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Promoting Research to the Masses: Assessing the Impact of a Poster Walk
Denise R. Adkins, Julie S. Lyon, International
Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2017/12/13

This paper (13 page PDF) describes a project where students created posters describing their research and displayed them in an open format on campus. The 'research' studies people who attended the poster session; there was a pre-test and post-test to evaluate 'learning' along with a survey where the participants were asked to rate their enjoyment. I find the concept intriguing. Wouldn't it be interesting is professors and graduate students did open poster sessions for the general public at a local mall? The purpose of such a session would of course go far beyond narrowly-defined 'learning' and even 'enjoyment'. Of course, the real question here is (as even this study acknowledges) the "intrinsic motivation" of the people presenting the posters. In this example the students were given extra credit, an incentive that doesn't apply to professors. Image: UVic, where "a student-oriented and student-run annual event" open to the public allows students to showcase their reserach.

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The Learning Alliance Inventory: Instrument Development and Initial Validation
Daniel T. Rogers, International Journal for
the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2017/12/13

As usual I don't think much of the actual research (the data set consist of psychology students at a midwestern university, and the result evaluated is effect on GPA). But the concept of the 'working alliance' is intriguing. "In his 1979 paper, Bordin argued that a working alliance occurs when one person makes an effort to change and another person serves as a facilitator of that change." The purpose of the current paper (18 page PDF) is to "was to develop a theoretically grounded and psychometrically sound instrument for measuring students’ perceptions of the working alliance they experience with their teacher." They worked their way from 93 content-valid measures drawn from the literature to a set of 18 statistically relevant items divided into three major categories: collaborative bond, teacher competence, and student investment. See also Rogers's 2009 paper 'The Working Alliance in Teaching and Learning: Theoretical Clarity and Research Implications'.

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