Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are crucial facilitators of undergraduate education, yet many begin their teaching appointments with minimal knowledge of teaching practices. Chemistry Instructional Coaching offers GTAs at the University of Michigan an opportunity to develop their instructional practice through a collaborative, nonevaluative,…

This article reports on one university's experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed "MonsterComp," including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures,…

This research project examines Intergroup Dialogue courses in The Program on Intergroup Relations at the University of Michigan. I investigate the various reasons why the demand for these courses which peaked in the late 90s and early 2000's started to decline in 2018. With partisanship at an all-time high in our society, and the ability and…

Many scholars recommend preparing faculty for educator roles. Faculty Learning Communities, The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and teaching centers represent common preparatory approaches. But faculty and teaching assistants report time, disciplinary disconnects, and lack of incentives as ongoing barriers. Inspired by K-12's…

An increasing number of introductory physics courses are seeking to incorporate "authentic practices," and a large area of focus in this trend is the incorporation of computational problems into the curriculum. These problems offer students an opportunity to engage with the programming practices and numerical problem-solving methods used…

The factors that influence rater scoring have been a subject of great interest to researchers in second language assessment. However, the research on the impact of test-takers' speech profiles (e.g., a jagged or a flat profile reflecting analytic subscores) on raters' scoring behaviors remains to be seen. To investigate the role of speech profiles…

Second-language (L2) testing researchers have explored the relationship between speakers' overall speaking ability, reflected by holistic scores, and the speakers' performance on speaking subcomponents, reflected by analytic scores (e.g., McNamara, 1990; Sato, 2011). These research studies have advanced applied linguists' understanding of how…

In recent years, issues pertaining to graduate student union organizing have been at the center of several political battles and court cases. This attention is, at least in part, due to the growth of graduate student unions at a time when organized labor's influence is receding in other, more traditionally unionized sectors of the labor force. As…

This section shares recent dissertations and theses with the "Journal of International Students" readers. There were about 139 graduate dissertations and theses related to the issues and challenges of international students in 2016. The complete versions of these selected dissertations are available in the ProQuest, Michigan-based…

Teacher education in the U.S. suffers from a form of continental drift with deep fault lines. Most teachers learn to teach in three disconnected lands--colleges of arts and science, schools of education, and K-12 classrooms. There is little to help preservice travelers navigate within and bridge across these spaces. This article describes the…

This article examines the ways in which the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) can be integrated into graduate education in the humanities to support future faculty preparation in teaching. Drawing on data from a multi-year project at a research-1 institution in the United States, and theories from postmodern geography and postcolonial…

Within academic institutions, writing centers are uniquely situated, socially rich sites for exploring learning and literacy. I examine the work of the Michigan Tech Writing Center's UN 1002 World Cultures study teams primarily because student participants and Writing Center coaches are actively engaged in structuring their own learning and…

The variety of problems identified with undergraduate education at large research universities may best be summed up by a disquieting portrait provided by the Boyer Commission. In its 1998 report, called "Reinventing Undergraduate Education", the commission described thousands of undergraduates receiving instruction from novice teaching…

This teacher-researcher case study examines the use of digital storytelling in a teacher assisting seminar. During the field placement, students composed a digital story of a teaching hour. Combining reflection with classroom footage, students exhibited their work for their colleagues. Digital stories added to the written narratives from the…