This is an open discussion onissues related to the mechanics of tutorial
delivery, encouraging student engagement, providing feedback to students,
and on any other relevant topic that participants would like to address.
The Engagement Retention and Success team have been working on restructuring Y1 tutorials by observing our lectures and tutorials and running workshops with our TA's. This will be an opportunity to meet them, hear their experiences and discuss our tutorial provision.
Since I discovered for myself mathematical mindsets, I have never taught a lecture. The principles of mathematical mindsets allow me to transform each lecture into an interactive teaching session during which I constantly give and receive appropriate feedback. To find out what students feel during these sessions, we conducted experiments taking EEG recordings of participants as they solve mathematical problems and discovered that problems informed by mathematical mindsets increase the participants’ motivation.
Dr. Hugo Maruri-Aguilar recently visited Morpeth Secondary School to better understand our students' background and how they have been taught before they get to us. He was hosted by teacher Sebastian Bicen, who will join us for our first BagLES discussion of 2018.
Plom is a system for administering handwritten tests, exams or homework on paper, but marking and returning them online. Pages are adorned and printed with individualized QR codes. Students write the paper. Papers are then scanned, and graded online by a team of TAs. PDF files are returned to students. The instructor and the Learning Management System (e.g., Moodle or Canvas) get a spreadsheet of grades. Plom supports randomized tests for close-quarters writing or multiple sittings using a novel approach of interleaving versioned questions.
Plom is Free and Open Source Software. UBC Mathematics has used the system for around 12000 papers in 20 courses. We are interested not just in logistics but also in how we can use the resulting data to improve our pedagogy around testing.
