Scholarly Outputs

In a fourth year undergraduate research methods class 99% of the students were Facebook users, routinely checking for updates, 10 to 20 times a day. Thus, a facebook page seemed like a natural addition to this seminar course, which requires the budding researchers to discuss and review literature, data, and regression analysis. A Facebook group resembles an online café with walls to the rest of the online community, allowing students to (a) chat in real-time, (b) discuss in virtual-time, and (c) share materials through straightforward file upload. Facebook groups can be open (public), closed (require administrator approval for joining and only members can read the posts), or secret (only members can see the group, who’s in it, and what what’s being posted). As for the benefits of a Facebook group, not only did I see better online interactions and face-to-face discussions, but also an easy way to receive continuous feedback from the students.

Understanding and thinking critically about scientific evidence is a crucial skill in the modern world. We present a simple learning framework that employs cycles of decisions about making and acting on quantitative comparisons between datasets or data and models. his structure led to significant and sustained improvement in students’ critical thinking behaviors, compared with a control group, with effects far beyond that of statistical significance.

Peer feedback is a useful strategy in teaching and learning, but its effectiveness particularly in introductory courses can be limited by the relative newness of students to both the body of knowledge upon which they are being asked to provide feedback and the skill set involved in providing good feedback. Students perceived this novel comparative approach increased their facility with course content, their ability assess their own work, and their capacity to provide feedback on the work of others in a collaborative learning environment.

Many students in the Faculty of Arts in departments often fear quantitative methods and try to avoid courses that require any level of math. Students also report that methods courses are boring, leading to poor attendance and low achievement (Onwuegbuzie, 2010). We believe hands on time with data and data analysis software through labs and individual research projects will increase student learning (Wei, 2005). Further, a fundamental notion of inquiry guided learning in Sociology suggests that students should think and act like Sociologists (Atkinson & Hunt, 2008). This presentation tests in practice the idea that experiential learning and practice increase learning (Tishkovskaya & Lancaster, 2012). We believe this approach will engage students in learning quantitative techniques and will alleviate their fears in these courses.

One of the key goals of any interdisciplinary program is to break down the siloed thinking that confines ideas to specific disciplines. While there is increasing interest in interdisciplinary science programs, there is a lack of documented research in interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Preliminary data from a large-scale evaluation of interdisciplinary thinking using two instruments, an attitude survey (N = 1600) and a card sort (N = 150) in the three options for first-year science at UBC: Choose Your Timetable, Coordinated Science, and Science One. We will introduce a theoretical framework for evaluating interdisciplinarity, then show how attitudes towards interdisciplinarity and how the way students categorize textbook questions from disciplines change (or don't) after one year of instruction.

For instructors in North American universities and colleges, dealing with plagiarism has become frustratingly common. Value-laden terms such as “integrity,” “honesty,” “theft” and “respect” frequently appear in institutional statements and policies. Yet many of us have encountered students who seem “honestly” confused by our expectations and assumptions about plagiarism. Approaching plagiarism from a cultural perspective is one means of avoiding appeals to a supposedly shared moral code of academic integrity. A more nuanced and sensitive approach to plagiarism involves deconstructing our assumptions about the practice and finding less moralistic ways to familiarize our students with western expectations of academic accountability, with notions of originality, and with claims about what constitutes common knowledge.

In 2016 and 2017 Winter term II, we integrated peer feedback into a job interview assignment in a second-year Beginning Japanese course. Students posted their job interview practice video onto the Collaborative Learning Annotation System (CLAS), and provided feedback onto the timeline of a video of their peers using the annotation feature in CLAS. The preliminary data analysis support that students can benefit from formative peer feedback on oral proficiency. Our presentation will focus on various strategies used to prepare foreign language contexts (L2) students for the peer feedback activity, the technology used for the implementation, and student perception towards the use of peer feedback on the preparation of a speaking test.

Experiential learning in ecology is a cornerstone for building competencies and skills, but requires special consideration by instructors. In this workshop we will discuss and design learning objectives and evaluation techniques across the spectrum of experiential learning in the natural sciences. Through a series of examples and audience participation, examine best practices for experiential learning in a variety of contexts. Participants should be prepared to discuss their experiences and questions with others.

Academic writing across disciplines is often linguistically complex, characterized by abstract ideas densely packed into nominal groups (Biber & Gray, 2010; Halliday & Martin, 1993; McCabe & Gallagher, 2008), along with infrequent lexis and content requiring specific cultural knowledge. This linguistic complexity presents a significant comprehension challenge, contributing to an increase in the performance gap between English as an additional language (EAL) students and their non-EAL peers (Abedi & Gándara, 2006). This study presents the outcome of a collaborative project between Psychology, Sociology, and EAP instructors teaching within a pathway program at a Canadian university combining first-year university courses with language-linked EAP courses. One key outcome of this collaboration has been greater awareness of the comprehension challenges that assessments pose for students, particularly in the case of multiple choice question (MCQ) exams. To investigate the effects of linguistic complexity, the research team analyzed whether unpacking MCQs by reducing the linguistic complexity in test questions improves comprehension for EAL students. Our findings indicate that EAL students are more likely to score higher on unpacked assessment questions, highlighting the importance of reducing the complexity of language in assessments to provide linguistic space for novice students to demonstrate their knowledge of disciplinary content

Many organic chemistry learners have difficulty ranking the relative strengths of acids and bases using conceptual understanding. Identifying misconceptions during learning can help educators improve curriculum and instruction, and help students guide their studying. Previous studies have recognized several mental models, or problem-solving approaches, that contribute to acid-base misconceptions; however, these models are insufficient at pinpointing the specific sources of knowledge gaps underlying the students’ mistakes. To this end, we developed a 15-item, multi-tiered and adaptive multiple-choice concept test using misconceptions we identified with think-aloud protocols. The test identifies how students compare pairs of acids and drills down to uncover their specific ways of thinking about core concepts.

Please see full abstract on page 474.
Context/Relationship to Literature:
Teacher education is a “significant site of adult learning” (Butterwick, 2014). Teacher education can be a place where neo-liberal ideas about learning and how to be in the world are perpetuated. Alternatively, it can also be a place where an existential view of learning is explored – a view that embraces possibility and has the potential to facilitate children to ‘come into the world.’
My research explores pre-service teachers’ beliefs about what it means to teach and draws on Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, which can be defined as “the capacity for new beginnings” (Bernauer, 1987, p. viii) and the ‘coming of children’ which is connected to birth (beginning)...

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is a rich forum where scholars from different fields and philosophical orientations find space to share their research on teaching and learning in higher education. Within this paper, we will share our individual and collective experiences of why we perceive phenomenology as a methodology well-suited for a broad range of SoTL purposes. Phenomenology is a research approach that focuses on describing the common meaning of the lived experience of several individuals about a particular phenomenon. We will discuss how phenomenology informed our own SoTL research projects, exploring the experiences of faculty and undergraduates in higher education. We will highlight the challenges and affordances that emerged from our use of this methodology. Phenomenology has motivated us to tell our stories...

University courses designed to contain in-class discussion often involve measurements of participation; however, issues arise in how to objectively and effectively assess participation. Lack of transparency and clarity on participation criteria and marking can cause student anxiety. This project aims to assess the impact of a student-created participation model in reducing anxiety related to participation. Workshops were conducted with 4th-year undergraduate students at a Canadian research-intensive university. A participation model was constructed and subsequently implemented in upper-level undergraduate courses that emphasize discussion. Results from in-class surveys demonstrated a significant decrease in student anxiety related to participation after model implementation.

Purpose: The need for Interprofessional Education (IPE) has been well documented and communicated by many prominent governmental bodies and health organizations. However, more longitudinal outcomes research is needed to demonstrate the impact of IPE on students’ attitudes and behaviours. This study assessed dental hygiene students’ readiness for IPE and collaborative practice at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Methods: A modified Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) survey was conducted on 23 (96% response rate) second-year dental hygiene students prior to commencing the university’s newly integrated 4-week IPE curriculum and immediately following its completion approximately 1 month later. A focus group comprising five students then explored learning experiences and impact on attitudes about collaborative practice in greater depth. Curriculum content included professionalism, ethical practice, Indigenous cultural safety, and resiliency. Results: Attitudinal shifts were observed in three of the RIPLS measures suggesting that students found greater clarity regarding their professional roles and became more receptive to learning clinical problem-solving skills with other disciplines. No statistically significant differences surfaced between the pre-attitudinal and post-attitudinal RIPLS measures. The focus group revealed three prominent themes: greater role clarification, recognition of similarities in knowledge and practice with other professions, and cultivation of professional identity, collegiality, and respect. Conclusion: Students found greater clarity about professional roles and developed an enhanced appreciation for working with other health professions after completing the university’s month-long integrated IPE curriculum.

In this presentation, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of a health humanities initiative aimed at enhancing students’ ability to provide patient-centred care. Project: To deepen students' understanding of patients' illness experience, humanities elements were embedded in case scenarios deployed in PY1 skills labs. Original paintings were added to a lower back pain case scenario and an autobiographical essay was added to a glaucoma case scenario, with associated questions incorporated into facilitators' guides for the case discussions. Most students felt these embellishments were valuable, contributing to their understanding of the patients’ concerns and their ability to empathize. A few students had strong negative reactions, finding the embellishments unengaging, artificial, and/or a poor alternative to interacting with actual patients. Students marginally preferred the essay to the paintings, and suggested other media, including poetry, music and video for future cases. Pharmacist facilitators indicated that students were reasonably engaged in discussions of the embellishments and that session flow was unaffected. Presentation Goals: 1) to share health humanities resources and approaches to incorporating humanities elements into patient case scenarios 2) to describe benefits and challenges of integrating humanities into a pharmacy curriculum 3) to demonstrate a scholarly approach to an educational innovation Relevance to pharmacy education: Hippocrates said “It's more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.” However, patient case scenarios used in clinical learning activities typically focus on biomedical details and do not provide a holistic picture of the individual. Further, didactic curricula provide little contact with actual patients and students rarely have personal experience of the conditions and therapies they are learning about. Nevertheless, students are expected to demonstrate empathy and to provide pharmaceutical care responsive to patients' individual needs. Integration of the humanities into the pharmacy curriculum is a potential strategy to bridge these gaps. Summary: To enhance students' appreciation of patients as unique individuals with differing illness experiences, artistic and literary works were incorporated into case scenarios. Student and instructor reactions to these novel elements will be presented, along with future plans for health humanities in the pharmacy curriculum.

We consider a utility-based customer choice model where the customer may purchase multiple products and even possibly multiple units of each product. We study the firm's optimal pricing problem, and present an algorithm to find the optimal prices.

The Beaty Biodiversity Museum (BBM) is home to the University of British Columbia's biological collections, including the largest collection of vascular plants in Canada (~225,000 specimens) and one of the world's largest collections of Pacific Northwest seaweeds (~90,000 specimens). These collections include substantial representation of Salish Sea watershed plant species and Salish Sea seaweed species and are a wealth of potential for teaching and research projects. Yet, most UBC Biology Program courses do not use the Museum as a teaching resource or use only the public displays. This project focuses on first-year and second-year students and seeks to integrate research collections into large-enrollment courses in order to introduce students to coastal British Columbia biodiversity while also contributing to museum inventory and digital transcription projects. The questions discussed here are: 1) how are first-year students' knowledge, interests and perceptions of biological diversity impacted by interacting with research collections? and 2) how much of an impact, and of what quality, can student participation have for BBM initiatives? For the first question, student responses to written questions in two courses were collected via a survey given prior to and after students completed a 2-hour activity using BBM specimens. Preliminary results suggest that students benefited from interacting with authentic research collections of local species. For the second question, the number of specimens recorded or digitally-transcribed by students was recorded. These data will be discussed along with recommendations for how to incorporate student participation into biodiversity projects while maintaining high-quality data collection.

Addressing social inequities has been recognized as foundational to transforming food systems. Activists and scholars have critiqued food movements as lacking an orientation towards addressing issues of social justice. To address issues of inequity, sustainable food systems education (SFSE) programs will have to increase students’ equity-related capabilities. Our first objective in this paper is to determine the extent to which SFSE programs in the USA and Canada address equity. We identified 108 programs and reviewed their public facing documents for an explicit focus on equity. We found that roughly 80% of universities with SFSE programs do not provide evidence that they explicitly include equity in their curricula. Our second objective is to propose an equity competency model based on literature from multiple fields and perspectives. This entails dimensions related to knowledge of self; knowledge of others and one’s interactions with them; knowledge of systems of oppression and inequities; and the drive to embrace and create strategies and tactics for dismantling racism and other forms of inequity. Integrating our equity competency model into SFSE curricula can support the development of future professionals capable of dismantling inequity in the food system. We understand that to integrate an equity competency in our curricula will require commitment to build will and skill not only of our students, but our faculty, and entire university communities.

In the context of a large first-year business course, we explore the value of student contributors, the former students from this course, working with faculty to improve the learning experience of the students enrolled in the course. By describing our study of the roles, impacts, benefits, and challenges of the student contributors’ involvement in creating supplemental resources, such as videos and practice problems, intended to augment the teaching process of the faculty and the learning process of the student learners, we contribute to the understanding of this three-party experience. Our study included interviews, survey questions, and resource-engagement analytics. We found that because student contributors can provide unique perspectives, greater inclusivity, and diverse approaches to teaching, there are benefits to the instructors, the student contributors, and the student learners.

In the context of a large first-year business course, we explore the value of student contributors, the former students from this course, working with faculty to improve the learning experience of the students who are enrolled in the course. By studying the roles, impacts, benefits, and challenges of the student contributors' involvement in creating videos and practice problems (supplemental resources) intended to augment the teaching process of the faculty and learning process of the student learners, we contribute to the understanding of this three-party experience. Our case study includes qualitative data from interviews and open-ended survey questions, as well as quantitative data from survey questions and resource-engagement analytics. We find that, as student contributors can provide unique perspectives, greater inclusivity, and diverse approaches to teaching, there are benefits to the instructors, the student contributors, and the student learners in this three-party arrangement.