Papers by Sheilagh Grills
Volume X, 2017
Student Services support, including learning skills assistance, can be integral in empowering lea... more Student Services support, including learning skills assistance, can be integral in empowering learners. First-year students are expected to be self-directed in their learning, yet may have neither been challenged nor experienced negative consequences for a lack of perseverance. Academic skills professionals can be partners with teaching faculty in student success by helping to build transferable learning skills, especially for high-fail introductory courses. In this paper, I report on supplementary workshops developed to target fundamental skills with course-specific examples. This partnership included incentivizing academic support with both carrots and sticks; instructors in introductory biology strongly urged students receiving D grades or below on the first test to approach Student Services for support, while sociology faculty incorporated workshop attendance into the introductory course with participation grades. Following such incentivizing of learning skills, workshop attendance increased by 45%. In both courses, first test scores and high school averages for students attending workshops did not differ from students not attending workshops. However, students who attended learning skills workshops had significantly higher course grades, persistence, sessional grade point averages (GPAs), and cumulative GPAs than students not attending workshops. Controlling for high school average, each learning skills workshop attended was associated with a 0.11 to 0.27 increase in sessional GPA on a 4.3 point scale.
This paper describes weekly tutorials led by a peer mentor which have been embedded into a one-se... more This paper describes weekly tutorials led by a peer mentor which have been embedded into a one-semester Success Course to assist students transitioning to tertiary studies. The activities and material for the tutorials are interdisciplinary and can be adapted to a variety of central themes for a learning community or cohort-based program. Critical thinking and inquiry based learning exercises are integrated throughout the weekly meetings, and each session is designed to address a particular problem or bottleneck to learning. Peer mentors model individual responsibility and self-regulation and emphasize learning as a process rather than an end product. A series of small assignments with multiple opportunities for feedback, and high academic standards promotes increased confidence and skill levels.
Peer Mentor Handbook, 2011
Theorists have long argued for understanding the realities we share as social constructions. Howe... more Theorists have long argued for understanding the realities we share as social constructions. However, the experience of uncertainty, doubt, and various related misgivings are as fully social as are knowledge claims. Through our interactions and relations with others, we mutually come to understand what is real, what we may claim to know and what may be uncertain. Doubt is the experience of the person unconvinced by the claims of others, whose everyday life is marked by unknowing, and who is located outside of the certainty or reality framed by others. Women living with an unpredictable chronic illness or those newly diagnosed may be very attentive to claims of expert knowledge. Yet for many women, resisting a definitive diagnosis or prognosis in favour of plausible doubt is a reasoned outcome that allows for a changing future. While some community members may view a woman's doubt as in and of itself indicative of some form of individual pathology that demands repair (e.g. denial, resistance to authority, clinical depression), we argue for a more fully social and less dismissive understanding of women's lives. This paper will explore the process of making illness meaningful and making doubt reasonable by using a combination of voices and vantage points. In it we move between more traditional academic discourse and first-person narrative as a means of commenting on, framing and analyzing the lived experience of women with chronic illness. This examination draws upon participant observation and autoethnographic
Conference Presentations by Sheilagh Grills
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Papers by Sheilagh Grills
Conference Presentations by Sheilagh Grills