SoTL Commons Conference Presenters
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Session 7 : 11:00 am – 11:45 am
7.5 - Room 1908
Visual Analogies for Enhancing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning [pr-1]
Susan Spezzini (University of Alabama at Birmingham): spezzini@uab.edu
This session examines how visual analogies help students to better understand complex ideas and, thus, more effectively bridge the gap between the known and the unknown. T he presenter will describe how, through visual analogies, her students are experiencing greater success in phonology, traditionally the most difficult course within the master's program for teaching English as a second language. She will trace the two-year development of her “Fun-Analogy (phonology) Train” and explain how this train analogy led to a study comparing before and after learner outcomes as evidenced by exams, surveys, course evaluations, and PRAXIS scores. The session will reach closure with suggestions on how participants can identify visual analogies for representing abstract concepts in their own disciplines and also on how to replicate similar analogy-based projects for promoting their own scholarship of teaching and learning.