This paper adds to the nascent literature on teaching research methods and what students learn from courses and assessment. Postgraduate students are often confronted with large amounts of reading, and the content of material can be intimidating. Convincing them also to engage critically with readings is even more difficult. We report on a…

Social presence (represented by salience of instructor and fellow students) in an online teaching environment has been shown to influence perceptions of course activity and self-estimates of learning. An experiment is described here in which teacher presence is manipulated via personalized messages from the teaching assistant throughout the…

The Monte Carlo Quiz (MCQ), a single-item quiz, is so named because chance, with the roll of a die, determines (a) whether the quiz is administered; (b) the specific article, chapter, or section of the assigned reading that the quiz covers; and (c) the particular question that makes up the quiz. The MCQ encourages both punctual completion and deep…