Associate Professor Alessio Gaspar received the 2023 USF College of Engineering’s Outstanding Teaching Award for his lengthy service and innovative teaching methodologies. Professor Gaspar is a recently inducted member of the College of Engineering’s Academy of Distinguished Engineering Educators.
“I used cognitive load reduction principles to separate, in programming courses, the acquisition of problem-solving skills from that of language-specific knowledge. Most textbooks do not delineate these two objectives, thus resulting in students struggling to grasp both at the same time and thus tackling an unnecessary heavy cognitive load.” Such attention to effective teaching methods has been greatly appreciated by his students. “I was really scared to take this class before I started in spring because I had never done programming before, but the way this class is structured allows for so many resources and I do not think it's too hard for someone who is a novice programmer,” said one of his students.
“Without proper understanding of the [revised Bloom taxonomy], it is easy to assume that performing well on a complex question always requires students to have developed the necessary skills,” said Professor Gaspar describing another of the methods he’s employed in teaching. By carefully planning his lessons around this classification and other such cognitive research, he’s able to target areas of misunderstanding to teach what students aren’t getting, even when they are performing well.