What are you currently working on? “One of the projects that I'm working on is a continuation of a r project with Andrew Horne and Dr. Tyler Beveridge about students' grade perceptions. Many educators view that students earn grades – they start from zero, whereas students often see that they begin at a hundred and then lose grades. This creates a tension about grades between educators and students. I also know that students have concerns about their GPA and how it can oftentimes be a gatekeeper to future career paths and professional programs – this tension can result in students engaging in various grade negotiation behaviours. In Andrew’s project asked if we could change grade negotiation behaviour by changing whether students have grades presented such that they earn grades instead of lose grades. The short answer is no, we couldn’t change it. Building off this research, Dr. Beveridge and I and our graduate student, Jenna Yuen, are looking at if those grade perceptions still persist in dentistry students. Yes, they do. In terms of grades, there's not going to be a perfect solution, but we wanted to disentangle this as much as we can. The other major project I'm working on right now is in collaboration with Dr. Anita Woods and our Clinical Anatomy graduate student, Nicole Setterington. This research supports my role as Director of SEED, the Schulich Education Enhancement Division. We wanted to investigate a way to give students the ability to give timely feedback on tech issues as they arose after the switch to fully online learning with the pandemic. But what we found is that many students didn’t know that this existed and so we came up with a new solution using Padlet, allowing students to post and upvote/downvote feedback. We had some initial success with this approach and Dr. Woods decided to
Dr. Sarah McLean Associate Professor More about her research https://bit.ly/McLeanInfo Contact Info sarah.mclean@schulich.uwo.ca (519) 661-2111 Ext. 88587
expand the feedback system to a few undergraduate physiology courses. Now we’re developing a 3.0 version and are excited as to what that might look like.”
What are some of your future goals? “I'm really passionate about experiential and active learning. I have a few different projects that I'm working on – one is MASCOT, the Medical Sciences Community Outreach Team, in collaboration with Dr. Jeff Frisbee, Jenn Devlin, and our experiential learning coordinator, Jedd Sardido. We've partnered with a number of different community organizations that primarily help to enact change in marginalized, equity-seeking groups and underserved populations in London. So, if students want to gain these opportunities, then connect them to those volunteer organizations. That’s my ultimate goal, to help students with expanding the boundaries of where they see their education taking them.” 48
