occasional paper

Improving Student Writing: U-M Faculty Using Online Collaboration Tools

There's no question that students' writing improves most when they have frequent opportunities for practice and feedback. But instructors sometimes struggle to find ways to provide those opportunities, especially in large courses. One method that many U-M instructors use to good effect is structured peer review. These three faculty members--featured in CRLT's recent Occasional Paper about Online Collaboration Tools (OCTs)--have made creative use of OCTs to facilitate collaborative writing as well as timely, frequent, low-stakes peer feedback: Read more »

Submitted by tbraun on Fri, 03/01/2013 - 8:45am
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Teaching with Clickers

 

This occasional paper discusses research showing how student personal response systems (often called 'clickers') can support student learning. It gives specific strategies for using clickers to assess student knowledge prior to the course, check students' understanding of new material, administer tests, document attendance, and more. The paper also discusses challenges and proposes best practices for using clickers for a range of purposes. 
 
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Teaching Effectively with GSI-Faculty Teams

This Occasional Paper summarizes the literature on GSI-faculty relationships in order to offer strategies for both GSIs and faculty to construct effective working partnerships. The nature of GSI-faculty teams varies widely across the University of Michigan, by factors such as size (some faculty supervise many GSIs, while others work with only one GSI), GSI responsibilities (such as grading, holding office hours, leading discussion sections, and studio or clinical work), discipline, and instructor identity.  As a result, this research is contextualized by recommendations drawn from the 2003 Provost’s Seminar on Graduate Students as Teachers, at which over 162 faculty and GSI attendees from fourteen UM schools and colleges strategized about ways to proactively cultivate effective GSI-faculty relationships and address problems when they occur.

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Promoting Academic Integrity in the Classroom

 

This Occasional Paper is intended to inform efforts to address academic integrity at U-M by: 

  • providing an overview of current research on academic integrity; 
  • summarizing instructional best practices for promoting academic integrity and deterring and detecting academic dishonesty; 
  • describing institutional options for promoting academic integrity and for dealing with academic dishonesty; 
  • linking readers to other resources on academic integrity
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Teaching for Retention in Science, Engineering, and Math Disciplines: A Guide for Faculty

In this CRLT Occasional Paper, we describe specific classroom strategies and teaching behaviors that have been demonstrated to improve the success of a diverse body of students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) courses. We also provide practical advice to individual faculty members who are seeking to implement these teaching strategies. Extensive research on why students leave STEM fields suggests that individual faculty can play a key role in supporting and retaining a diverse student body in STEM. Although underrepresented groups may have the most to gain, retention-conscious teaching practices are likely to have a positive impact on the persistence of all students in STEM.

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