Classics

The Classics Department joined the Active Learning Initiative in the Initiative’s second phase. The department, known for its teaching in small seminar-style and language courses, is interested in developing larger introductory courses with broad interest to the Cornell community based on an active learning model. With the help of a postdoctoral fellow, Classics has developed two new courses, “Statues and Public Life” and “Hieroglyphs to HTML: History of Writing”, and transformed their large Mythology course. Their approach has been to offer structured activities that ask students to closely examine ancient literature, art and material culture, to compare these different forms of expression, as well as make connections between the past and the current day.

In 2022, Classics will continue the transformation of their undergraduate curriculum. As with their earlier grant, the department plans to use active learning strategies that prioritize student thinking and discussion. The focus will be on making the Classics curriculum more inclusive by implementing active learning in four courses that address issues relevant to both Classics and the modern world. The department believes these courses, which will address the ancient world’s treatment of race and ethnicity, gender, human rights, social justice, and climate change, will engage students from across the university.

History

The Department of History will develop one new course and redesign five others with the help of two postdoctoral fellows. The courses will address the current urgent need to train students in media literacy and evidence-based knowledge. This is evident in its new course, The deep fake: Conspiracies throughout history, which will teach undergraduates how to become sophisticated interpreters of the evidence and sources that inform media, news, and history.

Courses planned for redesign such as A global history of love and The rise and fall of the Soviet empire are geared towards a wide range of students within and outside the college. The department believes that by incorporating the “doing of history” through active learning, its courses will galvanize students to engage more deeply with historical meaning-making and encourage them to explore classes in other regional areas and time periods.

Music

The Music Department wanted to engage students in the learning process in new and innovative ways and to provide better ways for students to practice what they are learning. Their 2017 grant allowed them to introduce new technology in and out of the classroom with portable keyboards, polling questions, and custom software developed by their ALI postdoctoral fellow. In 2018, faculty began to introduce lightweight portable keyboards into a sequence of three music theory classes (Music 1105, 2101, and 2102) to help students explore new concepts and develop self-awareness about their playing through immediate feedback. With the help of a postdoctoral fellow, they also developed online learning tools, which provide adaptive feedback to students outside of class. The department predicts that both the keyboard practice and the immediate feedback with the online tool will make abstract theories more understandable, helping students to develop a more sophisticated understanding of music and music theory.

Biological and Environmental Engineering

The Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering recognizes that in order to succeed as engineers, students must leave Cornell with problem-solving skills that transcend fundamental and applied knowledge sets. Students must be able to transfer their skills and knowledge across courses and contexts to identify and develop solutions to complex problems. As part of its 2019 Active Learning Initiative grant, the department is targeting four courses that focus on developing problem-solving skills in order to provide students with a “problem-solving toolbox.” This toolbox will serve beyond the immediate course and into meta-learning that spans biological engineering as a discipline, giving students a structure with many potential applications. Three faculty members and two postdoctoral fellows are transforming three existing courses and developing one new course; about 200 students will take these courses every year.

Biomedical Engineering

With its grant, the Nancy E. & Peter C. Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering will employ teaching principles used in architectural design education to transform its 6-course, core undergraduate sequence. This is the first step in a plan to expand design education to address challenges students face in bridging conceptual knowledge with practice and improving their ability to integrate knowledge across scales. With the new approach, students will work in small groups to model, analyze, and design products to present in class during feedback critiques. The department believes the new teaching strategy, paired with emphasis on applying engineering analysis to complex biology, will improve students’ proficiency and prepare them for variability and uncertainty common in their careers while building essential communication and teamwork skills.

Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

The Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering’s ALI grant will allow faculty to integrate inquiry-based learning across 11 required courses in its undergraduate curriculum. Traditionally in the program, students learned theory and applied it to close-ended problems for three years before engaging with equipment for the first time in lab their senior year. With the new design, opportunities for hands-on, experiential learning will be spread throughout the curriculum, and there will now be space for a new senior-level capstone design course, which will be spread over the course of a year. The faculty believes that synchronizing their new inquiry-based model with theory lessons and design problems will help students achieve a deeper level of learning and will facilitate the development of more meaningful and sophisticated capstone projects directly linked to their career goals. They see this new change effort as a living laboratory.

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

With the help of the Active Learning Initiative, the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering redesigned most of its junior-year courses in phase 3 of the ALI to incorporate project or case-based learning, where conceptual learning was paired with classroom activities and team-based assignments such as robot design in Mechatronics. The department is now poised to revolutionize laboratory instruction at the Sibley School by creating multiple learning studios that will replace traditional lab courses. The department plans to organize studios around three engineering systems: forklift, robot, and satellite; each integrating laboratory experiences across 5-10 classes. Studios will act as central hubs for students of any skill level across all years of the program, connecting classes and concepts across the curriculum. In this model, students will visit and revisit the same instructional spaces in multiple contexts, alternating roles as experts and learners and interacting with multiple modes of an engineering system. The MAE project will affect every required class in the curriculum and one third of all classes in the department.

Physics

The Physics Department has been involved with the ALI since the very beginning. During the Initiative’s pilot phase, the Department transformed its introductory engineering sequence introducing pre-class work and creating space for students to discuss and solve problems during class time. Later, it redesigned the labs in this sequence adopting an inquiry-based model to better engage students and to help them learn what it means to do experimental physics. 

With its current grant, the Department will redesign its two Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) sequences (4 courses) to better support the diversity of the student population in terms of their math and physics preparation, majors, study habits, and high school backgrounds. These courses have a wide impact on students as they serve as the physical sciences graduation requirement for several colleges and their content and course materials are covered on the MCAT. The redesigned courses will implement active learning activities that focus on authentic biological examples that provide meaningful physical insight and foster the reasoning skills that are needed by biologists. 

The Department plans to evaluate the needs and benefits of IPLS courses at Cornell and connect what’s being done on campus with research-based developments that have occurred at other universities. It will spend a year gathering information on the current needs of the student population in these courses, followed by two years implementing and revising the new curricula. The Department will evaluate the role of physics lab instruction for IPLS students, as well as the efficacy and learning benefits of the instructional pedagogies of the two sequences: auto-tutorial (individual) versus typical classroom instruction. It will further consider whether other instructional approaches might be more appropriate for this population. 
 

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

The Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology was one of the pioneers of the Active Learning Initiative in 2014. Department faculty were interested in using new teaching pedagogies to improve student learning in two, large introductory courses: Introduction to Ecology and the Environment (BioEE 1610) and Evolutionary Biology and Diversity (BioEE 1780). After choosing a gradual implementation approach, BioEE 1610’s instructors settled on a blend of lecture, polling, small-group discussion, and small-group activities in every class.

Faculty in BioEE 1780, adopted a more structured, Team Based Learning (TBL) approach with their class. Now funded through the 2019 Initiative, course faculty have launched an online active learning version of the Evolutionary Biology course with the help of an ALI-funded postdoctoral fellow. The online class runs in parallel to the in-person course during the school year and on its own in the summer. The instructors hope that the new version of the course will reach a broader and more diverse community of students without increasing the size of the already popular in-person course. It will serve as a model for developing online courses that employ active learning strategies and for assessing the efficacy of online versus in-person instruction.

Entomology

The Entomology Department wants students to learn the “how’s and why’s” of the scientific process while becoming critical consumers of scientific information. They also want their students to become skilled at evaluating science-based, public policy discussions through a multidisciplinary lens so that they can interpret and communicate scientific information to others. With three years of funding from the 2019 Active Learning Initiative grant, Entomology has redesigned three popular classes for non-majors (Alien Empire, Honeybee Biology, Plagues and People). The redesign has incorporated active learning modules that prompt students to practice thinking and communicating like scientists and to learn to evaluate scientific information. Four faculty members and a teaching postdoc contributed to the transformation effort, which reaches over 300 students a year.

Molecular Biology & Genetics

The Department of Molecular Biology & Genetics has developed a plan to improve student performance and shift classroom culture from competitive to collaborative, in response to their concerns about the number of Biological Sciences majors who struggle in MBG core courses. The Department will implement active learning strategies, such as polling, pre-lecture work, quizzes, and collaborative group work in five large, core courses of 170-400 students. They will additionally focus on identifying struggling students early in the semester, implementing strategies for community-building and cooperative learning, increasing student confidence, and normalizing help-seeking in order to better connect students with support. TAs will play an integral role in this process, and the Department plans to create training modules on active learning strategies, pedagogy, and course-specific materials, in order to prepare them for working with students in the redesigned courses. 

Natural Resources

The new Environmental and Sustainability Sciences (ESS) major is a rapidly growing multidisciplinary major that includes 75 faculty from 22 departments across CALS and A&S. Through emphasizing cross-disciplinary perspectives, ESS faculty are helping students to think critically and work collaboratively to solve complex environmental problems. The 2019 Active Learning Initiative grant has allowed the department to redesign two courses, Climate Solutions and Introductory Field Biology, and to develop several new courses, including capstones that enable students to dive deeply into a semester-long group project. In the new, Global Water Sustainability course, students work collaboratively to develop and evaluate plans for improving water resource management, including engaging in direct dialogue with outside experts and working with community partners. In Climate Solutions, a hybrid in-person and online course, students identify, implement, and assess an individual climate action and climate policy initiative, then present their project to their classmates. The five faculty and two postdocs leading these efforts will share lessons learned widely within the ESS community to foster additional efforts to incorporate active learning approaches across a wide spectrum of courses.

Neurobiology and Behavior

The Department of Neurobiology and Behavior (NBB), also part of the first round of ALI funding, initially chose to transform Neurobiology and Behavior II: Introduction to Neuroscience (BioNB 2220), a course in the biology curriculum taught by a team of nine faculty. Two years later with the success of their first transformation underway, the faculty transformed Neurobiology and Behavior I: Introduction to Behavior (BioNB 2210), the first course in the two-course sequence. The department’s active learning fellow worked with each instructor to incorporate a few new techniques (e.g., Clicker questions, class discussion, pre-lecture videos). After implementing active learning, the department found that in most years the discrepancy in exam scores between 3-credit (no discussion section) and 4-credit students was so greatly reduced that the function of the discussion section as a tool to master basic concepts appeared to have been satisfied by active learning exercises in the classroom.

Plant Science

When the School of Integrative Plant Science (SIPS) was established in 2015, it significantly revised its 10-course, core undergraduate curriculum. In the years since, the major has more than doubled in size. SIPS is transforming their core curriculum with the help of a 2019 Active Learning Initiative grant by developing in-class activities, improving student learning, and providing faculty with resources to support these changes. These efforts are also targeting the laboratory components of the program by moving away from observational labs and towards experimental labs, where students make a hypothesis, design an experiment, collect and analyze data, and present their findings. The project will involve the work of 14 faculty and four postdocs over five years, with the resulting transformation of 10 courses, making it one of the largest ALI projects.

The School of Integrative Plant Science (SIPS) has made the creation of a strong and progressive teaching ecosystem a top priority. Since its inception in 2015, the program has worked to transform its core undergraduate curriculum. In 2019, SIPS received an ALI grant to redesign 10 undergraduate courses and labs, incorporating active learning and experimentation while further streamlining its curriculum. With its 2023 funding, SIPS will build on its earlier work with the transformation of four additional courses and the development of one new course. Courses will incorporate active learning strategies, such as case studies, group projects, discussions, and two-part group exams. Implementing active learning and inclusive teaching strategies across their undergraduate curriculum will support SIPS’s commitment to increase the diversity of students in their undergraduate program and build community at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Information Science

Information Science (IS) has experienced explosive growth in its undergraduate enrollments over the last several years. With a 2019 Active Learning Initiative grant, the department has been reimagining the way it facilitates student learning in some of its largest and fastest growing courses. Six faculty members have committed to using innovative active learning techniques drawn from a variety of disciplines to transform six courses central to their curriculum over a three-year period. These faculty have been incorporating activities in and out of the classroom, as well as developing peer-programming activities, live-coding collaborations, interactive case studies, and group data visualization projects with the help of two postdoctoral fellows. Finding ways to implement collaborative classwork and peer feedback in large classes has been a particular focus of this project. When fully implemented, the changes will impact over 1,500 students.

Mathematics

The Mathematics Department began its involvement with the Active Learning Initiative in 2017 when it received a three-year grant to transform two introductory calculus courses and a proofs course. Together, these courses serve more than 900 students a year. Students in Calculus I now spend much of their class time working on problems while their instructor provides guidance, and those in “Modeling with Calculus for the Life Sciences,” spend time modeling dynamical systems and working with their peers to solve problems. With its 2019 Active Learning Initiative grant, the Department transformed two linear algebra courses which provide foundational math knowledge for numerous fields and impact over 400 students a year. Course changes were directed at improving students’ conceptual understanding as well as their ability to model real-life situations.

Now, with its 2024 funding, the Department aims to revolutionize the teaching and learning experience in four engineering mathematics courses which together serve 2,000 students each semester. It plans to introduce active learning into the lectures, discussion sections, and assignments using polling questions, interactive worksheets, and mini-projects with real-world applications. They plan to transform two additional upper-level courses that serve as introductions to specific fields of mathematics. The Department ultimately believes that introducing innovative teaching methods will foster a more engaging and effective learning environment, facilitating improved comprehension and concept retention. 
 

City and Regional Planning

City and Regional Planning (CRP) recently redesigned its undergraduate curriculum to better prepare students for working with cities around the world as they confront accumulating crises stemming from shifting economies and legacies of inequality. This new curriculum helps students prioritize questions of justice and equity, to frame the challenges urban residents face, and to engage in finding sustainable solutions with communities, officials, and policy makers. With the new curriculum in place, CRP is poised to design three new undergraduate courses that will incorporate active and engaged learning, giving students the opportunity to practice the methods of the discipline, such as participatory planning and research, interviewing, collaborative data collection, map-making, and qualitative and quantitative data analysis.

Economics

When the Department of Economics joined the Active Learning Initiative in 2017, it proposed an overhaul of the undergraduate curriculum that would transform seven of eight required core courses and one popular elective. Their goal is to improve student learning, particularly the ability to problem-solve, analyze graphs, and create economic models.

Economics is redesigning its courses to include peer instruction with in-class polling, in-class small-group and large-group discussion. Additionally, some courses have implemented innovative approaches such as small-group invention activities and two-stage group exams. The department has placed a high priority on developing standardized assessments that they expect will become standard for the field.

Government

The Department of Government plans to transform four courses that are essential to the major: Political violence, Post-truth politics, How do you know that? and Puzzle-solving with data. The courses will employ a wide range of teaching strategies aimed at improving student retention of core concepts and deepening their understanding of research design and statistical methods. Students in Political violence and Post-truth politics will engage in activities such as debates, simulations, writing, and reflections. In How do you know that? and Puzzle-solving with data, they will grapple with verbal puzzles, create and explain data visualizations, participate in hands-on data activities and analyses, and conduct longer term, project-based work. The department believes that a more hands-on approach to political science concepts and methodology will engage students more deeply with the material and lead to improved learning outcomes.
 

Psychology

Faculty in the Psychology Department were interested in using new pedagogical strategies and wanted to have a wider impact on psychology education by targeting learning outcomes established by the American Psychological Association. Using the ALI funding it received in 2018, the department has been transforming four courses and developing a fifth. The courses have revised their learning objectives and assessment strategies and introduced innovative activities to engage students and build community. Courses use case studies, debates, classroom polling, think-pair-share, and collaborative online annotation (for textbook readings) to help students learn the material and practice with their peers. Five faculty and two postdocs are supporting this project.

Sociology

Recognizing that its students come from diverse economic and social backgrounds and that they bring their deep-rooted beliefs about society with them, the Department of Sociology wanted to find new ways to help them to look at society from a sociological perspective. Funding through the ALI allowed the Department to hire two postdoctoral fellows to help transform two courses: Introduction to Sociology (Soc 1101) and Social Inequality (Soc 2208). The fellows worked with faculty to design instructional materials for the main class time and with graduate student TAs on the design, content, and pedagogy of discussion sections. They have introduced carefully designed in-class activities, polling questions, and peer discussion as a way for undergraduate students to challenge their preconceived beliefs about social processes, learn from their peers, and develop the skills to think critically about social structure, social dynamics, and the promises and pitfalls of social scientific modes of inquiry.