With “Stratospheric” Eval Scores and a “Flipped” Classroom Approach, Mark Patterson Earns the 2025 Dean’s Innovation Scholar Award

The programming language known as R is useful for making meaning out of statistics. But it can also be an absolute nightmare to learn.

“It’s kind of like learning how to snowboard,” said Mark Patterson, assistant teaching professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences and the recipient of the 2025 Dean’s Innovation Scholar Award.

“Those first couple of days on the mountain are going to be unbelievably painful,” he laughed. “But if you can push through, it’s really exciting and fun.”

Remembering how brutal his own experience learning R had been, Patterson decided to try flipping the script. Rather than standing in front of his classes and lecturing, then sending students home figure out R on their own, he recorded short, instructional videos that could be accessed at any time.

“With all the contents recorded, students could watch at their own pace, rewatch parts that were confusing or skip parts that weren’t relevant,” Patterson said. “Best of all, this freed up our in-class environment to be more of a question-and-answer, hack-session.”

The verdict? Students gave Patterson and his class “stratospheric” evaluation scores that “might seem like hyperbole if they didn’t match the rest of his record so closely,” wrote Danny Oppenheimer, a professor in the Social and Decision Sciences Department, in his letter nominating Patterson for the Dean’s Innovation Award.

"Mark is maybe the most energetic, excited, innovative and passionate teacher I've ever seen,” said Richard Scheines, Bess Family Dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “Many years ago I got to actually co-teach with him, and it was a great experience. He is completely and totally dedicated to his students, and always looking to improve his teaching with technology, or pedagogical innovation or new material. He is a perfect candidate for this award.”

Real World Coursework

Patterson’s “flipped classrooms” are just one of the innovations cited by Oppenheimer and SDS department head Gretchen Chapman in their letter.

They also point to Patterson’s role as director of the Quantitative Social Science Scholar’s program (QSSS), his advising work on a large number of senior theses and his two signature courses, 88-300 Programming and Data Analysis for Social Scientists and 88-130 Behavioral Economics for Life.

“Patterson provides his class with anonymized data about student well-being here at CMU and has them explore that data to try and identify ways to make the CMU experience better,” said Oppenheimer. “The assignments are relevant to issues the students care about, appropriately scaffolded to allow students to actually complete the tasks and offer students the opportunity for creative exploration as they master the material.”

What’s more, Patterson’s Behavioral Economics for Life course focuses on real-life problems that are relevant to college students, such as procrastination, saving money and getting enough sleep, and then reveals the Behavioral Economics principles that explain these phenomena.

“Mark is incredibly passionate as an educator,” said Oppenheimer. “He's passionate about his students and ensuring their success, he's passionate about the topics he teaches and he's passionate about being the best educator he can be.”

An Eye On The Future

While the Dean’s Innovation Scholar Award is itself an honor, it also comes with a $20,000 prize, which aims to provide two years of support for curriculum development, course delivery and learning outcomes assessment. And Patterson already has some big ideas on how that money could improve coursework.

“There are so many people at CMU who I think are already interested in different versions of this question about how we can change our courses to make them better, potentially, by incorporating AI into all of the different parts of the teaching process,” said Patterson.

The catch is, testing out new coursework, teaching methods and feedback-delivery systems requires time and money.

“I think the thing that I'm really excited about with these funds is that it'll allow us to run the highly controlled, systematic tests to figure out whether a new version of an AI-based tool actually is helping or not,” said Patterson. “To be responsible educators, we really need to test to see whether those things are actually outperforming the current systems that we've got.”

In this way, Oppenheimer sees Patterson’s award as benefiting the entire college.

“Giving Mark resources to better explore new possibilities not only is a great investment of helping the students in his classes, but it also expands the repertoire of tools available to other educators, thus indirectly helping all the students on campus, and many students beyond,” he said.

To continue the snowboarding analogy, that should mean fewer novices nursing bruised tailbones and banged up elbows, and more budding experts shredding powder as fresh as their insights.