Individual Fellow Initiatives

Displaying 1 - 21 of 21
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Academic Culture in McCombs School of Business

Cohort: 2022
Fellow: Kristie J Loescher

MSB does not have a standardized way to define or measure rigor in the classroom beyond using class GPAs as a proxy measure. This focus on lower GPA = higher rigor has had the unintended consequence of creating a
culture of acceptance for low student performance, which disproportionately falls on underrepresented
minorties and first-generation students. This project focuses on standardizing the definition and measurement of rigor in the classroom in a manner that supports both faculty development/promotion and student diversity/inclusion.

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The “Social/Wellness Module:” Providing Space for Wellbeing and Social Learning for Incoming UT Students

Cohort: 2022
Fellow: Marina Alexandrova

My project addresses the lack of built-in social/wellness-oriented interactions in introductory courses for

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Enhancing Assessment Practices in Large Physics Courses

Cohort: 2022
Fellow: Jonathan Perry

There exists a gap between instruction and assessment in large introductory physics courses. Recent
projects supported by the PTFs and the Texas Mindset Initiative have focused on classroom instruction and

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Peer Mentor Leadership Project

Cohort: 2021
Fellow: Gwendolyn Stovall

UT CNS Freshman Research Initiative (FRI) peer mentors are a critical component of FRI success! FRI peer mentors, many serving as student teachers, guide undergraduate students in scientific research activities. For many, that includes leading meetings, providing student feedback, creatively solving problems and helping students connect the dots, honing interpersonal social skills, effectively communicating, and more – all 21st Century skills (Trilling and Fadel, 2009).

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Making New Scientists: Supporting the Training of Incoming Science Majors

Cohort: 2021
Fellow: Ruth Shear

Traditional science degree programs concentrate primarily on content and are not known for preparing their graduates with other skills needed for scientific careers.

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The Compassion Project

Cohort: 2021
Fellow: Natalie Czimskey

In a Gallup poll of UT alumni (2014), only 15-17% of UT alumni strongly believed that faculty cared about them as a person. The Gallup report (2014) relayed information on various measures of alumni well-being. Gallup found that college experience was more likely to correlate to alumni well-being than the type of university attended. Having a professor who they believed cared about them as a person was the number one driving factor in alumni well-being. This means there is long-term impact to the short-term care of our students.

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Student Success and Well-being

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: Nina Telang

My project is designed to support engineering students primarily in their freshman and sophomore years, when they struggle the most, resulting in high failing rates. Students do not always implement the best study strategies as they transition from high school to college, and do not prioritize their self-care and well-being. College level coursework is significantly more difficult compared to high school level courses and require more critical and abstract thinking.

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Improving Scientific Literacy and Climate Change Understanding for all UT Students

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: Steven Finkelstein

In CNS we teach ~6500 non-science majors in our introductory classes each year (>2000 in Astronomy alone). These are the last science courses these students take, which presents us with an opportunity to make a lasting impression. I propose to lead a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) to design module focused on scientific literacy and the science behind climate change. This module will be based on active learning, making use of the abundance of research that shows students retain information better by doing rather than listening.

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Mentored Research Learning: An Evaluation

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: Michael Findley

Mentored research defies the traditional higher education approach, which separates research and teaching into distinct activities. Instead, mentored research fully integrates faculty research activities and student learning. In this approach, researchers do not simply carry out their research in isolation with a paid set of PhD-level research assistants. Further, students do not simply learn from in-class lectures or more traditional out-of-classroom experiences, such as study abroad.

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Facilitation of Student Success in Introductory Accounting

Cohort: 2019
Fellow: Kristina Zvinakis

The students participating in this project are part of a group of students known as McCombs Success Scholars (MSS). Such students have been identified as potentially not as well prepared for academic success as some of their McCombs-school peers (i.e., they grew up in smaller cities/towns, their family’s socio-economic status tilts toward the lower end of the scale, they attended a small high school).

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STAMP of Success in Doctoral Education: Student Training, Advising, and Mentorship Practices

Cohort: 2018
Fellow: Jessica Toste

Success in a doctoral program can be captured by students’ adjustment to the academic community and their achievement. In recent years, growing concerns have been raised by media, policy makers, and academics about reported mental health issues amongst PhD students. Research suggests that the mental health of PhD students can be improved when there are available supports related to management of work-life balance, workload, decision-making, and leadership styles that lead to satisfactory and constructive work relations (Levecque et al., 2017).

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Online Drivers Exercise

Cohort: 2017
Fellow: Clint Tuttle

Since my first semester at UT (Fall 2011) I’ve taught about 10,000 students across all colleges. From this immense amount of student interaction, I’ve come to believe that many of our students lack the tools and techniques to define their own personal path to success and are not confident in how to best make decisions about their future.  As a result of this, I believe many students are seeking what they see as a “safe path” (e.g.

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Freshman Opportunities for Research in the Geosciences (FORGe)

Cohort: 2017
Fellow: Mary Poteet

I am working on a unique partnership between Austin Community College (ACC) and UT Austin to develop collaborative peer learning communities (PLCs) in the Geosciences with mixed cohorts of two-year college (2YC) and four-year college (4YC) students.

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Teaching Patient Safety at the Bedside

Cohort: 2017
Fellow: Chris Moriates

Creating a culture of patient safety in teaching hospitals results in safer care delivery. The many demands of the current clinical learning environment make it challenging to routinely and effectively include bedside teaching and role-modeling of patient safety. We used a “positive deviance” model, which has been applied in various settings to help change cultural practices, to identify clinical faculty who model and teach patient safety principles during direct patient care.

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BA Colloquium in Theatre and Dance

Cohort: 2017
Fellow: Andrew Carlson

The BA program in Theatre and Dance lacks adequate faculty mentorship and an identity as a program. A recent poll of BA students in Theatre and Dance on strengths and weaknesses of the program revealed that many BA students see themselves as “second-class citizens” in a department that offers three highly structured and mentored BFA programs in dance, teacher certification, and acting.

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Hispanic STEM Transfer Student Challenges and Resources

Cohort: 2016
Fellow: Maura Borrego

In 2012, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology documented the need to prepare an additional one million STEM professionals over the next ten years. To achieve this increase in STEM degree production, attention must be directed towards improving pathways for all students, specifically minority students who have been historically underserved. Research has indicated a need to focus on these underrepresented groups in STEM settings as enrollment patterns and access to higher education differs between groups of students.

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Teaching the University: Enhancing Student Understanding and Appreciation of the University

Cohort: 2016
Fellow: Hina Azam

My project is intended to address a lack of understanding among most undergraduate students of the university both as an institution and as a space in which intellectual life is pursued.  This lack of understanding among undergraduates is intertwined, I believe, with a broader lack of appreciation for higher education/academia in our cultural and civic life.

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Professional Development for Undergraduate Students Majoring in the Biological Sciences

Cohort: 2015
Fellow: Christopher Shank

I seek the opportunity to create a professional development curriculum that would provide students a structured vehicle for developing professional confidence and self-awareness, and facilitate  early  success  in  an  increasingly  competitive ‘real-world.’ My desire to work on this idea as a Provost Teaching Fellow stems from the overwhelmingly positive student response to professional development activities that I have incorporated in several of my courses.

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Thinking Beyond the Four Years: Assessing a Program for Coaching Career Success

Cohort: 2015
Fellow: Brad Love

The project is a longitudinal partnership with the Vick Center for Strategic Advising, College of Education faculty, Project 2021 staff, and other Longhorns to measure existing attempts to teach useful skills such as emotional intelligence so that students can make constructive decisions while at UT and then be prepared for the significant life transition that is one’s first career post-graduation. The key activities include semesterly surveys and interviews with students using Vick Center services such as in-person visits and online modules.

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Foundations of Data Analysis:A Transformative Dual-Credit Course to Prepare Texas Seniors to Succeed in Higher Education

Cohort: 2014
Fellow: Cathy Stacy

SSC 302 is an introductory course that blends the skills of data analysis, basic modeling techniques and inferential statistics. Many UT students complete this course to satisfy their core math requirement. I believe the content of SSC 302 should be made available to students prior to their enrollment here at UT, both to accelerate their preparedness for college and to help inform their choice of major trajectories once they are here.

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CS Studio: Teaching Introductory Programming to At-Risk Students in a Small Class Structure

Cohort: 2014
Fellow: Michael Scott

CS312 is the introductory programming class for computer science majors. It teaches students structured programming: designing and implementing computer programs that solve nontrivial problems. CS312 is the first required course for Computer Science majors. It is part of the four course pre CS program. CS is different than many of the other disciplines in the College of Natural Science. Most students have some exposure to math, chemistry, biology, and even physics during their secondary education. And some have the opportunity to take Computer Science courses.