Guest blog post by Nikolas Zelem, nzelem@uwaterloo.ca
My name is Nikolas Zelem, I’m a third-year student in the Honours Physics program here at the University of Waterloo. I’ve spent the last four months working with Diana as an Educational Research Assistant. Most of my time was spent working on tasks for the Enhancing Assessment Practices (EAP) project. I reviewed Faculty of Math course syllabi and co-conducted a survey of Faculty of Math students regarding assessments. Both tasks were in service of a larger goal, creating a webpage for the EAP project.
The webpage, which is now live, is intended to give instructors in the Faculty of Math ideas about how they can enhance existing assessments and potentially inspire them to come up with new assessments. The page uses some of the data collected by the aforementioned syllabi review and survey (both of which were valuable learning experiences for me on their own). It also builds upon Asma’s (the previous Educational Research Assistant) and Diana’s work from the year prior. They had already found many valuable sources which are now cited on the webpage.
The EAP webpage doesn’t just offer ideas from literature, though. One section of the website is dedicated to sharing assessment practices from instructors in the Faculty of Math. One of my responsibilities was to ask those instructors for permission to include their assessments on the websites. All of the instructors were very helpful, making an unfamiliar task much easier. Assembling the webpage was also one of my responsibilities, to do so required me to learn how to use WCMS. I had never used WCMS before, but it was fairly intuitive, so working on the webpage was straightforward. I hope this webpage can help some instructors that need ideas for assessments.
While the webpage was a major part of my co-op, I also completed an important project that was not as closely related to the EAP project. I co-authored a paper with Diana and Chelsea Uggenti about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in statistics. Our paper supplies the reader with nine UDL strategies that can be easily implemented in post-secondary statistics classrooms. It also contains two case studies that offer real-life examples of how some of the strategies can be implemented.
I was primarily responsible for the literature review. Given the limited time available, the literature review was not intended to be extensive, but I still feel like I learned a lot during the process. I had never conducted a literature review before, so this was an entirely new experience. I learned how to quickly assess whether a paper was relevant to our topic and concisely summarize papers that were. This required critical thinking skills that aren’t generally emphasized in my coursework, so I’m glad I got the opportunity to practice these skills. I also learned a great deal about UDL and accessibility in education. One of the great things about performing a literature review is the incredible amount of information you are exposed to.
The whole process of writing a paper was also a very valuable experience, I’m sure this will benefit me greatly in my future academic endeavours. I will be presenting our findings at the upcoming IASE Satellite Conference in July of this year. Presenting on that scale will be a new experience, like many things I’ve done in my position as Educational Research Assistant, but I’m sure it will be just as rewarding.
Overall, I’ve gotten the chance to experience a variety of different aspects of research, both quantitative (syllabi review and survey) and qualitative (literature review). I’m very grateful to be given these opportunities. It was a joy working with Diana and the few others that we collaborated with over the course of the term.
