Bloom's Sixth

Collin Bruey and Laura Phillips check out posters at the Service Showcase. Bruey and Phillips created their own poster about work at the Center for Community Outreach. By Doug Ward I’m frequently awed by the creative, even life-changing, work that students engage in. The annual Service Showcase sponsored by the Center for Service Learning, provides an impressive display of that work. This year’s Showcase took place last week. As a judge for the Showcase over the past two years, I’ve learned how…

By Doug Ward One poster offers to explain the chemistry of the world’s most popular drug. Another teases about the fatty acids that make T-shirts feel soft. Still another promises secrets about the oils used in making the perfect chicken nugget. None of them offers its secrets outright, though. And that’s just how Drew Vartia, a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the chemistry department, wants it. A poster in Malott Hall refers people to information about the chemistry of soap. The posters were created by the 60 students in Honors Chemistry I, which Vartia worked on with Professor…

By Doug Ward and Mary Deane Sorcinelli BOULDER, Colo. – Symbolism sometimes makes more of a difference than money in bringing about change in higher education. That’s what Emily Miller, associate vice president for policy at the Association of American Universities, has found in her work with the AAU’s Undergraduate STEM Initiative. It’s also a strategy she…

By Doug Ward and Mary Deane Sorcinelli BOULDER, Colo. – Symbolism sometimes makes more of a difference than money in bringing about change in higher education. That’s what Emily Miller, associate vice president for policy at the Association of American Universities, has found in her work with the AAU’s Undergraduate STEM Initiative. It’s also a strategy she…

By Doug Ward Matthew Ohland talks confidently about the best ways to form student teams. In a gregarious baritone punctuated by frequent, genuine laughs, he freely shares the wisdom he has gained from leading development of a team creation tool called CATME and from studying the dynamics of teams for more than two decades. Ohland, a professor of engineering education at Purdue, visited KU recently and spoke with faculty…

“What just happened?” Carl Luchies asked his graduate teaching assistant.  They stood at the front of a lecture hall in early 2013, watching as 120 normally subdued engineering undergraduates burst into spontaneous conversation. Luchies, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, had just given the students a problem to work on and told them it was a collaborative quiz due at the end of class. Students could work with anyone in the room, he said. “Anyone?” they asked. Carl Luchies works with a student in a graduate-level biomechanics class Anyone, he said. They could move…

David McConnell sees both benefit and paradox in active learning. McConnell, a professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University, spoke to members of the geology department at KU last week about his research into active learning and his work in helping others adopt active learning techniques in their classes. David McConnell, in a photo from his N.C. State profile…