2. Students as Learners
Forging an Academic Journey
Students experience research assignments within the context of a larger academic journey. It’s crucial for them to recognize how the research project you assign extends their learning from past courses and contributes to their future goals. As you design your assessment, consider the course learning outcomes, program level, and unique characteristics of the discipline to ensure your assessment is relevant, meaningful, builds on previous research activities, and prepares students for future research experiences.
Case Study: Monisha
Monisha is in the second semester of the Makeup for Media and Creative Arts program. Thus far, she is loving her studies. Her father works in the film industry and she has grown up visiting sets and chatting with people who work in the industry. While she feels like she knows a lot about makeup and costume design, she is realizing there’s so much more to learn. After graduation, she hopes to work for theatre companies across Canada and the United States.
This semester, she’s really excited about a course she’s taking called Era & Period Hair Design where she is tasked with replicating a hairstyle from the Roaring 20’s. This is exactly the type of work she hopes to do after graduation. As part of the assignment, she must:
- Conduct research into the Roaring 20s in the context of hair styling applications.
- Effectively apply techniques for styling hair suitable to era applications.
- Determine the appropriate product required to replicate a period hairstyle.
She’s excited to get started.
Question: What makes this assignment so engaging for Monisha?
Case Study: Aydin
Aydin is in the first semester of a Chemical Engineering Technology program. He hopes to one day work in a quality control lab for a food processing plant. He has a few relatives who work in the industry and he did well in science and math courses in high school.
For his general elective this semester, Aydin chose a sociology course called Innovation: Shaping the Modern World. Aydin isn’t sure he is an innovator, or that he’ll have much opportunity to innovate in his future career. But the course fit his time schedule and one of his friends was taking it, so he added it to his schedule. For the final project of the course, Aydin must find information about a modern innovation of his choice and draw connections between the development of the innovation and course concepts.
Aydin already knows what he’s going to research: the development of industrial food preservation. However, the final project is supposed to be a written essay, and writing essays is his least favourite task. In fact, the lack of writing requirements was one of the reasons he chose the chemical engineering technology program. Plus, the last research paper he had to write was at least 3 years ago. He’s already dreading getting started.
Question: What makes this assignment challenging for Aydin? How might the instructor address these challenges?
Strategies for Success
- Align the learning outcomes of the assignment with the stated learning outcomes of the course and program.
- Consider how the assignment will fit within the program as a whole. What past research experiences have students had? What future experiences will be offered? What gaps exist?
- Use every research project as an opportunity to develop authentic skills used by researchers and practitioners in the discipline.
