Class of 1922 Outstanding Innovation in Helping Students Learn Award recipients announced

Two Purdue faculty have been selected as recipients of the Class of 1922 Outstanding Innovation in Helping Students Learn Award.

The recipients are:

* Matthew W. Ohland, professor of engineering education, received the award for his Comprehensive Assessment of Team-Member Effectiveness (CATME) Team Tools software. The program consists of the Team-Maker and Peer Evaluation tools, which assist educators in creating balanced groups in the classroom and allows students to accurately evaluate the team they worked with. The tool also collects survey data from students, prepares reports for instructors and provides individual feedback to students.

Ohland has two bachelor's degrees, one in religion and one in engineering, from Swarthmore College; two master's degrees, one in mechanical engineering and one in materials engineering, from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and a doctorate in civil engineering from the University of Florida. He was a 2015 recipient of the Charles B. Murphy Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award. His research interests include longitudinal study of engineering students, persistence, progression, peer evaluation and team formation.

* Daniel J. Olson, assistant professor of Spanish and linguistics, received the award for his work on visual feedback for pronunciation instruction. His method allows students in his class to visually see how they are pronouncing words in the language they are learning. The program lets a student compare how they pronounce a word compared to how a native speaker pronounces the same word. The program is used in the classroom and at home. Students record themselves pronouncing words and then participate in a self-evaluation.

Olson has a bachelor's degree in international studies from the University of Dayton, and a master's in Ibero-Romance linguistics and a doctorate in Hispanic linguistics, both from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include phonetics and phonology; prosody, intonation and suprasegmental phonetics; psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics; and bilingualism, language contact, code switching and language switching.

The recipients will be honored during the Faculty Award Convocation today (April 25).