Teaching-as-Research Fellows Poster Session & Call for Proposals
As part of the CIRTL Network activities at Vanderbilt, the CFT co-sponsors the Teaching-as-Research (TAR) Fellows program for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields at Vanderbilt. CIRTL defines TAR as follows:
“Teaching-as-Research involves the deliberate, systematic, and reflective use of research methods to develop and implement teaching practices that advance the learning experiences and outcomes of students and teachers.”
Each fall, up to eight TAR Fellows are selected to conduct projects exploring aspects of undergraduate education in their disciplines. Each Fellow works with a faculty mentor, and each project typically focuses on an undergraduate course taught by that mentor.
Last month, the 2010-11 TAR Fellows presented their work at a poster session open to the Vanderbilt community. Here’s a list of their projects. Their faculty mentors are listed in italics. Click on the links to see their posters.
- Spencer Crowder & Rucha Joshi, Biomedical Engineering (Craig Duvall & Hak-Joon Sung) – Interactive Learning with a Classroom Response System in Biomaterials Education
- Chetan Patil, Biomedical Engineering (Fredrick Haselton & Anita Mahadevan-Jansen) – A Problem-Based Laboratory Module for Fluorescence Spectroscopy in Biomedical Engineering [VUnetID req.]
- John Roseberry, Earth & Environmental Science (Daniel Morgan) – Toward an Understanding of Spatial Reasoning Skills in EES-101 [VUnetID req.]
- Douglas Watson, Physics & Astronomy (Kelly Holley-Bockelmann & Andreas Berlind) – Graduate Student Learning in Order of Magnitude Astrophysics [VUnetID req.]
(Note that some of the Fellows did not obtain Institutional Review Board approval for their research, so they are limited to sharing their work with the Vanderbilt community. Thus the “VUnetID required” for some posters.)
The poster session was followed by a colloquium talk by Karl Smith of Purdue University on engineering education research. See our earlier blog post for some highlights from Karl’s talk.
If you’re a faculty member or graduate student interested in developing, implementing, and assessing some curricular materials or in exploring particular aspects of student learning in your discipline, please consider submitting a proposal for the 2011-12 Teaching-as-Research Fellows program. The call for proposals is available, and proposals are due June 1st.
If you have any questions about the Teaching-as-Research Fellows program, please contact CFT assistant director Derek Bruff.
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