PIMS and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics Teaching Series

Without changing course content, delivery, or assessments, how we make an impact on undergraduate student learning?

Dr. Junkins proposes taking advantage of the frequent and varied interactions between students and teaching assistants, by targeting the language used in these interactions.

In a graduate student workshop at Western University, concrete recommendations were developed for using language to increase student engagement and motivation. The workshop used active learning techniques to focus on making improvements to the language used when introducing new subjects, when teaching one-on-one or in a classroom setting, and when providing feedback and support to students.

In this talk, Dr. Junkins will give an overview of the workshop and the feedback provided by participants as well as discuss research by Mesa and Chang which motivated the theme of language and the more technical recommendations for the appropriate use of heterogloss voice to promote and/or steer classroom discussion.