Pair Of Courses Research Articles

Building career skills through virtual exchange

As globalization expands and interactions between people increase around the world, organizations need individuals with skills that are not only acquired from traditional curricula. Furthermore, the World Economic Forum has noted that, by 2025, 97 million new jobs will be created with the need for soft skills such as leadership, intercultural fluency, and teamwork. Therefore, higher education institutions may need to develop high-impact pedagogies with internationalized curriculums that bring results beyond classrooms and articulate the link between internationalization and employability. Business educators identified these career success skills through a virtual exchange project known as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) in two pairs of courses, Thailand-USA and the Netherlands-USA. Students from Queens College, City University of New York in the U.S. (n=54), Assumption University in Thailand (n=22), and The Hague University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands (n=19) engaged in a shared assignment across borders through COIL. Using discussions, questionnaires with a five-point Likert scale, and regression analysis, authors discovered that, by using virtual exchange in higher education instruction with an innovative COIL project that included intercultural communication, students build competencies that employers seek. Students specifically enhanced their ability to speak publicly (oral communications), to interact respectfully with all people (intercultural fluency), and to identify their strengths relevant to career goals (career management). The objective of this study is to encourage university leadership to promote and prioritize COIL in order to increase content knowledge and employability.

Náttúra by Kitchen Theory: An immersive multisensory dining concept

The Náttúra dining concept developed by Kitchen Theory ran from September to December 2014 in London. It was inspired by the New Nordic Cuisine Manifesto which has influenced not only cuisine in the Nordic countries but international gastronomy more broadly for a number of years now. This multisensory dining concept incorporated dishes that have subsequently appeared in peer-reviewed academic research, including in this journal, thus highlighting the potential of practice-led gastrophysics research (as in research that was designed to optimize the eye-appeal of the plating of one of the dishes served on the menu). By incorporating different nature/natural sounds with each pair of courses (namely the sounds of the earth, wind, fire, and water), this multisensory dining concept bridges the contemporary interest in ‘sonic seasoning’ and the increasingly common approach of incorporating atmospheric soundscapes into gastronomic dining experiences. At the same time, nature videos projected onto the wall of the dining room, together with the use of atmospheric ambient aromas incorporated into several of the dishes further helped to transport guests to a range of different immersive multisensory environments, all loosely connected by an Icelandic theme.

What Is Essential in Teaching Theatre History? A Revised Theatre Studies Curriculum

What Is Essential in Teaching Theatre History? A Revised Theatre Studies Curriculum Daniel Smith (bio) and Ann Folino White (bio) In 2014, we implemented a new theatre history curriculum at Michigan State University by replacing the two-course survey sequence with two topics-based, non-sequential courses: Studies in Contemporary Theatre and Studies in Theatre History. Initially, this decision proved controversial with some of our colleagues; a number of faculty (mainly though not exclusively from acting) expressed discontent with a perceived diminishment of students’ familiarity with historical knowledge and vocabulary vital to students’ “pre-professional” training. Meanwhile, one of us was scolded by a senior scholar at another university for creating “functional illiterates.” The resistance we encountered appears to be based in the notion that essential material was not being taught. In these instances and others, we were made to respond to two questions: How did we determine what is essential? and What was our criteria? We have answered these questions largely by committing to teaching historiography, and reiterating to students that nothing is vital so much as one (or two) courses can only offer a partial view and as such it is only one of multiple histories. Displacing the survey model was our attempt to respond to student-centered concerns, administrative agendas, our shared pedagogical dissatisfaction, and changes in the field of theatre history. Five years on in this experiment, we wish to share our experience implementing alternative curriculum, because developing, teaching, and revising these courses has helped us to home in on the essentials of theatre history pedagogy. The goals to develop students’ information literacy and understanding of historiographic principles and practices have provided us both the flexibility and mooring to navigate the challenges of COVID-19 and social upheaval. Like so many of our colleagues across the nation, we were asked by administrators to find nimble and agile solutions in order to pivot to online learning. This transition went somewhat more smoothly than it might have, because we were already emphasizing “concepts over coverage” (Ahlgren 39). Overview and Genealogy In fall 2013, following the retirements of two theatre studies faculty, the then-chair appointed Ann as Head of Theatre Studies. The chair encouraged a revitalization of the area and gave Ann a lot of latitude to overhaul the curriculum, which she and Dan did together. Prior to this, students were required to take a pair of courses: History of Western Theatre to 1850 and History of Western Theatre since 1850. Catalog descriptions suggest that this sequence was intended to be a study of theatre styles, with a survey of everything before realism in the fall, and then realism and responses to realism in the spring. As instructors, we were dissatisfied with the compacted, compressed, canonical, and Eurocentric model we had inherited. The Registrar’s Office provides digital access to course catalogs since 1970, allowing us to trace some genealogy (“Archived Course Descriptions”). In 1974, there were six upper-level theatre studies courses. The Western Theatre History Survey was a three-course sequence: 500 BC–1550; 1550–1770; and 1770–1905. Two courses were devoted to modern and contemporary theatre: Ibsen to 1945, and 1945 to the present. A course in Asian theatre disappears from the catalog in [End Page 113] 1974. In 1978, the Western Theatre History Survey sequence was reduced to two courses and the title changed to Developments in Theatre I and II. This change effectively combined the first two sections into one course, as it broke the two-course sequence at 1770. In 1985, this end date was changed to 1850. The modern and contemporary sequence had also been cut in 1978; perhaps the move to 1850 was intended to reflect increased coverage of twentieth-century topics in the survey. Part of our impetus for reviewing the survey, then, was that it had been running without significant changes since 1985. Our changes to the curriculum were approved in 2013 by both Department of Theatre faculty and the College Curriculum Committee (as required in bylaws) and implemented in 2014. The approved course descriptions are: • Studies in Contemporary Theatre: Interdisciplinary methods for analysis of contemporary drama, theatre, and performance. Emphasis on the relationship of artistic forms...

Community of Practice Among Faculty Team-Teaching Education Doctorate (Ed.D.) Students: A Reflective Study

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of the study was to contribute to knowledge about the ways in which incorporating a Community of Practice into doctoral seminar teaching and course management could be a practical and sustainable path to professional development for doctoral faculty aspiring to become stewards of the practice of teaching. Background: This report documents a reflective self-study conducted by four professors engaged in a community of practice while team-teaching a linked pair of EdD seminars on action research at Arizona State University. Methodology: This reflective study used field notes and written reflections as its sources of data to examine how participants’ identities as professors of education changed during and after participating in a team-taught professional doctoral pair of courses. Contribution: An important goal of the community of practice was to promote faculty professional development as stewards of the practice of teaching. Engaging in disciplined reflection on teaching is uncommon in American graduate education and rarely documented in the literature of post-compulsory education. Findings: Analysis of post-hoc reflective accounts and contemporaneous notes revealed a general pattern of gradual transformation by the teaching team members. The professors moved from anxious concern about appearing competent to growing confidence and appreciation for the potential of a community of practice to provide significant professional benefits to students and faculty. Salutary features of reflective team teaching in a community of practice persist in participants’ subsequent teaching practice. Recommendations for Practitioners: Reported benefits include eagerness for team teaching, increased openness to pedagogical suggestions from peers, comfort with being observed by colleagues while teaching, and willingness to revise plans when initial plans and practices are not working effectively for students. Recommendation for Researchers: Data analysis and testimony support the claim that engaging in a CoP, in this case, did support their identity transformation as stewards of their own practice as instructors and professors of education. However, the study design does not support a claim that most or all future Communities of Practice in doctoral education will produce similar salutary results. Testing this proposition will require additional research in settings and programs different from the one represented here. Impact on Society: Implementing communities of practice in doctoral programs can make room for professional development for both the faculty team and for the students. Future Research: Further studies could be conducted to document the ways in which other communities of practice can be used to develop faculty instructors in masters and doctoral programs and in undergraduate education.

Humanized Computing for Mass Customization Application in Curriculum Management

Universities may set similar courses due to disciplinary crossing. Facing the problem that undergraduates have numerous tasks and limited time, we designed a mass customization model which will automatically provide every student with a suitable curriculum to maximize their degree of satisfaction when the student enters a set of courses. Our calculating model of curriculum satisfaction is based on the assumptions that curriculum satisfaction is proportional to its similarity and that curriculum satisfaction is inversely proportional to credits. With regard to a student who chooses n courses, his satisfaction model is total degree of satisfaction divided by total credits. We manually screened out 84 pairs of courses about science and engineering, social science and humanities, and made use of their Chinese names and Chinese course description on the site of Office of Educational Administration, and segmented words based on statistical principles and calculated the course similarity by using vector space. In addition, we make supplement to curriculum similarity by the use of artificially-designed questionnaires.

Working Collaboratively—Teaching Collaboration

My research into the dynamics and mechanics of collaboration and teaching collaborative practices started as a studio art project with a colleague. In this project, we worked deliberately and self-consciously on our collaboration to extract a set of parameters or guidelines for our students. Since then, I have helped develop a linked pair of courses titled "Integrative Studio" and "Integrative Seminar" that include "teaching students how to collaborate" as a learning outcome. My research for this article began by asking faculty who teach this course how they approach the topic. This article is grounded in four narratives that describe how to teach students to work in groups. Working in groups teaches students the meaning of the word peer in an authentic manner as a lived experience that is central to contemporary discussions of effective learning. Students who learn to collaborate may gain a deeper understanding of the way their minds work, find a commitment to building strong communities, understand dispositions toward learning, and exercise higher-order thinking skills. Although my work is specifically within art and design, the ideas and strategies discussed could be applied to or adapted for other contexts.

Applications in Cross-Curriculum Teaching The Synthesis of the Design Studio and Building Technology Seminar

"Change or perish. You need to prepare yourself for a profession that you are notgoing to recognize a decade from now.”Thom Mayne, Remarks on building information modeling at the 2005 AIAConvention, Las Vegas, NVToday architects are faced with new challenges involving Integrated Project Delivery and associated digital technologies that are rapidly changing the way architects work. Collaboration is the key to this newway of working as architects discover that the management of buildinginformation requires new skills and methods in design.How do educators respond to this call? How do we prepare a futuregeneration of architects to thrive within a rapidly changing profession?Given these new models for project delivery currently being utilized by theprofession, a new pair of courses was created at the Southern CaliforniaInstitute of Architecture (SCI_Arc) for the integration of the designcurricula with a building technology course by emphasizing teamworkand the use of three-dimensional software. The aim was to develop newskill-sets for students while maintaining a deep understanding of designand built form. Educators have long struggled with traditional architectural curricula that inherently separate design and technology courses. This bifurcation, often times convenient and useful for the organization of aschool and curriculum, is of course at odds with the "comprehensive” nature of architectural education that is so strived for in most programs.This paper serves to show examples of an attempt to address this seriousissue within the first professional graduate school curriculum (3 1/2 yearM.ARCH) by bridging both the second year design and technology classesover a two semester span. The goals of the two courses were; to bridgethe gap between design and technology pedagogy, develop collaborativetools for students, investigate a comprehensive understanding of theintegration of building systems, and to finally produce a set of documentsthat demonstrate this ability and use appropriate three-dimensionalsoftware to facilitate the investigation.It is helpful to set the stage on the importance of this shift of educational methodology by outlining first the context of the current environment bothwithin the profession and the academic realms. Finally, I will attempt toreflect on the methods employed and analyze the pros and cons of theendeavor and discuss possible improvements.

Information Literacy and the Undergraduate Research Methods Curriculum

ABSTRACT Paper originally prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 27–31, 2003, Philadelphia, PA. The “Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education” generated by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL 2000) provides a plausible set of pedagogical goals to guide the construction and implementation of an undergraduate research methods course. We argue that the context of the undergraduate methods course with its emphasis on developing analytical and data management skills as well as exposure to concepts such as validity, reliability, measurement, and bias should be particularly fertile ground for the development of ACRL targeted competencies. Our paper outlines the five information literacy standards (as well as the performance indicators and outcomes associated with each) described in the ACRL paper noting how they relate to designing student assignments and research projects. It then describes a limited natural experiment conducted using two sections of a methods course and two sections of a non-methods political science course. For one course in each of these pairs of courses, the assignments and some additional course content were varied to reflect the information literacy standards (other course elements including text, instructor, and most lecture content were constant). Student scores on a standardized information literacy test indicate that information literacy-oriented courses can improve student performance on standardized competency tests. However, this improvement was equally present in both methods and non-methods courses.

The Subordination of Aesthetic Fundamentals in College Art Instruction

Opportunities for college students of art and design to study fundamentals of visual aesthetics, integrity of form, and principles of composition are limited today by a number of factors. With the well-documented prominence of postmodern critical theory in the world of contemporary art (and its questionable effects on higher education in art and design), the study of aesthetic fundamentals is largely subordinated to a multitude of conceptual, theoretical, and expressive priorities recycled from the art world.2 Contemporary idea-based priorities tend to obviate, in the minds of many artists who teach, the for aesthetic fundamentals in college art curricula. But as Rudolph Amheim suggests, art is not easily replaced by ideas alone. For no matter how interested artists, instructors, or students may be in ideas, theory, or self-expression, today's college art/design students need to gain a solid grounding in aesthetic fundamentals early in their college art educations in order to become adept and well-informed makers of art and/or design. In this essay I argue for the value of aesthetic fundamentals in the education of artists and designers, and outline a series of factors that contribute to the subordination of aesthetics in college art instruction. I examine introductory-level college art/design curricula, including a pair of courses that are intended to provide students with visual, compositional, and/or aesthetic fundamentals, and explore why instructors, even in these courses, too often bypass such fundamentals in their teaching. Specifically, I discuss the ways in which traditions of art education, mixed with artist/teachers' own art training, lead to a virtual dismissal of aesthetic fundamentals. Certain assumptions that professional artists often bring to their teaching and how these contribute to the problem are examined. I identify a historical phenomenon

Is There Gender Bias in Student Evaluations of Teaching?

Given the widespread use of student evaluations of teaching for tenure and promotion decisions, it is important to be aware of possible bias in the evaluations. One definition of bias is if a teacher or course characteristic affects teacher evaluations, either positively or negatively, but is unrelated to criteria of good teaching, such as increased student learning. Class size, for example, affects evaluations in that teachers of classes with under 15 students get higher evaluations. But if students learn more in small classes than they do in large classes, perhaps because small classes allow for more personal attention, then class size is not truly biasing the evaluations; rather, the evaluations are reflecting increased learning. A second, more general, definition of bias is when a known characteristic of students systematically affects their ratings of teachers. The gender of the student, particularly how it interacts with the gender of the teacher, is an example of this possible bias in student evaluations. Do male students tend to rate women teachers lower than men teachers because of a gender bias, especially in fields that are male dominated, such as the natural sciences? Do female students judge women teachers to be more effective than men because they feel more comfortable with them? These are important questions that directly affect the validity of the evaluations when used for personnel decisions. Ideally student evaluations should be related to what they learn from a teacher and not to gender or to other personal characteristics of the teacher (e.g., age, ethnicity). Studies that have investigated gender bias have thus far produced conflicting results. Some studies have found no (or extremely small) differences between the evaluation of female and male instructors on the basis of student gender alone (Basow & Distenfeld, 1985; Basow & Howe, 1987; Bennett, 1982; Elmore & LaPointe, 1974; Harris, 1975; Kaschak, 1981). Other studies reported gender bias, with male students rating female instructors lower than male instructors (Basow & Silberg, 1987; Etaugh & Riley, 1983; Kaschak, 1978; Lombardo & Tocci, 1979; Paludi & Bauer, 1983). Two studies conducted in actual classrooms did not report gender bias in overall evaluations. Bennett's (1982) used a course evaluation questionnaire that included teaching performance ratings, perceptual orientation scales, and indicators of the degree and context of student-instructor interaction. Her data included the evaluations of 11 female and 28 male instructors by 253 students enrolled in nonscience introductory courses at a liberal arts college. Female and male students did not differentiate between faculty members of different gender. Although there was no evidence of direct bias in formal student evaluations of instructors, there was evidence of gender related differences in regard to student-instructor relationships and instructor warmth, support, and accessibility. Elmore and LaPointe (1974) found no interaction between faculty gender and student gender in their analysis of 38 pairs of courses (paired on the basis of course number and gender of instructor) evaluated by 1,259 students. The courses were selected from a variety of departments and colleges within one research university. No attempts were made, however, to compare results from various disciplines or results for students in the same classes. Research that reported gender bias included Basow and Silberg's (1987) study of 16 pairs of instructors (paired on rank, discipline, and years of experience), in which male students rated female instructors less favorably than male instructors. Similar results by Kaschak (1978) and Lombardo and Tocci (1979) were found in a simulated rather than actual classroom setting. In these studies female students saw no difference in the effectiveness of male and female teachers. Feldman conducted two reviews of students' views of male and female college teachers. …

Factors Affecting Students’ Evaluations of the Same Course Taught by the Same Instructor on Different Occasions

Correlations between student ratings of the same course taught by the same instructor on two different occasions (n = 341 pairs of courses) were high (mean r = .71), but were lower than the reliabilities of the ratings (mean r = .93); much reliable variance was unique to a particular course offering. This study investigates factors that might explain this unique variance. For each pair of courses, the more favorably evaluated tended to be: (1) the one in which students expected higher grades (and presumably learned more); (2) the one which students perceived to require the most work; and, (3) the one which was taught after the instructor had already taught the course at least once before (and presumably improved as a consequence of this experience). These findings are not consistent with the hypothesis that these background characteristics bias student ratings, and they argue for alternative explanations.

Factors Affecting Students' Evaluations of the Same Course Taught by the Same Instructor on Different Occasions

Correlations between student ratings of the same course taught by the same instructor on two different occasions (n = 341 pairs of courses) were high (mean r = .71), but were lower than the reliabilities of the ratings (mean r = .93); much reliable variance was unique to a particular course offering. This study investigates factors that might explain this unique variance. For each pair of courses, the more favorably evaluated tended to be: (1) the one in which students expected higher grades (and presumably learned more); (2) the one which students perceived to require the most work; and, (3) the one which was taught after the instructor had already taught the course at least once before (and presumably improved as a consequence of this experience). These findings are not consistent with the hypothesis that these background characteristics bias student ratings, and they argue for alternative explanations.

Similarity of student ratings across instructors, courses, and time

This study raised three questions about the similarity or generalizability of student ratings of courses and instructors. First, how stable are student ratings of the same instructor giving the same course during twodifferent semesters? Second, how similar are student ratings of the same instructor in twodifferent courses? Third, how similar are student ratings of a given course being taught bydifferent instructors? Instances were identified in which student ratings on seven different factors were available for pairs of courses for each of these questions. For the case of the same instructor — same course—different semesters, student ratings were reasonably similar (median r for seven factors about 0.70). For the case of the same instructor—different courses, the median r was surprisingly low — about 0.40. For the case of the same course—different instructors, substantial correlations were obtained for some factors and insignificant correlations for other factors. Implications of these findings for practical use of student ratings and suggestions for further research in the area are discussed.