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Dr. Rachael Blasiman

Dr. Rachael Blasiman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences.  She teaches at the Salem campus, where she actively promotes undergraduate research and mentoring.  Her research interests include memory, learning, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).  She is currently serving as a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Teaching and Learning.

Learning is the fundamental objective in every college course, but how does it work?  How do you get your students to deeply learn information and retain it over time?  In this workshop, we will discuss best practices in helping your students connect to course material, provide practical classroom techniques from award-winning teachers, explore methods of enhancing connections in both synchronous and asynchronous environments, and brainstorm ideas to create cross-disciplinary connections in learning.

The goal of my Faculty Fellows project is: 

• To describe best practices in helping students make connections between course content and their own experiences
• To provide resources for faculty to use the power of connections to enhance their own teaching
• Conduct research on interdisciplinary use of connections to enhance learning and improve retention. The connections we make are especially relevant in this time of remote teaching, which can often feel impersonal. Forming strong connections between course content and students' experiences is the foundation of all we seek to do as educators, and improving connections will have a measurable impact on learning and retention.