Three professors receive equity and inclusion teaching awards
At the November School of Science faculty meeting Drs. Torrey Gallagher, Weihao Qu and Laura Turner received awards for their innovations in teaching that promote equity and inclusion. The awards were made in two categories innovations to Assessment and for innovations involving the entire syllabus. Innovations that stemmed from published strategies that promote equity and inclusion of persons underrepresented in each field or with evidence of success in the classroom were required.
Dr. Qu’s project entitled “Secure Database Design – ensuring student interest” won in the category of Assessment. Dr. Qu states “The key renovation is to provide students opportunities to pick up what they are most interested (or comfortable) into the assessment of their performance of the courses. This is inspired by the concept of Universal Design for Learning(UDL) and Classroom Assessment Techniques(CATs)[ from the inclusive STEM online course.” Instead of giving students in CS/SE 450 a standard examinations Dr. Qu asked students to designed their own database in a competition that satisfied the course requirements. Dr. Qu reported high student learning as assessed by the database design and a later quiz, as well as higher student participation and satisfaction.
In the category of Improvements to Entire Syllabi, Drs. Gallagher and Turner were both recognized.
Dr. Gallagher’s submission “Skeletal Outlines for Better Outcomes in Math 117” provided skeletal outlines of course content for every class meeting of Math 117 (quantitative Analysis for Business I) in the Spring semester 2024. These skeletal outlines included a review exercise to begin each class meeting, theoretical sections with few blanks for student work and all crucial theoretical points typed out at least once, carefully scaffolded examples, building from mostly typed out to mostly blank, when applicable, problem-solving strategies for word problems were also scaffolded. The rationale for these outlines was the combination of poor student note taking and the reliance of the course on algorithms, the combination did not make for strong student outcomes. After using the outlines, Dr. Gallagher observed that both the average and median grades rose in his class from the prior year where no outlines were provided and that students found the outlines “very helpful”.
Dr. Laura Turner’s “Course Curriculum Revisions: exposing students to diverse voices in MA 325 (History of Mathematics)” Dr. Turner chose to focus on the importance of representation in Mathematics and to assign a scaffolded series of assignments beginning with picture a mathematician” and proceeding through a series of assignments, including written and graphic works where students not only highlighted mathematicians from historically underrepresented groups but critiqued the works of others for completeness and biases. The rationale for this revision is “while many view mathematics as apolitical and objective, research on the history of the subject contains many examples to the contrary. Moreover, MA 325 is largely populated by students who will become mathematics teachers, and their exposure to these subjects is critical not only to their own growth and development but also those of their future students. An understanding of the state of the discipline and how we find our places within it is also vital to anyone who seeks to practice mathematics within academia, industry, business, or government.” Selected graphic works are reproduced below.
