Teacher Spotlight

Dr. James Fraser
Associate Professor
Queen’s University
Class Size: 40 Students

Dr. Fraser, numerous teaching award winning professor from Queen’s University, is known to employ proven teaching pedagogies in his courses. For his Laser Optics course, he wanted to improve student’s pre-class preparation so that they can better engage and solidify their understanding in-class.

As a result, Dr. Fraser used SharpScholar’s in-class and pre-class product to deliver an engaging learning experience for his students. Want to learn more? Read below.

How Dr. Fraser Used SharpScholar

Dr. Fraser distributes reading content to help the students prepare for the upcoming class. Dr. Fraser uploaded these readings onto SharpScholar app. Then, in an effort to circumvent passive reading, he added questions throughout the content and at the end of the lesson to help test students’ concept understanding. Dr. Fraser also used annotations to make sure the students focused on the right areas of the text.

As a result, students were able to read an interactive reading with questions, comments, and highlights and came better prepared to class.

Teaching Pedagogies used by Dr. Fraser

Formative Assessment

Formative Evaluation is diagnostic testing for both the teacher and the students to identify areas of strength and weakness. It is one of the most proven teaching strategies, based on the ground-breaking research by Dr. John Hattie. By adding practice questions throughout the assigned reading, students are guided to engage,
instead of passively understanding the content.

Asking Questions

Dr. Fraser encouraged students to ask questions and seek help. This not only allowed students to help each other out but to review the class’s questions to improve their own understanding. In the end, the whole class – including the teacher – benefited from asking, answering and reviewing of questions.

Social Learning

SharpScholar created an interactive learning environment for students where they could engage with the content, ask, and answer questions. This allowed students to help each other and made use of the widely recognized peer instruction teaching pedagogy.

Successful Outcomes

Actionable Insights

Dr. Fraser was able to identify that the most common comments/questions were about: Lorentz Model Concept, electron oscillators, and multiple electron atoms.

Facilitate Learning

By using SharpScholar, Dr. Fraser could ensure that his students were prepared and already familiar with certain concepts. He was able to facilitate teaching by posing questions and helping the students problem solve at a higher level.

Deeper Learning

As a result of this workflow, the students
understanding of difficult concepts were
strengthened and were prepared to discuss
more in-depth concepts and questions in-class.