Awardee: Beth Altringer (SEAS)

Summary: Expanding existing innovative program for assessing student learning in hands-on innovation courses. Awardee plans to advance methods for better assessing how teams interact and ideas develop during experiential learning in multi-disciplinary engineering classes focused on design and innovation.

“We’re building on what we know from the literature to create a multi-level, mixed-method feedback system designed to be useful to students and teachers alike, that can help us improve teaching and learning in innovation education classes.” — Beth Altringer

Can difficult feedback increase collaboration?

Beth Altringer’s project explores the teaching and learning of collaboration skills. Her laboratory is an experiential, multi-disciplinary engineering class, and she is in the process of developing a rich descriptive analysis of how students learn to work productively with one another and with outside experts.

Her methods include rigorous and multifaceted conversation pairings, and do not shy away from providing difficult feedback for each student that mixes quantitative and qualitative assessment. The process not only informs Altringer’s instructional decisions but also students’ understanding of the design behind their learning experience.

The results from her assessments are forming a foundational database from which tools for collaboration — between students, students and faculty, and students and experts — are in development.

Additional information:

• Beth Altringer: “Ideas with Impact” – Harvard Alumni website
• The Innovators’ Practice: Thinking Outside the Square – Harvard Alumni website