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Employing a Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Improve a Graduate-Level Health Care Informatics Epidemiology Course

August 9, 2024
Peer review of assignments encourages social cohesion among students, promotes a better understanding of course material, and develops soft skills. In the most recent National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) report, employers are most commonly seeking recent graduates who demonstrate the ability to problem solve and who effectively work on a team (Gray, 2024). Peer review assignments can help students practice these skills. Teaching students to provide quality feedback on peer assignments also allows instructors more direct student engagement opportunities since grading time is reduced (Hattie, 2022). This technique can be adopted for courses in any discipline and provides excellent practice for students to apply their knowledge of core concepts.

Create a Case Method Group Activity to Engage Students in Critical Thinking

September 30, 2019
The case method group activity is an instructional design strategy that involves faculty members providing one or more case studies to which groups of students respond. The case(s) could be a real-life case or simulation. It could be description of key concept(s) applied, a story or scenario, an actual case study, a problem or mystery,…

Incorporate Online Debates to Stimulate Critical Thinking and Engagement

December 3, 2018
Online debates have been found to elicit higher levels of cognitive presence in online discussions versus the more traditional question-and-answer format (Zydney, deNoyelles, & Chen, 2014). This can be explained in several ways. In a debate, students must argue for or against a position, with the intention of persuading others to assume the same position.…

Post First Discourse

August 17, 2017
Description Online discussions are most effective when students engage in higher order thinking, taking time to reflect and compose original posts. Instructors play a key role in purposefully designing discussion forums that move “student discourse out of the margins of thinking to deeper levels of thought” (Williams, Jaramillo, Peski, 2015, p. 46). The post-first discourse…

Provide Non-Linguistic Representations to Foster Reflection

October 21, 2016
Nonlinguistic strategies require students to create a representation of new information that does not rely on language. Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock (2001) define non-linguistic representations as the use of visual, kinesthetic, and whole body systems to acquire and store knowledge. Mental images and physical sensation combined with linguistic modes allow students to better reflect. This…

Strengthening STEM Laboratory Assessment Using Learner Portfolio and Electronic Assessment

October 21, 2016
Weekly lab reports are an integral part of the foundational engineering curriculum. In many conventional science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) curricula, students are required to write a report after each weekly experiment, documenting the lab process. Recent research by Vargas and Hanstedt (2014), however, indicates limitations of weekly lab reports, including reduced effectiveness to…

Using GIST Statements for Summary of Learning Content

October 20, 2016
Description The goal of a GIST statement is to write a summary in a given amount of words (i.e 20 words, 15 words, 10 words). GIST is an acronym that stands for: Generating Interactions between Schemata and Texts (Cunningham, 1982; Herrell, 2000). The instructor can determine the amount of words when writing the GIST statement.…

Use a Guided Approach to Support Critical Thinking in Online Discussions

April 16, 2015
Supporting college students to develop critical thinking skills is an overarching goal in higher education. Students with developed critical thinking skills have the ability to evaluate their own arguments as well as others, resolve conflicts, and generate well-reasoned resolutions to complex problems (Behar-Horenstein & Niu, 2011). Given that there is an exponential increase in the…