Program-In Person Conference

CJ Eubanks Fleming, Eric E. Hall, Caroline J. Ketcham, and Paul C. Miller, Elon University

• This session explores undergraduate research (UR) at Elon University, examining what it is, what it looks like in practice, and how it connects to career readiness. Drawing on the eight competencies designed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), presenters will discuss efforts to bring a career-focused lens to undergraduate research experiences. The session also addresses equity and access, highlighting concerns for underrepresented student populations and introducing Shared Equity Leadership as a framework for inclusive mentoring. Attendees will leave with a practical resource, the FIRE² Toolkit, designed to foster meaningful student reflection and growth throughout the research journey.

Marna Winter, Elon University

• What if joy is not an add-on, but a pedagogical strategy, shaping how students engage with learning? This session positions joyful pedagogy as an intentional approach to supporting student presence and deepening meaningful engagement with the learning community. Grounded in relational and wellness pedagogy, this workshop introduces the Arrive–Explore–Reflect framework, a flexible, cross-disciplinary model for designing learning experiences that foster connection, curiosity, and active engagement. Drawing on classroom-based research, participants will explore how practices, such as arrival, exploration, and reflection, enhance students’ readiness and engagement with content. Participants engage in an experiential activity and leave with practical strategies to implement immediately.

Belén Gajardo Álvarez, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Kassidy Puckett, Peter Felten, Elon University

• What does it take to prepare students for tomorrow? Research reveals that strong relationships are essential for healthy communities and happy lives. Research also shows that educational relationships are at the heart of student learning, belonging, well-being, and success in college – and are especially vital for students who are first-generation or from marginalized groups. Because the classroom and the curriculum are at the heart of higher education, faculty are the most important architects of those human connections. The ways we design courses, teach every day, and assess learning not only shape interactions in our courses but also help students develop relational capacities, habits, and values that will allow them to thrive personally and professionally for life. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll explore four evidence-informed strategies that faculty across institutions use to build meaningful relationships with and among students: demonstrating care, using interactive pedagogies, sharing personal stories, and connecting individually. In the workshop, we will reflect on our own teaching and identify concrete ways to deepen relational practices in our courses. Whether you’re new to relational pedagogy or looking to strengthen existing approaches, this workshop will offer practical strategies – and connections to colleagues – grounded in research and adaptable to diverse disciplines and teaching contexts.

Heidi Griffin & Shawn Bowers, Queens University

• Leveraging the LMS system extends the classroom, and therefore the opportunities for engaged learning beyond the four walls of a physical space. In this session, two instructors of writing, rhetoric, and general education studies share their pedagogical practices around creating transparent and accessible learning environments utilizing the Canvas course shells. Thinking about the digital space as part of the course landscape means making intentional choices that deepen students’ learning in meaningful ways.

Melinda Harper, Queens University

• As employers increasingly emphasize transferable competencies such as collaboration, communication, leadership, and emotional intelligence, educators are challenged to design experiences that target these skills. This presentation describes an applied simulation course that uses experiential learning and structured reflection to help advanced undergraduate students develop leadership and group facilitation skills. The multi-disciplinary approach of this course is especially appealing to several majors, such as business, psychology, sports management, communication and health sciences. This session will share the course design, assessment strategies, and observed student outcomes, while also offering practical approaches that instructors can intentionally use to build transferable skills within their own disciplines.

Kyle Altmann, Shannon Duvall, Duke Hutchings, Martin Kamela, Joel Karty, Elon University

• In standards-based grading, instructors identify the specific skills or competencies students should master in the course. Standards are posted for students to review, and assessment of these standards generally allows multiple attempts to accommodate learner differences and reward improvement. In this panel, faculty members from the Computer Science, Chemistry, and Physics & Astronomy departments reflect on implementing this grading methodology in their courses. The discussion will focus on student engagement, feedback, and learning outcomes, as well as the instructor’s initial and ongoing time investment and related course delivery and content updates.

CJ Fleming & Sabrina Perkins, Elon University

• Undergraduate research mentoring relationships play a critical role in students’ sense of belonging, academic success, and professional development. Yet, like any close relationship, mentoring partnerships can also involve challenges. This poster explores how insights from relationship science, particularly research on what makes close relationships thrive, can inform mentoring practices. Drawing on scholarship about effective relationships and our experiences as undergraduate research mentors, we present seven actionable strategies for strengthening mentoring partnerships. Participants will be invited to reflect on their own mentoring relationships and consider practical, relationship-centered approaches that can foster more meaningful, supportive, and effective mentoring across disciplines.

Chad Hallyburton, Mariana Da Costa & Isabella Erskine, Western Carolina University

• The influenza vaccination status of healthcare workers (HCWs) influences HCW infection risks, rates of healthcare-associated infections, etc., but resistance to employer vaccine mandates is common. A Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience challenged pre-nursing students to create materials promoting timely vaccination in HCWs and the impacts of the curriculum on student knowledge/beliefs were described. Significant knowledge improvements regarding vaccine safety, efficacy, and patient risks were noted. Changes in mandate-related beliefs were less pronounced. Other important project outcomes included supporting pre-nursing students as future evidence-based vaccine decision-making leaders and embedding workforce-relevant research into coursework to strengthen curriculum relevance.

Jennifer Dixon, Queens University

• Durable, transferable learning is something students actively construct, requiring an intentional balance of instructor support and productive student struggle, keeping the locus of cognitive work with the learner. This in-progress SoTL study examines whether low-preparation, student-centered micro-adjustments grounded in Lang’s (2021) small teaching framework and Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) can create structured opportunities for students to maintain agency in the learning process, cultivating genuine competence. Drawing on preliminary data from a business course, this poster explores a menu of brief classroom interventions designed to support student autonomy, competence, and engagement with implications for faculty across all disciplines.

Jeremy Hohertz, Colin Vernon & Shon Gilliam, Elon University

• This work substituted an escape room-style activity for a traditional final exam in the second semester of an algebra-based introductory physics class. Students worked in small groups to solve a series of hands-on challenges in addition to traditional problems. Example problems, student feedback, and logistical details will be presented. Inspired by the work of Anthony Crider and his Epic Finales.

Catherine Bowlin, Elon University

• This poster examines question-based pedagogy (QBP) as a strategy for building transferable learning skills through feedback practices. Drawing on an in-progress SoTL project in first-year writing courses, it explores how teaching students to generate purposeful questions about their own work fosters metacognition, agency, and deeper engagement with revision. Situated within a linguistically just, grade-decentered assessment ecology, QBP positions students as active participants in feedback processes. Preliminary findings suggest that student-generated questions help students take ownership of their writing and learning. Attendees will encounter adaptable strategies for integrating question-driven feedback practices across disciplines to support self-directed, lifelong learners.

Catherine A. Baxter, Megan Koransky, Queens University

• High–cognitive load courses often require students to engage in complex clinical reasoning before they have fully mastered foundational concepts. This presentation shares a scaffolded, technology‑enhanced instructional approach designed to support cognitive development from foundational recall to team‑based application in undergraduate nursing courses. Drawing on Bloom’s Taxonomy and cognitive load theory the course design intentionally separates early individual learning tasks—focused on remembering and understanding—from later group-based activities requiring application, analysis, and creation. The Connectivism learning theory was also used to connect students, allowing them to share information and learning concepts through a collaborative process.The Canvas LMS serves as the central environment for these experiences, supported by a deliberate, phased integration of digital tools such as Canvas Studio, Padlet, Quizlet, Kahoot! and Lucid.

Heidi Hollingsworth, Mark Enfield, Bill Burress & Jeffrey Carpenter, Elon University

• This poster presentation shares findings from our study of the impact of field experiences abroad on pre-service teachers (PSTs). The poster briefly describes study methodology and then highlights results of initial analyses of interviews with PSTs during their field placement abroad. Discussion will focus on findings related to PSTs’ articulation of learning and competencies relevant to an evolving society (e.g., learning about the cultured nature of schooling and about aspects of their own intercultural competence). Although our study focuses on PSTs, understanding of workplace culture, global awareness, and intercultural competence are transferable competencies in many disciplines.

Brandon Sheridan, Elon University

• This study presents a method for integrating AI into courses to promote critical thinking, trust, and AI literacy. Adapting the “send-a-problem” approach, students first build individual understanding, then collaborate using AI to generate complex problems, and finally solve peer-created tasks. Implemented across multiple courses over two semesters (≈130 students), the study also surveys student perceptions of AI use. Preliminary results indicate positive engagement, with students valuing problem creation while recognizing AI’s limitations as a learning tool.

Jen Uno, Elon University

• This poster will present bottom-up inductive qualitative data analysis from students who engage with UTAs, faculty who work with UTAs, and the UTAs themselves. Students, faculty, and UTAs were asked questions around what roles TAs play in the classroom setting, how TAs helped support learning, and how UTAs interact with both students in the class as well as with faculty. Data will focus on key themes that emerge from focus groups and interviews in an effort to illustrate the diverse ways in which UTAs contribute to building a sense of community in the classroom, as well as their broader impact on the learning environment. This work has the potential to highlight the importance of collaboration within the classroom illustrating the power of combined knowledge and the impact it has on student learning in STEM.

Carresse Gerald, Josephine Harris and Zhiming Yang, North Carolina Central University

• Traditional lecture design in STEM courses do not fully engage students. This instructor-centered format fails to engage students with diverse learning styles and limits student engagement and critical thinking. To vitalize traditional lecture-based STEM instruction, this project implemented a pedagogical redesign within the undergraduate program at North Carolina Central University. We hypothesized hands-on, experiential learning will increase academic performance and engagement. By transitioning from computer-based labs to integrated hands-on, experiential learning, the initiative modernized two existing courses—Physical Geography and Global Environmental Sustainability—and introduced two new courses focused on Environmental Science and Education. Furthermore, the program extended these experiential methods to nearby high schools to bolster recruitment efforts. Our findings indicate that this shift to active learning significantly enhanced student engagement, academic performance, and retention rates. Future studies will explore whether this hands-on, experiential model can be successfully scaled into other environmental science courses and eventually other disciplines.

10:30 – 10:55: Human-Centered Intelligence: Student Co-Hosting to Cultivate Feedback Literacy and Improve Instruction

Barbara Lom, Davidson College

• Developing agency, feedback literacy, and professional communication is vital for success in unpredictable, AI-influenced futures. This session introduces co-hosting, an easy-to-implement ‘small teaching’ partnership appropriate for any course that empowers students to examine their learning in ways that reveal hidden barriers, small moments, and quiet highlights, all important pedagogical aspects that rarely appear on end-of-semester evaluations. Student co-hosts not only provide actionable data to improve instruction in real-time, but also gain essential experience with metacognition, constructive feedback, partnership, and navigating power differentials. The session will share co-hosting structure, logistics, and prompts along with feedback examples and resulting instructional pivots.

11:05 – 11:30: Sustainability education: Critical transferable skills for students and educators across disciplines

Aleks Babic, Guilford College

• This session will demonstrate the necessity and effectiveness of integrating Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) principles and practices, into general education curricula and interdisciplinary courses. This is especially important now as the growth of AI data centers exponentially increases the demand for natural resources. By learning applied sustainability principles through small scale textile production, students can transfer these skills toward problem solving in their own academic, professional, and personal lives. Since energy and resource production, use, and expenditure will shape the future of many disciplines, students also apply the lessons learned to their own fields of study.

10:30 – 10:55: A Structural Approach to Transferable Skills: Alternating High-Impact Workshops and Guided Collaboration in a Students as Partners Program

Robert Hirsch, Lou Hirsch, Martin-Gatton, Wyatt Driskell, Brittany Ray, Chloe Ebelhar, University of Kentucky

• Growing Graduates from the Ground Up (G3U) is a yearlong, credit-bearing Students as Partners program at MGCAFE in which undergraduate student consultants partner with instructors to co-design curricular innovations. G3U prepares students for complex, unpredictable futures through a deliberate instructional rhythm: High Impact Practice (HIP) days immerse students in diverse pedagogical experiences led by innovators across the university, while Guided Collaboration Days bring student and instructional partners together to translate that exposure into real classroom change. This alternating structure builds adaptability, critical thinking, and collaborative problem-solving – transferable skills students carry well beyond the course.

11:05 – 11:30: Impacts of community-based learning courses in STEM on student belonging and STEM major and career affinity

Kelsey Bitting & Jessica Merricks, Elon University

• STEM disciplines produce too few majors to meet workforce demand, in part due to prevailing pedagogies that fail to welcome, engage, and excite students. Community-based learning (CBL) courses partner with local organizations to address real-world community needs and may enhance student belonging and motivation to pursue STEM fields by providing an engaged, hands-on experience using STEM content to help others. CBL may be particularly impactful for women, first-generation students, and students of color: Research suggests these historically-underrepresented groups are differentially drawn to prosocial careers and may turn away from STEM in part because they do not see a direct societal impact on under-resourced communities. This study uses a quantitative pre-post comparison group design to evaluate the impact of CBL courses in STEM at Elon (n=4) compared to STEM courses that do not use CBL pedagogy (n=3). Using Skinner and colleagues’ (2017) SPIRES survey, we measured self-reported self-efficacy, belonging, likelihood of pursuing a STEM major or minor, and likelihood of pursuing a STEM career, both overall and between demographic groups.

10:30 – 10:55: The Belonging Continuum: Leveraging Faculty Support to Increase Student Success

Stephanie Keene & Joyce Clapp, UNC Greensboro

• Sense of belonging isn’t just about making friends on campus. It also has to be cultivated and sustained in the classroom. This discussion-based presentation explores the belonging continuum and highlights evidence-based strategies faculty can use to foster belonging in their courses and create foundations for the future.

11:05 – 11:30: Beyond the Classroom: How Design Thinking Fosters Transferable Skills and Lifelong Learners

Danielle Lake, Stevie Schonberg, John Cirelli, Elon University, & Kathleen Flannery, Saint Anselm College

• This session provides research-backed strategies for cultivating confidence, curiosity, and strong learning habits across students’ academic journeys through extra-curricular involvement with design thinking (DT) practices. Presenters will share findings from a mixed methods research study that illustrate how mentored and extended DT educational opportunities beyond the classroom (e.g., work-integrated learning, design thinking workshops, teaching and research assistantships, community-based projects, and consulting opportunities) foster long-term skills valuable for students’ professional, personal, and civic lives post-graduation. In the end, session attendees will explore how they might adapt these strategies to their own educational context.

10:30 – 10:55: Making Meaning Through Images and Reflection: Supporting Student Learning Across Contexts

Emily Moser, Elon University,

• This session explores how arts-based, place-responsive reflection supports the development of student learning habits by helping students interpret their experiences and connect course content to their own perspectives. Drawing on an assignment from a first-year study-away course in Türkiye, it highlights how image-based reflection builds habits of meaning-making that can support academic work and future inquiry. Participants will examine student portfolio examples and consider how students use images to interpret experience, reflect on positionality, and connect learning across contexts. The session concludes with practical strategies for integrating image-based reflection to support curiosity, confidence, and learning across contexts.

11:05 – 11:30: Take Away the Box: Moving from Transactional Thinking to Relational Habits

Jennifer Smith Daniel & Andrea McCrary, Queens University

• Students may see learning as transactional: check the boxes and move along. However, research in learning shows that building habits of reflection and relational skills serves students better in the long term. In this session, the presenters discuss their use of weekly self-assessment quizzes, inspired by Laura Gibbs’ “gradebook declarations.” Designed as quick, habitual practices for students, these weekly Canvas quizzes can be used as a third space to resist the transactional. We’ll share what we’ve learned, what we’ve left behind, and how it’s become an important part of our pedagogies, ideally leaving time to generate new questions.

10:30 – 10:55: Using the 4A Evidence-Based Framework to Design for Optimal Learning in the College Classroom

Audrey Dentith, NC A&T State University & Nancy Winfrey, Wake Forest University

• When faculty plan their course, they often think about what they will do during class. Lesson plans are filled with activities intended to engage students but how do we know that learning is occurring?Join us for an exploration of a structured classroom learning design that aligns with educational neuroscience and foundational adult learning theory, and that shifts the emphasis from what you will do as the instructor to what the students will learn during class time. Designing student engagement grounded in the biology of learning, with a consistent and effective structure, ensures accountable achievement of learning objectives.

11:05 – 11:30: Low Floor, High Ceiling: Inviting Every Student into the Conversation in Higher Education

Erin Hone, Elon University

• This interactive session explores how elementary math pedagogical routines can be repurposed in higher education to build rapport, community, and participation. Which One Doesn’t Belong? and Would You Rather? use low floor, high ceiling prompts to invite all students into discussion while supporting deeper thinking, reasoning, and justification. Grounded in research on student voice and belonging, these routines create low-stakes opportunities for peer connection and inclusive participation across the academic journey. Participants will experience both routines and adapt one for their own disciplinary context.

10:30 – 10:55: Scaffolding High Cognitive Load Courses for Gen Z Learners Through Intentional Pedagogy and Strategic Digital Integration

Catherine Baxter & Megan Koransky, Queens University

• High–cognitive load courses often require students to engage in complex clinical reasoning before they have fully mastered foundational concepts. This presentation shares a scaffolded, technology‑enhanced instructional approach designed to support cognitive development from foundational recall to team‑based application in undergraduate nursing courses. Drawing on Bloom’s Taxonomy and cognitive load theory the course design intentionally separates early individual learning tasks—focused on remembering and understanding—from later group-based activities requiring application, analysis, and creation. The Connectivism learning theory was also used to connect students, allowing them to share information and learning concepts through a collaborative process.​ The Canvas LMS serves as the central environment for these experiences, supported by a deliberate, phased integration of digital tools such as Canvas Studio, Padlet, Quizlet, Kahoot! and Lucid.