"Brown's Open Curriculum has celebrated over 50 years, and evidence suggests the powerful potential of an open curriculum model for developing students’ investment in learning and promoting their independence and creativity (Teagle Foundation, 2006). Indeed, the values underlying the purpose statement above — development of a student’s competence and self-efficacy, a sense of autonomy, and connection to faculty, staff, and other students — are, when fulfilled, associated with lifelong well-being, high performance, and deep learning (Deci & Ryan, 2008).

This newsletter looks at the building blocks of a curriculum — courses — and examines teaching strategies to further the values of development of student competence, autonomy, and relatedness to others. On the level of a course, what are strategies for creating a learning environment where all students have opportunities to achieve the benefits of the Open Curriculum? Educational psychologist Marilla Svinicki (2016) describes this approach to inclusion as helping students to answer three questions: “Can I do this?” “Do I have control of my work?” and “Do I belong here?”

In a course, well-designed assignments and assessments are key ways that instructors can promote students’ intellectual growth. However, equally importantly, the values of the Open Curriculum state that courses also should promote holistic growth, or students’ sense that they have the competence and capabilities to achieve their future goals. This sense of self-efficacy is strongly related to academic achievement, and it is something that instructors can positively influence, even within one term (Bandura, 1977; Bartimote-Aufflick, et al., 2016). 

Fortunately, the same teaching strategies can be used to help students achieve both cognitive and personal development, or to grow intellectually and gain a sense of competency. These include:

• Transparency of goals and tasks
  See Sheridan resources on Inclusive Teaching Strategies to Help Students Navigate Fast-Paced Courses and Teaching Problem Solving for examples of ways to make clear the purpose, relevance, and criteria for success of assignments for students. Changing just two assignments to heighten transparency has been found to increase students’ ratings of their academic confidence, sense of belonging, and competence in key liberal arts skills (e.g., writing and problem solving) (Winkelmes et al., 2016).
• Frequent low-stakes opportunities for practice and feedback, whether from the instructor or peers
  Sheridan resources on Teaching Writing and Inclusive Teaching Strategies to Help Students Navigate Fast-Paced Courses offer examples of ways to structure peer feedback or promote student learning through frequent quizzing.

Think-Pair-Share

Bartimote-Aufflick et al. (2016)’s review of research about strategies to increase student self-efficacy suggests an additional 11 teaching approaches.

One core value of the Open Curriculum is to enable students to be active participants in shaping their own learning. At the classroom level, this statement of purpose, oriented around student autonomy, may be the trickiest to enact. On the one hand, a great deal of evidence suggests that when we have opportunities to exercise choice, our motivation is heightened (Deci & Ryan, 2008; Pintrich, 2003). On the other, too many choices may be demotivating to students (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000) and, at least in STEM, a moderate to high degree of structure (e.g., daily or weekly homework) has been found to reduce achievement gaps (Casper et al., 2019; Eddy & Hogan, 2014; Haak, et al., 2011).

However, offering some degree of choice — even within a well-structured course — affords students a sense of control over their work. These opportunities could be relatively small in scale, because as Svinicki (2016, p. 7) suggests, “In every class there are things that the students can decide, such as concepts that need further discussion, or reasonable time limits for an assignment resubmission.” Choice in attendance policies and assessment approaches also can support student attendance and subject material mastery (Cullen & Oppenheimer, 2024). Other examples include allowing students to choose their own topic from the same type of assessment or choice of assessment about the same topic (Holman, et al., 2017). On the other end of the spectrum, “gameful courses” allow students more extensive choice, to customize their own pathways through a course (Brunvand & Hill, 2018). Charles Carroll’s course in history offers an example of a gameful course at Brown.

However, regardless of design, it is important to be cautious about the number of choices. One study at Stanford compared offering students a choice of six (limited choice) or 30 (extensive choice) essay prompts for extra credit. The researchers reported that more students in the limited choice condition engaged in the assignment — and wrote better papers (Iyenger & Lepper, 2000).

While supportive relationships are core to student motivation (Pintrich, 2003), connections to faculty are associated with many positive future outcomes, such as well-being and engagement at work (Gallup and Purdue University, 2014; Mayhew, et al. 2016). The following Sheridan newsletters offer strategies for faculty to build effective relationships with students:

• Connecting with Your Students
• Invitational Office Hours
• Effective Graduate Mentoring Practices

Courses can also help students develop learning-focused connections to their peers. On a small level, this can be done through active learning. A more extensive adoption of this value involves integrating student leadership roles into a course, like undergraduate teaching assistants, Writing Fellows, or Problem-Solving Fellows. Peer teaching is an evidence-based strategy to help close achievement gaps (Snyder et al., 2016) and increase students’ well-being, performance, and retention (e.g., Drane et al. 2014; Hanson et al., 2016). 

Another way to increase students’ sense of belonging is through motivational interventions. These are writing exercises, usually ungraded, that typically require little class time but are associated with benefits such as increased student sense of belonging (Yaeger & Walton, 2011). For example, in one study, students wrote a letter to a future student, after reading narratives about how others overcame challenges in the university (Walton et al., 2015). In another study, researchers asked introductory biology students to regularly pick a concept from lecture and write about the relevance of the concept or issue to their own life, giving examples. The key goal of the research was to increase student motivation by increasing students’ sense that course material is closely connected to them.  Researchers examined intersectional effects and did, indeed, see performance gains for all student groups (Harackiewicz, et al, 2015; Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009).

When an open curriculum lives up to its ideals, however, it creates a culture of choice and collaboration that encourages the creativity and engagement of both students and faculty by making them partners in the educational enterprise (Teagle Foundation, 2006, p. 2).

To realize the potential of the Open Curriculum, Brown’s classrooms also need to be aligned to helping students answer these core questions: Can I do this? Do I have control of my work? and Do I belong here? In its programs, the Sheridan Center will be offering several programs and events to support our teaching and learning communities in this endeavor. These include consultations and early student feedback sessions and workshops.

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This resource was authored by Dr. Mary Wright, Associate Provost for Teaching and Learning, Executive Director of Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, and Professor (Research) in Sociology, with input from Sheridan Center colleagues.