Best Practices in Undergraduate Science & Economics Education

This presentation will provide an introduction to “Pedagogy in Action,” a web portal designed to showcase best practices in undergraduate science and economics education. For some time we’ve been told of a revolution in active learning pedagogies to replace the traditional ‘chalk & talk’ of lecture-based learning. These pedagogies include Calibrated Peer Review, Cooperative Learning, Just-in-Time Teaching, and Quantitative Writing, to name just a few. But who has the time to research and determine the applicability of these methods to one’s teaching, much less the time to revise one’s class notes to incorporate these methods? The answer to this quandary might be Pedagogy in Action, a National Science Foundation-funded web portal hosted at Carleton College in Minnesota. Each pedagogy is explained in a stand-alone module. Each module follows the same structure–In three short paragraphs, the module answers the following questions: What is the pedagogy? Why might it be useful in your teaching? How can you implement it in your teaching? Perhaps the best part of each module is the list of ten or more examples of how faculty like you have used the pedagogy successfully in their teaching. As an added bonus, much of the material is designed to be discipline-agnostic, so even non-science or economics faculty may find it very useful.