- October 06, 2026
- By Sala Levin ’10
The toughest questions in a course may not be the ones students see on a test. Instructors looking at their syllabus might ask themselves: Do my students have the prerequisite knowledge I assume they have? Are my instructions for assignments clear? Are my exams measuring what I want them to measure?
Thirty-nine faculty across the University of Maryland are getting the chance to investigate such questions by using data and data analysis tools as recipients of 2026-27 Teaching Innovation Grants. The $6,500 awards from UMD’s Teaching and Learning Transformation Center (TLTC) can be used to help them identify and implement solutions to challenges students face in their courses. “By engaging with data, recipients focus on improving the student experience, through such changes as introducing new instructional practices or modifying the pacing of the course,” said TLTC Executive Director Lawrence Clark.
Born out of the university’s strategic plan commitment to reimagine learning, the Teaching Innovation Grants have since 2022 invested $4.5 million in 187 projects across every UMD school and college. Each round of funding has a different theme; previous ones have been experiential learning, educational technology and inclusive teaching.
[New Teaching Innovation Grants Help Accommodate ‘Broad Spectrum of Learners’]
The theme for the 2026-27 academic year is data-driven inquiry for student success. Common themes emerged from many of the 103 applications: improving student engagement, building fundamental coding, writing and critical thinking skills alongside widespread student use of generative AI, and creating more effective assignments and assessments, among others.
“We were looking for a clear question that could be solved through data collection and analysis,” said Clark. “Proposals had to articulate that there would be some modification made in the course to see if the data or student performance could be impacted.”
The chosen proposals run the gamut of academic fields, from courses in English and journalism to public policy and computer science.
Nora Burkhauser, a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science, is using the grant in part to create a database of review questions that students in her course, “Object-Oriented Programming I,” can use to receive guided practice and feedback on new concepts like logical thinking, algorithms, conditional statements and other building blocks of computer programming. She will then compare the outcomes of the students who used the database with those of students from previous semesters who didn’t have access to the resource.
“I’d like to make this really rich database where students will get feedback,” said Burkhauser, who has hired two undergraduate students to help build the database. “If they choose the wrong answer, they’ll get an explanation of why that’s incorrect to reinforce their learning.”
The grant is allowing Allison Lansverk, associate director of the Gemstone Honors Program, to better assess the effectiveness of the assignments she gives students in her course, “Introduction to Team Research.” Lansverk has used the TLTC’s course alignment instructor, an AI tool that analyzes the strength of syllabi, quizzes and exams, and assignments, to generate suggestions on improving her assignment descriptions. Lansverk is also using the grant to improve a survey she gives to students at the beginning and end of the semester to determine how much they feel their research skills have advanced.
“I’d already planned to do some upgrades to my assignment descriptions to make things more consistent and more built out,” said Lansverk. “I found it useful to have data to back that up through the course alignment tool. It would’ve been easy to miss pieces without having this tool point to things.”