Session 1
1:15 PM to 2:15 PM
Cross-Cultural Inclusivity in Assessment
Angela Mesic American Indian Studies, Sarah Gordon Altiman American Indian Studies, UW-Milwaukee
Moderator: Amanda Tucker, UW-Platteville
Most efforts at culturally responsive pedagogy often fall short of addressing instruction and assessment techniques. There are needs for culturally relevant curriculum and instruction techniques. Students with strong ties to a culturally defined community, including Native American, East Asian, African, and Latino students, form and maintain their sense of self in a way that is interdependent upon others. Many students raised in the United States form and maintain their sense of self in an independent way, focused on personal achievement and accomplishments, without cultural context and connections. This “independent” cultural model of education is typically the one used in mainstream university classrooms (Fryberg & Covarrubias, 2013). Cultural factors that impact how students view themselves and their community relationships become more important as campus spaces diversify. Instruction and assessment based on interdependent processes in the classroom have been shown to lead to more academic success across a wide range of students.
Embedded EDI Consultants and Interns: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Classroom Equity and Inclusion
Kristin Vespia Center for the Advancement of Teaching & Learning (& Professor of Psychology), Stacie Christian Interim Assistant Vice Chancellor of Inclusive Excellence, Kate Farley Teaching, Learning & Tech Consultant, UW-Green Bay, Caroline Boswell University of Louisville Delphi Center for Teaching & Learning
Moderators: Megan Schmid, UW-Stevens Point and Cyndi Kernahan, UW-River Falls
The Embedded Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Consultants and Interns program is in its pilot year at UW-Green Bay. The initiative was created by the Director of Inclusive Excellence in Student Affairs, the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, and a faculty member on the university's Council for EDI. This year 10 faculty members and their undergraduate interns have been placed in our academic colleges to provide consulting services on equity-minded and inclusive teaching practices, as well as to complete year-long EDI projects. This interactive presentation will encourage engagement by the audience after brief descriptions of the proposal origins, the process of seeking funding, the selection and training of the consultants and interns, and the lessons learned thus far in the pilot year.
Shared Session
Moderators: Regina Nelson, UW-Platteville and Erin Speetzen, UW-Stevens Point
High-Impact Audits in Digital Marketing
Kathy Fredrickson Marketing, UW-Oshkosh
The Digital Marketing Analytics Client Project was created and launched in spring 2018 at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. Since the project’s inception, 87 small businesses and non-profits have received website and social media audits.
The experience provides junior and senior level students with the opportunity to apply what they have learned by completing the Google Analytics certifications, as well as a social media audit.
Jeffrey Sweat Social Science, Georgios Loizides Social Science, Kimberly Sesvold Psychology, UW-Stout
High Impact Practices (HIPS) to increase retention and graduation rates are often resource-intensive and involve the development and staffing of large-scale campus programs. Enhancing student engagement and retention in a cost-effective way serves the interests of higher education institutions, faculty, and students. Preliminary findings will be presented from a survey of instructors at UW-Stout (and a limited number of follow-up in-depth interviews) which focuses on courses and assignments that are particularly engaging or impactful for students. These data will be used to determine the courses or assignments presently being taught that are identifiable as including characteristics of HIPS. By identifying which HIPS elements are present within current practices, steps can ultimately be taken to promote these techniques across the institution to enhance engagement, retention, and graduation rates.
Wisconsin Teaching Fellows & Scholars 2021-22
The following presentations are from participants in OPID's signature program, Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars. These presentations are the culmination of a year-long engagement in a community of practitioners focused on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).
Group Work and Student Engagement
Moderators: Valeria Barske, UW-Stevens Point and Heather Pelzel, UW-Whitewater
Lessons from the Pandemic - Improving Student Engagement and Learning in Engineering Dynamics in the Face-to-Face Lecture Setting
Bidhan Roy Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, UW-Platteville
Keeping students engaged and focused on learning has always been a challenge in Engineering Dynamics. Students come from all major engineering programs, and they range from the freshman to the senior level. As lectures went online during the pandemic, the challenges were magnified. To meet these challenges, a modified
Career Preparedness in the Theatre Arts: A Reflective Process Guided by Student Challenges Related to Individuality
Misti Bradford Associate Professor and Chair, Theatre Arts Department, UW-Parkside
College students choosing a career in the Theatre Arts face an array of challenges driven not only by their passions and interests, but also by their individual backgrounds, belief systems, choices, and needs. Idealized career mindsets are met with obstacles placed by the ever-evolving Theatre Arts industry and from the evolution of the individual. The anxiety associated with the uncertainties of a Theatre Arts career have also been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. This study uses reflections and surveys to provide insight into student problem solving and persistence as they move through their college experience and transition into the professional world. We hope to prepare students for the certainty of uncertainty by increasing understanding about how students persist through these challenges, build resilience, and how it affects their career preparedness at the freshman, graduate, and alumni levels.
Exploring Macroeconomics Students' Experiential Learning Cycle Using Econland Simulation
Praopan Pratoomchat Assistant Professor of Economics, UW-Superior
Kolb’s experiential learning cycle has become
more significant in the past decades among the community of scholarship of
teaching and learning. Simulation is one tool to help students engage in the
experiential learning cycle, and it is increasingly proposed as an alternative
way of learning in Economics. This study investigates the experiential learning
cycle stages; concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract
conceptualization, and active experimentation, using a simulation game called
"Econland" in Principles of Macroeconomics courses. The simulation
offers undergraduate students a real-world experience of policymakers by making
decisions on tax rates, interest rates, and government budgets for seven
periods. The study evaluates the effect of engaging students in each stage of
Kolb's experiential learning cycle by conducting data analysis and assessment
from a survey on students' learning preferences, two reflective essays, and
game strategy statistics.
Team Role Assignments: Improving Group Work Strategies for First-Year Environmental Science Students
Keith Gilland Assistant Professor of Biology, UW-Stout
Project management and cooperative group work are considered important parts of many ecological curricula but are often viewed negatively by students. Here, I focused on three components related to group work in UW-Stout’s introductory Plant Biology class: General attitudes toward cooperative learning, feelings and attitudes toward their group mates, and feelings of self-efficacy as scientists. Working in teams, students identified and mapped populations of invasive species on campus and developed a short report their findings. For each segment of the project, students identified their “job” from a set of prescribed roles and completed a questionnaire related to their feelings toward their own and their peer’s performance, their feelings about group work overall (SAGE assessment), and their feelings of self-efficacy (Baldwin’s self-efficacy assessment). I anticipate using these results to adjust my own teaching practice in this class, others in the Environmental Science Program, and sharing them with the discipline.