快活林性息

**This page is from an old version of 快活林性息's Teaching Toolkit. Find an updated version on听the current听.**

What Does it Mean to Teach with Transparency?

Teaching with transparency means to teach while making obvious the intellectual practices involved in completing and evaluating a learning task. The goal of transparent teaching is to promote students鈥� conscious understanding of how they learn. Transparent teaching methods help students understand how and why they are learning course content in particular ways.

Does it Work?

In 2014, AAC&U partnered with the Transparency in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (TILT听Higher Ed) project, founded at the University of Illinois and now housed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on an initiative that significantly increases underserved college students鈥� success. TG Philanthropy funded the Transparency and Problem-Centered Learning project (), with Tia McNair, Ashley Finley, and Mary-Ann Winkelmes as the coinvestigators. In its first year, the endeavor has identified a simple, replicable teaching intervention that demonstrably enhances students鈥� success, especially that of first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented college students in multiple ways at statistically significant levels, with a medium to large magnitude of effect. These results offer implications for how faculty can help their institutions to right the inequities in college students鈥� educational experiences across the country.

The results of their project suggest that faculty can contribute to increasing all students鈥� success, especially that of underserved students, in their first year of college (when the greatest number of students drop out) (Head and Hosteller 2015). In courses where students perceived more transparency as a result of receiving the transparently designed, problem-centered take-home assignments, they experienced significantly greater learning benefits compared with their classmates who perceived less transparency around assignments in a course. Specifically, students who received more transparency reported gains in three areas that are important predictors of students鈥� success: academic confidence, sense of belonging, and mastery of the skills that employers value most when hiring. These are 鈥渟ubstantively important鈥� and statistically significant findings that satisfy WWC standards for baseline equivalence measures of 0.05 or below, sample sizes above three hundred fifty, and effect size differences above 0.25 (US Department of Education March 2014).

听What do Transparent Assignments Look Like?

• Website with example assignments:
• Article:听
• Book:听 Magruder, E., Scott, W., Willard, M., Ruiz-Mesa, K., & Drew, S. (2019).听听In M. Winklemes, S. Tapp, & A. Boyle (Eds),听
• Article:听
• Article:听听(Mulnix, 2018)