Enhancing a First-Year Seminar for Optimized Learning

In this project, we added to and improved the course content for the Thinking and Knowing (FYSM 1607C), a cognitive science course. This course is a two-term course that started in the fall and we used available information on the students’ current performance and reception to the course to strategically re-design assessments for the course’s second term. Our three main goals were to increase student engagement in the course, facilitate connections between course topics and incorporate more supplementary materials and external resources. We accomplished this by creating an innovative group assignment to serve as the course’s final and by adding additional course-related material and general first-year resources to the course Brightspace page. As a bonus, we expanded on the Metacognition unit in the course and mobilized Brendan Conway-Smith’s extensive background on the topic to create a framework for the development of a new course.