Center for Teaching and Learning

2023-2024 Provost’s Teaching, Improvement, Experimentation, and Research (TIER) Grants

Please congratulate your colleagues, recipients of the 2023-24 TIER grants!

Abstracts

Hannah Snyder
The proposed research will develop a novel intervention program for academic procrastination that can be used in classroom settings using a learning management system (like LATTE) and test its efficacy in a large psychology course. Academic procrastination is prevalent and has been associated with worse academic performance (lower grades) and higher psychological distress (greater stress, anxiety, and depression). In fact, in a 2022 survey conducted by American College Health Association, 75% of students reported problems with procrastination, and almost 2⁄3 of these students reported that procrastination negatively impacted their academic performance in the past year, a far higher percentage than any other surveyed cause of academic difficulties. Despite this, no well-validated interventions for academic procrastination exist, especially those that instructors can easily implement in their classrooms. The proposed study adopts a holistic approach to intervention and equips students with practical tips and techniques that target the causes of procrastination hypothesized in a well-supported model of how procrastination occurs. If the intervention is efficacious, we will then disseminate it to other Brandeis faculty interested in incorporating it into their courses.

Nathalie Vladis
Despite the ubiquity of data, the numerical skills required to process it have traditionally been unapproachable and intimidating, particularly to our non-STEM students. This initiative will include a series of workshops and a toolkit with step-by-step instructions to promote numerical intuition, creative thinking, and accessibility through craft and play using non-traditional materials across Brandeis. This project will expose participants to novel, multi-sensory ways of exploring and visualizing data collaboratively in a relaxed and inclusive environment regardless of their background and previous experience with data. By crafting and playing, we practice taking risks and creative problem-solving - skills that student transfer to all areas of their academic career and life. Crucially, by moving away from the boundaries of two-dimensional visual representation, participants are invited to think of alternative modalities to communicate numerical values to make them more accessible to a broader audience.

Lisa Rourke and Scott Moore
The University Writing Seminar allows students to develop a sense of community in a supportive environment. In practice, however, some members of Brandeis’s multilingual community find it challenging to exercise their voices when surrounded by native English-speaking peers. We believe that such students could benefit from the option to take the UWS in smaller sections designed specifically with our multilingual students in mind. To address this need, we intend to pilot two multilingual sections of the University Writing Seminar (UWS) starting in AY 2024-2025. This would be an “opt-in” offering, and non-native speakers would work with their academic advisors to determine if the fit is appropriate. Multilingual sections of first year writing are offered by many of our peer institutions and endorsed by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCCs). This project would survey and consult with peer institutions offering these sections to inform the shape of our own, including both pedagogical modifications to UWS and instructor training. If successful, these multilingual sections would be institutionalized on an ongoing basis.

Benjamin Gomes-Casseres and Pito Salas
Teachers are always looking for ways to improve student engagement. This concern takes on a new dimension with online learning — there are new opportunities for distraction, and it’s even harder for teachers to read the room. The Brandeis Online Learning Lab (BOLL) studies student engagement in online classes, using patent-pending systems and methods and a unique software package. In this TIER project, we will: (1) analyze data from 20 online course sections at Brandeis that used these tools in the last three years; (2) test the tools in a few classes currently taught online; and (3) compare the results with data from in-person classes. We hope to work with the 5-8 faculty partners who have taught or are teaching online courses at Brandeis. We expect our findings to help improve student engagement, make it more equitable and broad-based, and encourage better teaching and learning.

Hanan Khashaba
The project “Bringing Arabic to Life” will teach Novice-level students the language needed to communicate on simple everyday topics.This will be achieved by creating an open resource workbook that contains interactive paper and online exercises targeting vocabulary, speaking, and listening comprehension. The Workbook will enable students to start using the language, instead of just reading about it. As the students gain confidence in speaking and understanding spoken live Arabic, they will be more motivated to continue learning Arabic.

Jonathan Anjaria
Incoming graduate students often say teaching is their career goal. However pedagogy is often a marginal part of MA or PhD curricula, which is focused on producing researchers. The goal of this project is to make pedagogy a central part of the graduate school experience while also showing that teaching can enhance, rather than distract from, scholarly pursuits such as dissertation research. I will develop a new pedagogy-oriented syllabus for foundational graduate seminar courses. This syllabus will include new sets of assignments oriented towards practical teacher training. These new course materials will offer a template for incorporating pedagogy training in foundational graduate seminars in all Social Science, Creative Arts and Humanities departments.

All projects will share materials, examples, and resources with the wider Brandeis community of educators and students on the CTL’s website as well as during Teaching and Learning Lunches and the Celebration of Teaching Day in the spring of 2024.