Teaching competency

Through my courses within the Cognate in College teaching (see https://www.unh.edu/professional-success/ceitl), I have learned a lot of effective tools and methods to develop the skills required for college teaching. I have demonstrated proficiency in the following core competencies, as described below and throughout this online portfolio.

Prior knowledge and effective learning

According to Ambrose & Lovett (2014), students have prior knowledge about (1) the course contents, (2) intellectual skills, (3) epistemological beliefs, and (4) the ability to assess and direct one's thinking when coming to a class first. They play an essential role in their learning. However, they tend to be often inaccurate.

• Identifying students' misconceptions helps instructors achieve course goals by promoting student learning. To identify content and skill misconceptions, I’ll ask students to do a quiz in order to assess their skills needed during the course and reveal how familiar they are with concepts. For beliefs and metacognition, I’d ask students questions about their learning experiences and expected grades.

• I’d recommend the following interventions to my colleague: (i) show students how to confront multiple perspectives, theories, and solutions; and (ii) introduce interesting research to encourage students to learn more.

Multimedia learning

Designing multimedia slides is an efficient and effective way to enhance learning (Overson). To use multimedia learning effectively, instructors must reduce extraneous processing, focus on essential processing, and promote generative processing (Mayer). Mayer suggested 12 principles to do this. In this presentation, I will introduce five principles that might be more helpful in teaching economics courses. I have uploaded more detailed information on how to use multimedia in my course on this webpage (see Multimedia learning in macroeconomics course )

Testing as Learning Strategy

The evidence suggests that successive relearning technique (Dunlosky et al., 2015) boosts student performance, produces long-term retention, and is relatively efficient because relearning requires less time. For economics courses, it is common to have a large class size (such as more than 100 students). Test banks are large enough and available so that students are able to practice several times in each subject. Thus, we can effectively use this in the classroom and help students apply this technique to their independent learning.

Learning strategies to enhance student learning

There is evidence from the field of cognitive and educational psychology that some learning strategies enhance students learning significantly. I showed some strategies below to use in a topic of the Solow model (see Learning activities ).

In macroeconomics, we analyze the different sources of economic growth. To explain them, we use the Solow model as a simple growth model. According to the Solow model, technological progress is the only way to sustain long-term economic growth (or increase in production). My goal for this topic is to have students understand how technological advancement provides sustained economic growth.

• To encourage self-explanation, I can use technology-enhanced representations such as simulations mentioned in Chiu and Chi (2018). For example, a change in parameters related to technological progress allows the simulation to produce graphs reflecting changes in an economy. Then I might ask students to explain details about changes in an economy that happened in simulation.

• For test-enhanced learning, I might first take a quick quiz during a class to draw a graph and then give students assignments with practice tests about the Solow model. Moreover, I might provide mock exam questions on this topic. Finally, questions in mid-term or final exams cover this topic. Therefore, students will repeatedly see them so that they can retain them even after the course.

• To apply the 3R technique, I might provide the key graph of the Solow model reflecting the impact of improvement in technology along with a text explaining how it works. Then, I’ll ask students to use the 3R technique to review and prepare for exams. However, I think I might ask students to work in a group to promote active learning.