Posted on

Understanding the impact of attendance and participation on academic achievement

Our paper on the impact of attendance and participation on academic achievement is now available online! Here is a pre-formatted version of the paper.

In this study, we provide evidence demonstrating that it is not enough for students to be physically present in class to do well in a course – students’ engagement in class, not attendance, is predictive of their achievement in the course.

Thanks to all my co-authors – Sharry Shakory, Arman Azad, Celia Popovic and Lillian Park – for a great collaboration!

Posted on

Cognition and Education

I just received my copy of “The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education” – looking forward to reading it cover to cover! I’m honoured to be a contributor, among many scholars I look up to.

Posted on

Our ‘Statistics for SoTL’ course is now accredited by the EDC!

I had the privilege of working with Dr. Natasha May (Educational Developer at the Teaching Commons, York University) to co-create and co-facilitate a course for graduate students on providing statistical support for SoTL researchers.

Our course is now accredited by the Educational Developers Caucus (EDC), which is a huge win! Many thanks to Natasha for being such a fantastic partner throughout this whole process!

Posted on

Using lego in the classroom: making implicit ideas explicit

This morning I gave a guest lecture for my colleague from Engineering at York University, Jeff Harris, focused on cognitive learning strategies discussed by Weinstein, Madan, & Sumeracki (2018) – a reading that students were assigned to read before class. In class, I challenged students to build lego representations of these strategies. The purpose of this creative lego activity was to deepen students’ understanding of these strategies by making their implicit ideas about them explicit. Here’s a sample of what they came up with!

  • Interleaving
  • Retrieval Practice
  • Elaboration
  • Distributed (Spaced) Practice
  • Concrete Examples

The activity sparked interesting discussions, and helped students identify what aspects of the assigned reading material they needed to review and/or clarify. It is definitely a teaching exercise that I will use again in the future.

Posted on

Associative Agnosia Video

I teach a third year course at York University that surveys different aspects of cognition, including, for example, perception, attention, memory, decision making, and language. Teaching the course often brings me outside my research area, and I really enjoy covering the different topics and discussing them with students. Last week we covered perception. While preparing for my lecture I found this great YouTube video of a patient with associative agnosia.

Patients with associative agnosia can copy drawings and match objects, but they cannot identify objects through vision – the video demonstrates this very well. Patients with visual agnosias, in general, are impaired in their ability to interpret visual information. Importantly, however, for these patients vision is not a problem, it is really a matter of interpreting visual information. If you know of any other good videos for teaching cognition, please let me know!

Posted on

Keynote for the 2015 Alchemy Summit, co-hosted by Maple Leaf Foods

Visual recording of Alice Kim keynote for Alchemy Summit 2015, co-hosted by Maple Leaf

I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the 2015 Alchemy SISTEM Learning Summit, co-hosted by Maple Leaf Foods. It was a fantastic event! It was my first time speaking to the food industry and my batteries were re-energized by how engaged the attendees were. It was clear that they were deeply interested in how knowledge retention can be enhanced and how they could then apply this information to their workplace. Here is the graphic recording of my presentation – what a great idea/memory cue!