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Grant program: Teaching and Learning Development Grant (TLDG)

Grant recipient: Luke Clossey, Department of History

Project team: Jovana Andelkovic, Liam Foster, Mica Jensen, Aali Mirjat, Cahit Mete Oguz, Esther Souman, Katherine Widmer, and Phoenix Yurkovich, research assistants

Timeframe: September 2018 to March 2020

Funding: $6000

Courses addressed:

• HIST 130 – Fundamentals of World History
• HIST 468W – Problems in the History of Religion

Final report: View Luke Clossey's final report (PDF)

Description: I want to find out what makes a good, in pedagogical terms, source. How does the choice of sources affect student learning? Courses are often developed under non-ideal circumstances, and sometimes not much thought is put into source selection. I include sources I think are "good," and when repeating a course remove sources students think are "bad" (i.e. long), but there is little reflection (neither by the instructor nor by the students) on what "good" and "bad" mean in terms of pedagogy.

Questions addressed:

• By what criteria do students determine if a source enhances engagement and learning?
• How do students use sources?
• Are the sources collected based on the previous two questions effective for student engagement and learning?
• What do students learn from the experience of helping develop criteria for good sources and then searching for them?

Knowledge sharing: I plan to share our findings in the departmental newsletter.

Keywords: sources, reading, reader, visual, textual, engagement