Announcements

Save the Date: New Faculty Orientation

New Faculty Orientation for academic year 2019-20 will be on Monday, August 26, 2019. New faculty (both tenure-track faculty and 100% full-time non-tenure-track instructional faculty) will be contacted via email by the Office of Faculty Development to RSVP for the event.


Upcoming Events

August
26
Monday, August 26, 2019 -
9:00AM to 3:30PM
New Faculty Orientation

The campus-wide New Faculty Orientation (NFO) is for new tenure-system faculty members and full-time (100%) lecturers/instructors and is organized by the Office of Faculty Development. NFO will introduce you to UMass and various campus resources that are intended to support your teaching, research, and life-work balance. The Office of Faculty Development will send new an invitation with additional information in early July. In addition to the campus-wide orientation, many departments and some schools/colleges sponsor orientation events for their new faculty. Ask your department chair or departmental administrator if such programming exists.

Faculty Profile

David Gross Partners with TEFD to Study Teaching
Professor | Biochemistry & Molecular Biology

“Comparing across three different sections of the same course, we did not find statistically significant differences in individual performance, effort, or team performance depending on whether teams were formed by the instructor, by students, or randomly by the learning management system.”

In collaboration with TEFD’s Mei-Yau Shih and Sarah Pociask, David Gross (Biochemistry & Molecular Biology) studied the impact of team formation strategies on student performance and attitudes in one of his team-based courses. They found that instructor-designed teams were more diverse, but that students in these teams performed no better than their peers in self-selected or randomly assigned teams. To find out more, read the full article, which was published in the July 2017 issue of the Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

See Past Faculty Profiles