Program Grant renewal proposal
University of St. Thomas
April 1, 2005
In 2002, the University of St. Thomas (UST) received a three-year Program Grant from the Bush Foundation.[1] The purpose of our existing grant is to raise undergraduate students’ higher-order thinking skills through Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) and faculty/student collaboration. This proposal is to renew that Program Grant for three more years – to expand our IBL initiatives more broadly and more deeply throughout the institution, and to continue to support faculty/student collaboration at present levels.
1. The importance of teaching higher-order thinking skills
As educators, our most important goal is to have our students reach high levels of intellectual thought and critical inquiry. In the field of education there are many taxonomies, or hierarchies, of intellectual development. One of the most widely accepted is that of Benjamin Bloom (Bloom, 1956). At the lower levels in his taxonomy, students are expected to memorize and recall definitions and facts. This pedagogy is typically delivered as traditional lecture, with a textbook that emphasizes disciplinary breadth rather than depth. Students are usually evaluated through objective tests that measure recall of facts, definitions, and other easily measured ideas. At the highest levels, by contrast, students conduct whole investigations. They assemble knowledge which may come from a wide variety of sources and sometimes even assess the quality of their explanations. Something other than the lecture method is typically much more effective to teach these higher-order thinking skills.
There are several reasons why faculty should teach higher-order thinking skills. Students learn to solve problems themselves. They become less reliant on finding an expert to give them an answer, and they understand that they, themselves, can construct knowledge, learning to learn independently. Much IBL instruction is best conducted with groups of students, preparing students to learn with peers, as they will be expected to do beyond the university. IBL is a complete learning cycle. Students typically must pose the problem in an insightful way; make a plan of how to solve it; gather data; evaluate the quality of the data; conduct the analysis; and write up the results. IBL models how professionals themselves learn.
The primary objective of our Program Grant is to raise students’ thinking skills to higher levels. Based on evolving research, IBL is a promising techniques to increase higher-order thinking (Duch, 2001; Hewlett, 1999). In addition, faculty-student collaboration is thought to be an effective way to instill higher-order thinking skills (NSF, 1988; Hakim, 2000). In faculty-student collaborations, students typically do original research or new applications. Students are required to analyze, synthesize, assess the quality of their work, and communicate their results in a professional way. Students witness firsthand how their professors think and how people contribute to knowledge.
2. Definition of IBL
IBL is any pedagogy where the exploration is the primary activity and the structure of instruction that follows is dictated by the students’ needs as they pursue the exploration. The teacher and the textbook are not the primary mode of instruction, with problems at the end of the chapter. Rather, problems or questions are posed whose ‘answers’ are the dominant activity, and other instruction is delivered as needed to assist students in their quest to respond to the questions.
For example, in an introductory IBL biology course for non-science majors, content is organized around major themes or issues, so that students identify the “big” or important ideas as a framework for learning. [2] Content is taught within the context of the theme, and basic principles of the discipline are presented on a need-to-know basis. Organizing teaching around a theme can be inherently interesting to students because of their tie to current issues or focus on a problem relevant to students’ lives. Their lives are not organized by chapter 1, then chapter 2. Thus, IBL courses engage student interest more fully, motivate students to do independent research on the topic, and encourage students to become critically analytical of data and written work on the subject (Norton et al. 1997; Hobson 2001; Dinan 2002).
IBL can include case studies, problem-solving, community-based studies, discovery- or project-based activities, and any other pedagogies that pose an investigation or problem as the primary educational technique, structuring other instruction as needed. In IBL, students typically work on a real-world problem that reflects the often complicated, non-linear process that we encounter in actual applications In IBL, students might start their investigation down a wrong road, back up, and try something else. The task of professors is to teach principles, frameworks, and investigatory tools. Students take these principles and apply them on their own, with the professor acting as a consultant, reference, and expert guide. Such projects culminate in a presentation or paper, often shared with a professional organization, client, or community partner. IBL is a complete learning cycle, moving through an entire process from framing a problem through to its solution and then giving the solution back to the professor, one another, and the client in a meaningful way.
3. Examples of our current use of IBL and
suggestions for the grant renewal
There are three ways that IBL has been integrated into the UST curriculum from the 2002-05 grant: (1) workshops offered to faculty, (2) re-grants for course revision (that is, awarding Bush grant money to faculty applicants for their own course redesign), and (3) faculty/student partnerships. Each of these is explained below. Assessment of them is given in Appendix A.
· Workshops
Since most faculty were unfamiliar with IBL in 2002, our initial emphasis was on presenting workshops and conferences so faculty could learn how to teach with IBL. We held nine workshops. One hundred and forty-four faculty members attended, or 42% of the full-time undergraduate faculty, representing 32 of 33 undergraduate departments, and we sent 16 faculty to IBL-based national conferences.
We wanted to be sure that we understood what faculty needed to know to make IBL implementation most effective. Therefore, we took assessment measurements after each workshop to see what obstacles faculty saw in their use of IBL. For example, our first workshops introducing IBL led faculty to realize they needed a better understanding of how to conduct group work, since much of IBL focuses on students investigating problems in teams. Our next workshop therefore addressed techniques to guide and enhance students’ group experiences. That workshop’s assessment results indicated that faculty wanted more examples specific to their disciplines, so workshops were offered on the topics of IBL for Business, Social Science, and the Humanities. Assessment of those workshops revealed that faculty wanted a better understanding of how to use IBL with students’ writing and how to best assess IBL, so workshops were offered on those subjects.
Participation in the faculty workshops was satisfactory, although we reached less than half the faculty. Three more years of funding will enable us to reach more of the 58% of faculty who have not yet attended any workshop. The distribution of faculty attendance by departments in shown in Appendix C. UST is not alone in reaching only a portion of faculty in faculty development projects. This is the case with any new or innovative pedagogy. Even in the sciences, “it still seems to be the case that only a minority of instructors have fully incorporated the use of investigations into all levels of their undergraduate laboratory offerings” (Wenzel, 2004).
The Bush Grant Implementation Committee (BGIC) believes that we might be more effective in reaching faculty if we consider alternatives to workshops. For example, we plan to provide a program to support Peer Coaching, such as New Mexico State does, where an IBL-experienced teacher teams up with another teacher wanting to convert a course, or part of one, to IBL (Meyer and Gray, 1996). We also plan support Teaching Circles, such as those at Century College, where groups of six to eight faculty work closely together for a semester on IBL design and implementation (Neaton, et al, 2004). A promising structure we can mimic is being explored by UST’s Service Learning program (SL). It consists of gathering several faculty, paid by a stipend, to study and discuss SL literature, then to submit publications about successful SL instruction. We want do the same thing as a way to heighten faculty awareness of cutting-edge research and development in IBL and also as a way to integrate teachers’ scholarship and teaching (www.stthomas.edu/servicelearning, 2005).
· Re-grants for course
revisions
We created five re-granting programs (i.e., awarding of Bush funds to faculty) to infuse IBL into our curriculum:
· Project Grants (for faculty to revise one course)
· Core & Core Area Grants (for groups of faculty to revise general education courses)
· Dissemination Grants (for faculty to disseminate either the results of IBL pedagogy, or the results of faculty/student collaborative research)
· Seed Grants (to reward faculty who wrote other external grants in support of our Bush grant)
· Summer Research Network Grants (to support departments in creating a community of scholars)
These re-granting programs funded 70 faculty course revision projects to bring IBL into their courses. The distribution of re-grants by department is shown in Appendix C. Those faculty also produced forty-five conference presentations and eight publications as a result of the Program Grant. See Appendix B. Re-grant recipients submitted final reports about their work. These reports indicate that IBL methods were implemented in their courses, but produced only anecdotal evidence. No final report of a faculty member produced solid evidence of students’ learning gains. Fortunately, other assessments yielded better information (reported under section 4 below, Assessment).
The most
influential grants, in terms of the number of students affected and the dollar
amounts of the grant, were the Core & Core Area courses (what we at St.
Thomas call ‘general education requirements’).
Six Core & Core Area Grants were awarded to the departments of Art
History, English, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Service-Learning. Because these grants affect more students,
they will be an important component of our renewal program. See Appendix A for the amounts awarded by
type of re-grant.
· Faculty/student
partnerships
As stated earlier, the purpose of our existing grant is to raise undergraduate students’ higher-order thinking skills through two major strategies: Inquiry-Based Learning and faculty/student collaboration.
Faculty/student collaboration is funded by UST matching funds. Over three years, the BGIC funded, through the pre-existing Undergraduate Research and Collaborative Scholarship program, 94 students and 71 professors to do collaborative work (54 Young Scholars grants of $3,000, and 40 Collaborative Inquiry grants of $1,000). We hosted four Collaborative Inquiry student poster sessions with 232 students collaborating with 68 faculty. We funded travel for 48 students to make conference presentations, and our students presented their research at the Minnesota Private College Scholars ‘Day at the Capitol.’
The Collaborative Inquiry poster sessions have been especially well accepted. Over two hundred students have exhibited their collaborative research at what are now two annual poster sessions. Assessments from the poster sessions yield some strong reactions, such as one student who remarked that her faculty collaborator was:
“…very
helpful and inspiring. [The
collaborative relationship] is ongoing.
I find that collaborating is a great opportunity to connect with a
professor outside of the classroom. My
faculty member has become a mentor and I have been exposed to many
opportunities to grow through her and by her.
This presentation experience was very rewarding. I received so much feedback from faculty,
staff, students, and members of the community.
It was nice to know [that] my project and research address salient
issues to people in the community. It
makes me feel like my research makes an impact on others. Thank you for such a fabulous opportunity.”
A complete summary of three years of assessment of the Collaborative Inquiry poster sessions is available from the UST Bush Grant Director, Dr. Robert Werner. The BGIC believes that faculty/student collaboration programs are successful and should continue to be funded. Many programs depend on those funds to finance summer student research. Cutting them would have a strong negative effect on the ongoing development of our culture of faculty/student collaboration and would make our successful efforts appear to be an educational flash-in-the-pan. We therefore include the continuation of this program in our renewal focus.
4. Assessment
All of our Program Grant activities have been assessed. Appendix A shows in detail the instruments that were used, highlights of the results, and actions taken based on those results.
Many assessment instruments result in counts, measurement of satisfaction, and textual comments. The Bush Program Grant, however, challenges us to measure students’ learning gains. We designed and implemented a quasi-experimental design to carry out this assessment. Results of applying that design to a Philosophy and an introductory Computer Science courses are given below. A third such experiment, in Mathematics, did not yield statistically significant differences.[3] A fourth treatment-and-control evaluation will occur in spring of 2005 in the senior-level Journalism capstone course, and we will administer a treatment-and-control instrument in Art History, comparing one IBL-based course to one that is taught using more traditional methodologies.
We believe that we should take a variety of kinds of measurements, then synthesize them to see if we are achieving multi-method reliability. That is, if every technique is showing us the same results, then we can trust that our results are, indeed, reliable outcomes of IBL and not an artifact of the assessment technique that is being used.
Our most valuable assessments were (1) our quasi-experiments, and (2) two external reviews.
· Assessments from the
quasi-experiments
A Program Grant challenges the recipient institution to assess students’ learning gains. This is, of course, quite a challenge. Our major effort to measure student learning gains is a procedure we call oral interviews. This is a quasi-experimental design modeled after the University of Wisconsin-Madison Chemistry Department. It is described in the following two cases.
Philosophy. Four Philosophy professors were awarded a re-grant in the summer of 2003 to revise the introductory Philosophy course (a large-enrollment required course at
St. Thomas). The four faculty members hypothesized that if students were taught to identify and apply tools used in philosophical reasoning, students would improve their general higher-order thinking skills. [4] The professors thought that through using IBL skills, students would be able to more effectively evaluate new arguments they have not encountered, therein thinking more critically and at a higher taxonomic level. Students would have transferable skills to use in other courses as well, including non-Philosophy courses. The four professors designed instruction that taught the reasoning skills, then devised IBL problems for students. Students were expected to apply their new thinking skills throughout the course.
Using IBL methods, four different professors taught four sections of the course (a total of 126 students). Another four sections of the course (129 students) were taught by three different professors using “traditional,” or non-IBL approaches, giving us a quasi-experimental design of a treatment group (the IBL sections) and a control group (the non-IBL group), but without random assignment of students to instructional method and without the rigor of holding other conditions constant, such as the professor, the time of day of the course, and the distribution of students among freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors.
At the end of the course, the four professors who taught the IBL sections conducted oral interviews of 32 randomly chosen students in order to assess students’ higher-order thinking skills. They gave each student a four-page article about whether nature or nurture was responsible for men having more sexual partners than women, along with the set of questions the professors would ask in the interview. This article posed a new problem that was not used in the course. Students had 15 minutes alone to read the article and think about it, then they spent 30 minutes being interviewed by two of the professors. The professors did not interview their own students and were blind with respect to whether a student came from the treatment or control group. Professors then rated students’ higher-order thinking skills with a given scoring rubric (devised by the professors) and a set of rules about how to ask their questions.
Students’
higher-order thinking skills, as rated by the four professors, were
significantly better if they took the IBL course. [5]
Computer Science. As a second example, a faculty member in the department of Quantitative Methods and Computer Science (QMCS), received a Bush Foundation re-grant in the summer of 2004 to develop students’ thinking skills in an introductory Computer Science course (QMCS 110 – Introduction to Information Processing). There was a strong need to revise the course shown by external data from industry and other sources indicating that students needed to be able to diagnose and solve problems on their own computers.
The professor reasoned that if students were given real-world computer problems, they would take more interest in the course, use the material more, and reason through a diagnosis, a cure, and prevention of the problem in the future. She devised a series of case studies and also had students identify their own computer problems. She then delivered instruction that enabled students to solve the problems in the case studies, and later on in the course, students reasoned through solutions to their own computer problems.
In the fall of 2004, the professor taught one section of the course using her new IBL strategy. Three other sections were taught in the traditional way, the same quasi-experimental assessment situation used for the Philosophy courses. After the course, five pairs of faculty interviewed a random sample of students. Each faculty pair had one QMCS professor and one from the Bush grant committee. A QMCS professor would understand the computer-science part, and a Bush grant committee member would recognize the students’ higher-order thinking skills.
Fourteen students from the treatment section (IBL) and nine from the control section (traditional instruction) were randomly chosen from class lists. The students were given four computer problems generated from a list of the most common calls to our computer-support help line. The students each had 15 minutes to study the problems, with their textbooks available. Then each student was interviewed for 15 minutes by a faculty pair. The faculty was blind with respect to whether the student came from the treatment or the control group, and the students didn’t know whether the professors were engaged with IBL or not.
The professors rated the students’ higher-order thinking skills with a pre-agreed rubric. The Bush grant’s Assessment Coordinator then calculated whether or not there was a difference among treatment and control groups. [6] The results of this quasi-experiment again confirm that students in sections where professors used IBL strategies had better general reasoning skills than students who had received traditional instruction.
Limitations. The quasi-experiments of the oral interviews have limitations. As noted earlier, this is a quasi-experimental design and we have not controlled for threats to internal and external validity. For example, we could not control for individual characteristics of each teacher. We are aware of the limitations of our design and we do not represent the findings as though they were based on true experimental designs. As one BGIC member said: “The interviews are fine for us. They’re not scientific, but they’re good to guide us.”
Internally, when de-briefing from our quasi-experiments, we found flaws in our procedures, such as interviewers asking leading questions and misunderstanding the scoring rubric. Interviewers should be trained in interview techniques so that their rating of student learning is more objective. Thus, in our Program Grant renewal budget, we include funds to hire external, well-trained interviewers from the Minnesota Center for Survey Research, Wilson Learning, or the Huntingdon Learning Center so as to lend greater methodological reliability to our results. In some cases, depending on the number of course sections being offered, it may become possible to control for individual instructors. Measurements taken by trained interviewers plus greater experimental control would increase the reliability of the quasi-experiments.
· Assessment from two external reviews
Perhaps the most useful assessments were two external reviews, one in 2003 and another in 2004. The major points of each review are also given in Appendix A. (Dr. Werner can readily supply the reports.) Each external reviewer, Drs. Kate Alley and Gary Ross (South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and Minot State University, respectively), is experienced in Program Grant management and review.
Most themes of their first visit in April 2003 surrounded assessment and information sharing. The main points were that we should coordinate assessments (which we are finally undertaking in spring of 2005), and we should share information about our programs and successes more widely with our own faculty and students, and with faculty at other institutions. The next year promises improvement, including a project to have students analyze the results of the NSSE and FSSE surveys in fall of 2005 (the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, respectively).
The central focus of the second review, in November, 2004 was that we should align our grant renewal with the general education curriculum revision, which is in progress during the 2005-07 academic years. The reviewers also suggested that: (1) we gather more systematic data about teaching techniques currently being used; (2) broaden our idea of IBL to include collaborative teaching, critical thinking, and student engagement; and (3) consider using different, or additional, general education assessment tools. Our plan includes support for entry-level courses, freshman paired courses [7], and Core & Core Area courses. Our plan also includes coordination of all undergraduate assessments, University-wide, because if our Program Grant is renewed, our Bush team will bring new assessment tools to bear on the required general education courses.
Two years of reviewer Kate Alley’s interviews of students produced rather eye-opening results. She asked a convenient sample of students (those in the cafeteria) about the instructional techniques their teachers use. Students reported considerable differences in teaching techniques according to subject being taught. They reported that primarily at the freshman and sophomore levels, the major teaching strategy was lecture. A Program Grant renewal would be largely aimed at those courses.
After extensive interviews with administrators, faculty, and students, Drs. Alley and Ross wrote: “From the [student] interviews overall, it appears the Inquiry-based Learning (IBL) pedagogies have been accepted by students and have become the preferred method of learning for participating students (some students are beginning to ask for IBL courses and faculty).”
The reviewers also wrote: “The culture of UST is beginning to change as a result of these programs. There is a strong commitment to IBL at this institution. IBL has, in fact, the potential to become a ‘UST distinctive’.”
5.
Revision of the general education requirements
An important new curricular effort is underway at St. Thomas in 2005-07. The revision of our general education requirements is being undertaken by a group called the Core Curriculum Task Force (CCTF). The CCTF grew out of the Undergraduate Planning and Policy Committee and has wide representation among all undergraduate units. Through meetings and interviews with departments, the CCTF revised the goals of the undergraduate core curriculum They identified thirteen such goals. The first two are most relevant to a Bush Program Grant renewal: (1) that students should “think analytically, critically, and creatively, to solve problems by applying knowledge in appropriate circumstances, and (2) “to write and speak clearly, and to read demanding works with comprehension.” The other goals are less relevant to our present purposes, such as those associated with understanding the fine arts, faith and the Catholic tradition, participation in democratic society, and effective use of technology. We are encouraged by the institution-wide recognition of the importance for engaged, critical learning and think that the synergy of our work through the Bush Grant can continue to move us forward in this effort. An effective convergence is developing between a Program Grant renewal and revision of the general education requirements.
6. Recommendations of the BGIC for a Program Grant renewal
The group closest to our Program Grant is the Bush Grant Implementation Committee. These are thirteen dedicated individuals from a wide range of disciplines. There has been a good level of continuity of personnel on the BGIC over three years. [8] The BGIC has, of course, been intimately involved with the two external reviews. The BGIC is in a good position to see the big picture of our Program Grant and to make recommendations for its renewal. They have several key ideas.
One of their ideas is that a promising way to deliver higher-order thinking skills is in lower-division interdisciplinary courses. Such courses require freshmen to synthesize information from a wide variety of sources, e.g. in a freshman paired course where an English and a Biology course together take on a problem like the relations between man and nature. A Philosophy teacher and a Sociology teacher’s joint courses might study society’s obligations to the poor. Such investigation will require a wide-ranging set of faculty skills to investigate what IBL should deliver and how best to guide students to develop sophisticated cognitive ability. Our experience in biology courses and educational literature say that IBL can be used successfully in large, introductory courses (Oliver-Hoyo and Beichner, 2004; Greene, Odom, and Malinowski, 2004; PKAL, 2005).
Fortunately, the BGIC can use existing structures to deliver IBL to lower-division courses. The existing paired-course program is thought to be quite successful. The Office of Academic Counseling is pondering the idea of a freshman seminar. Core & Core Area courses will be revised. All of these are perfect means for a Program Grant renewal to effect greater change earlier in a student’s education.
It is the opinion of the BGIC that it takes time to change a university. We are on track. Three more years of IBL and faculty/student collaboration will broaden and deepen our effect.
We plan to coordinate our assessment efforts for the undergraduate curriculum through the office of Vice President Angie Barretta-Herman and the Director of Institutional Research, Richard Liu. We will discuss this coordination in spring of 2005 and will continue to use CAAP (ACT’s Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency) annually and to add NSSE and FSSE every three years. NSSE and FSSE both have questions that directly relate to assessment of higher-order thinking skills.
The impact of UST’s general education assessment as it exists now is almost non-existent. Existing assessment results were not helpful to the committee revising the general education requirements (the CCTF). If we are going to affect general education with a Bush grant renewal, we need better campus-wide data that is longitudinal and reaches more students. Therefore, we would like to use a Program Grant renewal to fund NSSE, FSSE, CAAP; someone in Institutional Research to process assessment data; and an increase in funding for the oral interviews.
1) IBL is working, though we have both more faculty and more students to reach.
2) Above all, we should reach more students through support of lower-division courses: specifically, paired courses, Core & Core Area courses, a potential freshman seminar, and other entry-level courses. IBL should be ideal for lower-division interdisciplinary courses.
3) We should continue to support the Undergraduate Research & Scholarship program with UST funds.
4) We can coordinate and improve assessment, including the quasi-experiments.
University-wide
support
The
BGIC feels that it has the strong support of the faculty and the
administration. We are less known among
students, but a focus on lower-division courses should help that.
The Associate Dean of Academics & Research in UST’s School of Education, Dr. Gene Audette, when asked for input about our Bush grant renewal, wrote: “I support the work because it reflects most current research from the field of the psychology of cognition and human learning, and from the instructional design and evaluation literature. I agree with your point that such sea-change initiatives take years, not months, to implement, assess, and refine. Better to continue this effort with focused patience and committed resources than to flit off onto some other topic...”
In interviews with the external reviewers, College of Arts & Sciences Dean Dr. Tom Connery stated: “The Bush grant programs have actually changed the culture at UST. IBL is now a recruiting tool for students and faculty. Everyone on the campus is aware of IBL and students are beginning to prefer IBL professors. UST now looks for more engaging faculty when hiring.”
Dr. Tom Rochon, the Executive Vice President and Chief Academic Officer, said in those interviews that: “UST has a commitment to IBL and service-learning and is using these concepts as a way to differentiate itself from competing institutions. …every student should experience IBL as part of the ‘UST experience’”.
In the most
recent edition of the St. Thomas magazine, President Dease wrote (Dease,
2005): “Our goal is to become a leader in Catholic higher education because of
the excellence of our teaching and the high level of student achievement. We will attain this through collaborative
discovery between faculty and students, developing independent learners
equipped with skills of inquiry who can thrive in a rapidly changing society.”
Addressing the faculty at the annual convocation in the fall of 2004, President Dease said the following while speaking about the value of combining a liberal arts education with career preparation (a hallmark of UST):
“Research collaborations are just one wonderful
example of how faculty members are creatively fulfilling our mission of
combining liberal arts education and professional preparation. St. Thomas
has become a leader in fostering research collaborations between undergraduate
students and faculty, and this is an area we will expand still further in years
to come. With the assistance of a grant
from the Bush Foundation, we developed a highly successful program that brings
to undergraduates the kind of research experience that in the past was the
near-exclusive province of graduate education.
“There were 21 Collaborative Inquiry grants made this past year to St. Thomas faculty-student research pairs, and 33 Young Scholars grants to students working with faculty members. Thirty students were funded to travel to conferences to present the results of their research. Eighty-five students presented research results on the St. Thomas campus at poster sessions and in conferences organized in the spring and fall. Three students were invited to present their research at the state capitol this past spring. And when the Minnesota Academy of Sciences held its annual meeting last April, it presented six awards to student researchers. Three of those six awards went to St. Thomas students.
“This active learning model meets the standards and expectations in the strategic direction on academic excellence that was developed by a faculty committee and approved by the St. Thomas board of trustees last year. It is also an example of “learning by doing” that is the liberal arts equivalent of internships and other practicum formats in the professional areas. Through their engagement with the research process, students learn to be critical thinkers and better communicators.”
This
is our argument for sustainability after 2008.
We would have had six years to train faculty to use IBL. We will have reached the ‘reachable’
faculty. There will be little need for
ongoing workshops and other methods of teach faculty how to use IBL, therefore
little need for continued Bush Foundation funding for those purposes. Faculty/student collaboration, however, is an
ongoing expense. Such collaborations came
exclusively from UST funds in 2002-05 and will again in 2005-08. The administration has indicated that
faculty/student collaborations will continue to be funded at present levels
into the indefinite future.
Conclusion
Despite accomplishing significant things, we have work to do. Lower-division students experience a prevalence of lecture, though they prefer active engagement. Fifty-eight percent of faculty have not attended any Program Grant workshops. Revision of the general education requirements present a major opportunity to implement a widely defined vision of IBL.
IBL and faculty/student collaboration seem to be good ways to develop students’ higher-order thinking skills. While the quality of our assessments is adequate, it could be improved. A plan is beginning to coordinate university-wide assessment efforts, and a renewed Program Grant can play a vital role.
Our 2002-05 Program Grant established a firm foundation on which to build in 2005-08. Our efforts enjoy widespread support. Three more years of Bush Foundation funding will embed our learning gains further and help to steer the university through curricular reform.
References
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Dinan, F.J. 2002. Chemistry by the case. Journal of College Science Teaching 32(1): 36-41.
Greene, David B. Odom, Janice, and Malinowski,
Arlene. 2004. “Inquiry, Critical Thinking, and First-year Programs,” in Lee,
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A. 2001. Teaching relevant science for
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Meyer, Jon’a and Gray, Tara. 1996. “Peer Coaching: An Innovation in Teaching”, http://leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu/org/tcc_conf96/meyer.html (note: that link is dead, but other references are available at: http://www.teachermentors.com/RSOD%20Site/PeerCoach/CoachLinks.html
Oliver-Hoya, Maria, and Beichner, Robert. 2004. “Scale-Up: Bringing Inquiry-Guided Learning to Large Enrollment Courses,” in Lee, Virginia S. (ed)., 2004, Teaching and Learning Through Inquiry: A Guidebook for Institutions and Instructors, Sterling, VA: Stylus Press.
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[1] grant # 8255, in the amount of $444,990, for the period March 5, 2002 to June 30, 2005.
[2] For example, these questions lead the whole introductory Biology course:
Unit 1: Is there a link between obesity and diabetes?
Unit 2: Can you climb Mt. Everest?
Unit 3: Does HIV cause AIDS?
Unit 4: Whose child is this?
[3] In the Mathematics experiment, the professors’ ratings of students’ higher-order thinking skills, although not statistically significant, were in fact higher for the IBL group,. We concluded from that (first) experiment that we needed to use a more sensitive measurement scale, not an integer 1-5 scale.
[4] The specific set of thinking skills included: ability to distinguish valid from invalid arguments-and abilities to detect informal fallacies and assess causal explanations.
[5] In an independent-samples t test, p = .003 (df = 24). This result means that there are only three chances out of a thousand that the professors’ ratings would be obtained if in fact there was no difference in students’ thinking skills.
[6] Using an independent-samples t test and a criterion of a<.10 for statistical significance, p = .06 (df = 50). In other words, there are only six chances in a hundred that the professors would have given the ratings they did, when in fact, there was no difference in the students’ reasoning skills.
[7] We have a first-year program of paired courses. Faculty from different disciplines offer their courses in a cohort model; students take both courses together as a group and the faculty serve as the students’ advisors for the first two years of college or until students declare their majors. The pairing faculty can coordinate their courses significantly through shared readings, papers on topics that integrate both disciplines, etc., or the faculty may choose to have nothing in common other than the shared students. We propose to make the pairing more intentional, more interdisciplinary, and to raise the level of intellectual engagement significantly.
[8] There has also been continuity in the personnel who manage the grant:
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2002-03 |
2003-04 |
2004-05 |
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Program Director |
Robert Werner |
Kris Bunton |
Co-Director: Robert Werner |
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|
|
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Co-Director: Kris Bunton |
|
Program Coordinator |
Vanca Schrunk |
Vanca Schrunk |
Vanca Schrunk |
|
Assessment Coordinator |
Shahid Alvi |
Shahid Alvi |
Robert Werner |