, STEM instruction has remained unchanged for nearly as long as the subjects have been taught. With his interactive app, Weinberg, a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, hopes to inspire a new kind of classroom engagement.
Chem101, his first subject-specific tool, allows students to interact with and respond to an instructor in real time, and receive automated feedback to use in later classroom discussions. Take a topic that vexes a lot of first-year chemistry students: Lewis structures. Lewis structures, also known as Lewis dot diagrams, are two-dimensional drawings that show how molecules in an element are connected, as well as the shape of the molecule. During a lecture, students can use 101 to practice drawing these structures, which educators can then view, review and correct if needed. After a pilot study last fall, the app is being used at several major U.S. universities with much favorable feedback.
J. Mark McFadden offers advice on how you can change the temperature in your classroom without touching the thermostat.
Without question, a major classroom challenge facing today’s educators is getting their students to put down their phones and pick up their level of engagement. While a generation ago educators might find their students getting sidetracked by an attractive classmate, an enchanting daydream or passing notes about an upcoming tailgate party, today’s smartphones present educators with a whole new array of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
According to the 2011 article “The Use and Abuse of Cell Phones and Text Messaging in the Classroom: A Survey of College Students,” published in College Teaching, after surveying “269 college students from 21 academic majors at a small Northeastern university,” authors Deborah R. Tindall and Robert W. Bohlander found that “95 percent of students bring their phones to class every day, 92 percent use their phones to text message during class time and 10 percent admit they have texted during an exam on at least one occasion.”
After much trial and error, I have come to the conclusion that engaging my students is best accomplished by making them feel a bit anxious while keeping them in relatively close proximity to their comfort zone. I’ve had a great deal of success simply by rearranging the chairs in my classroom, making my students give pop oral reports on the previous night’s reading assignment and, when assigning collaborative writing assignments, pairing up two students who are exceedingly different from each other. Although these three pedagogical methods are far from foolproof, they have generally proven effective.
Dr. Johnson, a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator has been instrumental in establishing and supporting the Organization of African-American Students Excelling in STEM (OASES), a program that supports the success of African-American and other minorities in science. She also established a research-based program for first year science majors from underrepresented and underserved groups.
As the Life Sciences Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence, and Co-Chair of the Life Sciences Diversity Advisory Committee, Dr. Johnson has played a major role in making Life Sciences a campus and national leader in diversity and inclusive excellence. Her work has been the driving force for the requirement of a statement on contributions to diversity and inclusion in all faculty merit and promotion dossiers.
Finally, Dr. Johnson has developed strategies to achieve excellence in pedagogy and scholarship through diversity and inclusion and was part of a small group of campus faculty who contributed to the passage of the College of Letters and Science Diversity Course requirement.
Across the biomedical research community, people agree that something is seriously wrong with the academic labor market. Thousands of Ph.D. holders unable to obtain faculty jobs search for other opportunities despite lack of training for nonacademic employment, while many faculty investigators struggle, often futilely, to win funding amid intense competition.
But if jobs and funding opportunities are lacking, reports on the ills of the biomedical enterprise most certainly are not. The already-groaning shelf of studies, analyses, proposals, and recommendations penned over recent decades present strikingly similar conclusions and suggestions from an array of highly credentialed committees, boards, and blue-ribbon commissions. Nonetheless, in January, two ad hoc committees of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine kicked off projects to add to this literature. But readers familiar with those previous documents—and with the community’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for following the many earnest plans for reform offered therein—may share my skepticism that the newly commissioned reports are more likely than their numerous authoritative predecessors to spur systemic change.
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The past several decades have seen an interest in learning surge. It’s always been part of our educational endeavors, but the recent focus on it has been intense—that is, for teachers. Our interest is not shared by most of our students. They are still pretty much all about grades, preferably those acquired easily. They will work for points, but not very enthusiastically, if at all, without them.
Grades are important; we can’t say they don’t matter. They’re what gets students financial aid, job interviews, and admission to grad school. But in the larger scheme of life, grades don’t matter all that much. When was the last time someone asked about your GPA? It’s the knowledge and skills acquired in college that make a difference in what we do and how we live. Yes, grades are supposed to measure learning and they do, but not all that definitively.
Somehow we’ve got to get students more focused on learning and more accurately understanding what it requires. So many students still cling to the notion that grades measure ability, and that good grades result from big brains, not time and effort devoted to study. How do we make the point that IQ matters far less than the commitment to hard work?
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Some institutions are experimenting with ways to prepare students for a range of career opportunities. As institutions build these programs, author L. Maren Wood asks that they keep two important points about the nonfaculty job market in mind:
Institutions should build programs to address these two points. Here are a few ideas on how that might happen.
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This program seeks to develop a mentoring ethos by providing leadership, mentorship and diversity sensitivity training to graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. In addition, the UCLA Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL), provides professional development and training for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. Although this course if not for credit, those who complete the seminar course will receive a certificate of completion as part of UCLA CIRTL engagement.
RSVP to attend by May 22nd at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EMTSUMMER2017RSVP
– For more information about the EMT program, see the website: https://ceils.ucla.edu/entering-mentoring-training-program/.
– For questions please contact Rachel Kennison (rkennison@ceils.ucla.edu) or Diana Azurdia (dazurdia@mednet.ucla.edu) .
– To register for CIRTL, please go to https://www.cirtl.net/
There’s at least one issue that Americans aren’t divided on – going to college has become both more necessary and less affordable for most students over the last several years. And cost is one of the major reasons that only 41 percent of students actually earn a four-year degree within four years.
But finishing in four years matters, because research shows that the longer it takes, the less likely a student is to make it to graduation. A quarter of students drop out after four years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
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