SoTL Project Database
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SoTL Projects Database
| wdt_ID | Name | Position | Department | Division/Faculty | Project Title | Abstract/Description | Methods/Data Sources | Stage | Citation | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Michelle Arnot | Associate Professor, Teaching Stream | Pharmacology and Toxicology | Advancing Biomedical Discoveries through Experiential and Integrated Learning | This longitudinal study examines a hybrid active learning pedagogy that incorporates life design and career readiness tools integrated into an interdisciplinary basic medical sciences curriculum. Subject reporting using developed survey tools establish how these interventions are perceived by students in regards to their learning and their confidence surrounding readiness for future research and careers. Through directed online modules, assignments and discussion, can students improve their “perceived” skills and knowledge associated with diverse future research opportunities? Further, we are assessing undergraduate students involved in our fourth-year independent research courses (PCL, PSL and BCH) to compare feedback and student perceptions between those who have or have not taken the JPM300H Research Readiness Advancing Biomedical Innovations course in regards to research readiness and confidence in career preparedness. This project has also resulted in the development of eight online modules that introduce key content to help prepare students for research in and out of academia. Example online module topics include scientific data integrity (GLP, GCP, GMP), commercialization, research teams and project/budget management; these modules will help better prepare our students to enter research environments within and beyond academia. The modules are found on the University of Toronto experiential hub (https://experientialmodules.utoronto.ca/research-readiness/) and are open source for use inside and outside the UofT community. We also examine to see if a team-based and student driven research experience provides different perceived learning outcomes and strengths after completion of our JPM400Y, Biomedical Incubator Capstone Project. Students in this course apply and “live” the skills and knowledge taught in the JPM300H course, through team-based student driven research projects. They must apply project and budget management principles and practice research, business, commercialization/entrepreneurial, communication and team workplace skills necessary for their future careers. | Other quantitative data; Focus Groups; Observations; Survey Questionnaire | In Progress Stage | N/A | https://www.leaf.provost.utoronto.ca/advancing-biomedical-discoveries-through-experiential-and-integrated-learning/ | |
| 2 | Michelle Craig | Professor, Teaching Stream | Computer Science | Research This! Questions that Computing Educators Most Want Computing Education Researchers to Answer | The goal of many computing education researchers is to improve how computing is taught and learned. To do that, researchers must engage with teachers, coaches, and mentors who design instructional materials and deliver lessons. However researchers may not be investigating problems that are directly of interest or utility to practitioners, and thus may not deliver results that are as impactful as possible in their contexts. To find out what research most interests today's practitioners, we conducted a two-stage survey. The first stage gathered questions that practitioners want researchers to investigate, and the second stage ranked these questions in terms of importance. We found that today's practitioners are more interested in student behavior, student understanding, and pedagogy than in languages and tools, curriculum, and inclusivity, and that there is little overlap between the questions ranked as highly interesting by researchers and those ranked highly by practitioners. Our results indicate that researchers need to better communicate why the questions they are pursuing are important, look for opportunities to collaborate with those who teach but have little direct connection with research, and examine the relevance of their research questions to practitioners. | Survey Questionnaire; | Completed the Project | Paul Denny, Brett A. Becker, Michelle Craig, Greg Wilson, and Piotr Banaszkiewicz. 2019. Research This! Questions that Computing Educators Most Want Computing Education Researchers to Answer. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on International Comp | https://doi.org/10.1145/3291279.3339402 | |
| 3 | Michelle Craig | Professor, Teaching Stream | Computer Science | Answering the Correct Question | The first step in writing code is understanding the problem to be solved. When this step is not properly completed, students can waste time developing a solution to the wrong problem. Arguably, this tendency is exacerbated by online automatically-tested code submission systems where students work in isolation and sometimes appear to focus more on passing the instructor testcases than on understanding the problem or its solution. We report on an randomized A/B test with 831 CS1 students using an online submission system. Students in the control group wrote small Python functions based on a written description including a docstring with one example. Before the treatment-group students solved the same exercise, they were given a description of the same functions and were asked to provide the corresponding output for three sets of input. We hypothesized that this would decrease the time and attempts required to correctly write the code because students in the treatment group would not waste time on an incorrectly-conceived problem. We found support for this hypothesis on one of the problems but not on the other, and we offer some suggestions as to how this might be explained. | Other quantitative data | In Progress Stage | Michelle Craig, Andrew Petersen, and Jennifer Campbell. 2019. Answering the Correct Question. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Global Computing Education (CompEd '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 72–77. | https://doi.org/10.1145/3300115.3309529 | |
| 4 | Dawn Kilkenny Rocheleau | Associate Professor, Teaching Stream | Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering | Enhancing senior high school student engagement and academic performance using an inclusive and scalable inquiry-based program | The multi-disciplinary nature of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers often renders difficulty for high school students navigating from classroom knowledge to post-secondary pursuits. Discrepancies between the knowledge-based high school learning approach and the experiential approach of future studies leaves some students disillusioned by STEM. We present Discovery , a term-long inquiry-focused learning model delivered by STEM graduate students in collaboration with high school teachers, in the context of biomedical engineering. Entire classes of high school STEM students representing diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds engaged in iterative, problem-based learning designed to emphasize critical thinking concomitantly within the secondary school and university environments. Assessment of grades and survey data suggested positive impact of this learning model on students’ STEM interests and engagement, notably in under-performing cohorts, as well as repeating cohorts that engage in the program on more than one occasion. Discovery presents a scalable platform that stimulates persistence in STEM learning, providing valuable learning opportunities and capturing cohorts of students that might otherwise be under-engaged in STEM. | Completed the Project | NPJ Science of Learning 2020 | https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347452664_Enhancing_senior_high_school_student_engagement_and_academic_performance_using_an_inclusive_and_scalable_inquiry-based_program | ||
| 5 | Barbora Morra | Associate Professor | Department of Chemistry | Faculty of Arts & Science | Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Crisis: Adjusting Assessment Approaches within Introductory Organic Courses | This communication describes a variety of virtual student assessment strategies employed at the University of Toronto during the academic disruption caused by the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. Instructors focused their efforts toward maintaining a positive learning environment and offering meaningful evaluation methods for students in each of three introductory organic chemistry courses. Assessment schemes were initially modified in response to moving courses to a virtual platform, and a variety of support measures were used while students completed the course material and prepared for online “final assignments”, which in two courses included a virtual rehearsal test. The readiness for and delivery of online final assignments is outlined (including methods to effectively maintain academic integrity), and the important roles of graduate student teaching assistants in successfully completing each course are highlighted. Specific outcomes and reflections are discussed, including approaches which, with hindsight, were considered unnecessary, and others that proved to be valuable virtual teaching and assessment tools. | Completed the Project | https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00529 | ||
| 6 | Emanuel Istrate | Victoria College | Faculty of Arts & Science | When are our science students really creative and what type of creativity should we teach? | Creativity is essential for the success of scientists and engineers. From the history of science, we know about highly creative answers proposed to very hard questions, such as Max Planck and the quantization of energy, Albert Einstein and relativity, or Edward Jenner and vaccines. As a result, there is a strong push to teach and train science students to be creative in their work (Hadzigeorgiou 2012). While creativity should indeed be encouraged in students, at the lower years of university study one needs to determine how to balance this creativity with a strong awareness of what is realizable in practice. Especially in today’s world that is immersed in high-technology news, a perception is propagated in the media that any technology is possible, as long as someone thinks about it. This has led to a number of highly-publicized projects that have completely ignored practical feasibility (Johnson 2015, Hamilton 2016). Students also need to learn in what aspects of a project they should strive for creative ideas, and when to use conventional solutions that have been agreed upon. For instance, most experiments involving electricity connect the ground to the negative circuit terminal. This is standard practice, although there are sometimes reasons to do the opposite. When is it worth ignoring this standard in the name of creativity? Discussions on creativity often consider topics such as design thinking, etc. The discussion proposed here is more general than the choice of a particular technique. We focus the discussion specifically on post-secondary education. This presentation aims to start a discussion on the types of creativity we need to teach, to ensure that students will produce truly creative solutions, which will also yield good results when translated into practice. Because no “hard data” is available on the topic, a goal of the discussion would be to find possible ways to test various ways to teach this topic. | Completed the Project | The Western Conference on Science Education 2019 | https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/wcse/WCSENineteen/Thursday/34/ | ||
| 7 | Laura Dempster | Associate Professor | Dentistry | Faculty of Dentistry | A systematic review of computer-assisted learning in endodontics research | Purpose of paper was to compare efficacy and time efficiency of computer assisted learning with traditional learning methods or no instruction --> electronic + manual searches of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) completed in English up until June 2009 | Completed the Project | Journal of Dental Education 2010 | ||
| 8 | John Currie | Sessional Lecturer | Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology | University of Toronto Mississauga | Is Expressive Writing Transformative? | This session invites discussion on transformative learning around writing and writing pedagogies. The presenter will provide prompts so as to invite participation. Participants will leave having shared insights on methodology, theory, pedagogy and student experiences. For years I’ve witnessed students reporting transformation in their writing and in their perceptions of themselves as writers upon taking a foundational expressive writing course. The course assumes no prior writing experience and attracts students of all disciplines. Through weekly writing practice students acquire communications fundamentals of economy, directness, detail, voice and clarity through composing and revising creative nonfiction narratives. My in-progress research looks at three former students’ reflections on their learning experiences and at texts they wrote, in view of their frames of reference around their self-perceptions as writers, applying Mezirow’s (1997) criteria. Two students achieved high grades and one scored below average. I found that student experiences vary and transformative learning carries different hues. As well, the teacher must be as open to transformation themselves as to searching it out. For Fenwick (2003), this is the unpredictable nature of learning. Reflecting on these cases brought me to reflect upon my role as a teacher, considering what O’Reilley (1993) calls helping a student “find her ‘sacred center,’ the place where she stands at the crossroads of human experience. | In Progress Stage | STLHE 2014 | https://www.queensu.ca/stlhe2014/sites/webpublish.queensu.ca.stlhewww/files/files/Program%20PDFs/STLHE%20COMPLETE%20PROGRAM%20FINAL(2).pdf | |
| Department | Division/Faculty | Methods/Data Sources | Stage |