2022 Provost SOLER Seed Grants Awarded

Awardees for a new faculty grant to advance scholarship on teaching and learning were announced by Provost Mary C. Boyce on August 11, 2022. The new Provost’s SOLER Seed Grants program facilitates and supports faculty projects that seek to improve teaching and learning in Columbia courses by applying formal research methodologies. This is one of several grant programs that the Office of the Provost offers to encourage innovation and excellence in teaching and learning.

Each of the five projects selected for SOLER grants this year take innovative and research-based approaches to improving and testing new pedagogic methods, or to implementing or devising learning analytic procedures. Projects by faculty at four Columbia Schools will take a unique and often unprecedented approach to answering the question, “How do we better understand and improve learning?”

In one project, Amy Werman, a Lecturer in Social Work at the School of Social Work, will investigate the way a new method of student assessment impacts learning and comprehension. In this project, she questions what she calls the implicit assumption that grades measure learning. She hypothesizes that better learning outcomes are yielded by “ungrading,” an alternative pedagogy in which the emphasis is on feedback, revision, and personal self-reflection on the learning process. To test this, two sections of one course will experience the same material but be either graded or un-graded. At the end, all students will be asked to answer questions about their experience, learning, and satisfaction in the course.

In other projects, augmented and virtual reality will be used to improve comprehension in a biochemistry course; neuroscience and technology will be employed to investigate the relationships between experience, body language, and learning; another project will study the relationship between abstract thinking and student-teacher interaction; and another course will explore behavioral prompts as a way to increase student engagement in an especially challenging core course at the Mailman School of Public Health.

Each of these projects will yield knowledge that can be employed in the particular class and school where the work is conducted, but more importantly, findings can be mapped onto a range of courses across a broad range of teaching and learning environments within and beyond Columbia.

“The Science of Learning Research Initiative is an invaluable hub for cross-disciplinary learning to advance teaching and learning", said Soulaymane Kachani, Senior Vice Provost and Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. “These five new projects help faculty across our schools contribute to advancing the science of learning and yielding the best possible learning outcomes for all students, at Columbia and beyond.” 

 

2022 SOLER GRANT AWARDEES

Tugce Bilgin, Lecturer in the Discipline of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology
John Black, Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Telecommunications & Education
Josh Friedman, Research Staff Assistant
How Nonverbal Communication Supports Abstract Thinking Development

 

Nicholas Bock, Lecturer in the Discipline of Earth and Environmental Sciences
Vincent Fitzpatrick, Lecturer in the Discipline of Biological Sciences
Debora Monego, Lecturer in the Discipline of Chemistry
Interactive Simulations to Support Inquiry-Based Statistics Instruction in Frontiers of Science

 

Alfredo Spagna, Lecturer in the Discipline of Psychology
Xiaofu He, Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurobiology (in Psychiatry)
Neuro-DBER: A New Area of Discipline-Based Education Research that Leverages Neuroscience to Enhance Teaching and Learning

 

Brent Stockwell, Professor of Biological Sciences and Chemistry
Evaluating Augmented Reality (AR) Using Microsoft Mesh Hololens 2 for Teaching Deep Expertise in Introductory Biochemistry

 

Amy Werman, Lecturer in the Discipline of Social Work
An Exploration of the Anti-Oppressive Practice of "Un-grading" and Its Effects on Student Learning