We prepared active learning activities, lesson plans and materials for interdisciplinary recitation sections. These lessons were intended to be delivered by recitation faculty and/or TAs. The activities were meant to reinforce the content delivered in the large lecture session.
The Role-Playing exercise aimed to give students the opportunity to think broadly about the impact of research on society and use a number of information sources beyond traditional literature databases, including policy documents, patents, and news articles, to craft an oral argument.
We provided students with a short article in their discipline and asked them to answer a few questions about it before the recitation to ensure that they were prepared for the in-class activity. Working in small groups, students were given a role-playing prompt and asked to use a number of information sources to craft an oral argument. The prompts encouraged the students to think broadly about the societal implications of the research, including ethics, market potential, and reproducibility of scientific findings. At the end of the class, each group had a few minutes to present their position on the topic and share the resources that they used.
See the provided slides for the research articles and role-playing prompts.