Breakout Sessions for Thursday, April 23, 2026

This panel centers the voices of students with learning disabilities as they share their experiences navigating academic environments. Panelists will discuss challenges and successes, interactions with instructors and support services, and strategies that have helped them thrive. The conversation will highlight the diversity of learning experiences and offer insight into how teaching practices, course design, and institutional structures can better support all learners.

Interpretation and generation of representations are skills essential to STEM, yet our teaching and learning practices for representation can vary widely between and even within disciplines. We tend to emphasize that students learn formal representational systems (such as those in math and chemistry) and that students reproduce the understanding of a representation as conveyed by the instructor or textbook – rather than that students interpret, generate, and revise representations.

In this interactive, collaborative, and generative session, we will illustrate how drawing can be used to engage students in the process of creating representations themselves in order to follow their interests, take ownership of their learning, generate ideas, present and collaboratively revise ideas - and thus, to continue to grow their interest and knowledge as they engage more organically in math or scientific practices. We will also invite you to reflect and share practices in your field, as well as to start planning the next step of how you could use these ideas to enhance your own practice.

In our session, you will read, think, talk and draw, as well as see some of our work supporting drawing as a representational skill in STEM learning. We will also give interesting and useful references that present the theory and frameworks for teaching and learning drawing as a representational tool.

For over a decade, Roosevelt's Industrial Applications of Math course has acted like a miniature internship for math and computer science students. Each year our external partners describe to our students a project that they have with a data-related component. The math and computer science topics that the students learn and use depend on the specific project and vary from year to year, much like a project for a consulting company. Our students gain skills in technical communication, data handling, and research. In this breakout, a panel of current and past students from the course will talk about their experiences as student researchers working with our long-term partners at the Field Museum on MicroPlants and the Bryophyte Portal.

High attrition rates in STEM highlight the importance of student experiences in large gateway courses. We examine the use of exams that include both individual and group components in large-enrollment settings, including Molecular Biology (BIOL_SCI 201) at Northwestern University and Precalculus at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC).

Survey responses indicate that students value the opportunity to discuss reasoning, clarify misunderstandings, and learn from peers, with most reporting no significant drawbacks to the group component. Analysis of exam performance shows consistent gains associated with the group portion across achievement levels, with the largest improvements among lower-performing students. These findings suggest that incorporating both individual and group components into exams can reduce anxiety, enhance conceptual understanding, and foster a more supportive learning environment.

A short video clip illustrating the exam format and student interactions will accompany this presentation.