3. Applying Teaching & Learning Strategies
Engaging Students
Your research assignment should support the engagement with course content that you have already fostered in your instructional practice beginning on day one of your course and continuing until the final exam.
While factors that motivate learning are deeply personal, core criteria as described by Svinicki (2004) include: recognizing the value of the learning experience, and an expectation that successfully completing the task is possible.
Strategies for Success
- Ensure your assignment is at an appropriate level of difficulty. If possible, test out new assignments before assigning the work to your class.
- Encourage students to make connections to their own personal experiences by challenging them to:
- Explore topics that will solve problems or achieve goals in their own personal lives, the lives of a friend or family member, or their future careers/industries.
- Connect topics to their own personal cultural identities or contexts.
- Question power structures and how they impact their personal lives.
- Reflect on how their projects will contribute to their success in their future careers.
- Offer choices in topics (e.g., provide a list of topics to choose from, or allow students to narrow topics according to their interests) and how students will demonstrate their learning (e.g., an essay, a video podcast, a poster presentation, an infographic), where appropriate.
- Create authentic rhetorical situations (e.g., a technician helping a client) that replicates real-world activities (e.g., creating an explainer video).
- Focus on the learning experience (rather than the final product only) by offering students opportunities to practice skills, reflect on research tasks throughout the process, submit drafts for instructor or peer feedback, and/or re-submit their work.
- Invite students to display their work in front of a real-world audience (e.g., publish on social media, display poster boards on campus, upload work to institutional repositories).
- Be explicit in the rationale for the assessment, and the criteria for success.
- Show exemplars of past student work.
- Show your own enthusiasm for student work!
Resources
UDL Guidelines: Engagement[1]
Describes guidelines and checkpoints for engaging all students in a course of learning.
The Meaningful Writing Project[2]
An on-going cross-institutional study on students’ meaningful writing experiences.
