by Dr. Robert Werner
I am pleased to announce that the Bush
Foundation has renewed our grant to enhance undergraduate education for
2005-08.
The Bush Foundation was created in 1953 by Archibald Bush, one of the founders of the 3M Corporation. Bush left a large endowment to support health, education, and the arts. One of the Foundation’s programs supports improvements in undergraduate education.
The UST Bush grant in 2002-05
In preparing for our 2002-05 Bush grant, we decided that the best way we could improve undergraduate education at St. Thomas is to raise students’ higher-order thinking skills. How? Two ways: use a family of teaching methods we call “Inquiry-Based Learning” (IBL); and promote faculty/student collaboration.
We have good evidence from the last three years that IBL does raise students’ higher-order thinking skills. I wrote about some of the results from our quasi-experimental assessments in the March 2004 and January 2005 issues of Synergia. (The last section of this article discusses IBL).
The second way that the Bush grant supports raising student’s higher-order thinking skills is to support faculty/student collaboration. The literature and our own experiences at UST strongly confirm that this a valuable pedagogy (Hakim, 2000; Wenzel, 2004).
In planning our grant renewal, the UST Bush grant committee [1] recognized that our successes over the last three years deserve continuation, but we also saw that there were reasons to make some changes: (1) our teaching workshops reached only 42% of our full-time faculty; (2) IBL was mostly employed in upper-division courses; (3) faculty/student collaboration is terrific teaching, but is expensive and reaches only few students, and (4) teaching literature supports the success of delivering IBL to freshmen and sophomore students (Greene et. al 2004; Myer and Gray 1996; Oliver-Hoya et al. 2004).
Therefore, we decided to focus more of our efforts in
the next three years at lower-division
courses. We will maintain levels of
support for faculty-student collaboration at their 2002-05 levels.
Our programs in 2005-08 will continue to sponsor undergraduate faculty development seminars, such as the well-received Best Teaching Practices workshop this summer. We will also fund the following re-granting programs (programs with an asterisk are new):
1) grants
to faculty for course revision
· Core and Core Area Course Grants: to
raise students’ higher-order thinking skills through inquiry-based teaching of
core and core area courses. (max. $10,000 per group or department)
* Freshmen Paired Course Grants: same as Core & Core Area, but for
Freshmen Paired courses. (max. $2,000 per pair of faculty)
* Entry-Level Course Grants: if your course is the first course a student
would take in your discipline, but is neither a Core, Core Area, nor Freshmen
Paired course, e.g. Business 200, Marketing 300, Education 210, Engineering
150, Social Work 281, etc. (max. $1,500 per project)
· Other Course Grants: for any undergraduate course that does not meet the three categories above. (max. $1,500 per project)
2)
Dissemination and Scholarship of Pedagogy grants
· Dissemination
Grants: to disseminate faculty/student collaborative inquiry results at
conferences. (max. $1,000 per person)
* Scholarship of Pedagogy Grants: to finance travel for a faculty member to present their pedagogical findings about inquiry-based learning or faculty/student collaborations. (max. $1,500 per project)
3) grants
for student/faculty collaboration:
There are two kinds of these grants, both
administered through UST’s Undergraduate Research and Collaborative
Scholarship program (directed by Dr. Jennifer Cruise).
· Young
Scholars grants award $3,000
to a student and $500 to their faculty mentor for collaborative scholarship
during the summer.
· Collaborative Inquiry grants provide
$1,000 to the student and $500 to the faculty member to do collaborative
research outside the classroom, usually during the school year.
4) grants to departments for summer research
and scholarship programs
· Summer Research Network Grants Departments may apply for funds to support
activities such as lunches, speakers, advertising, or field trips for faculty
and students during the summer months, with the goal of building a community of
scholars. (max. $1,000 per department)
5) Peer
Coaching stipends
* The new Peer Coaching
program supports pairing of an IBL-experienced and non-experienced faculty member
to implement IBL teaching methods. (max. $1,000 per pair of faculty)
More information on all of these programs is
available at: www.stthomas.edu/bushgrant.
What is IBL? Given that one of our goals is to raise students’ higher-order thinking skills through IBL, just what is 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. 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 Sue Chaplin’s 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; Chaplin and Manske 2005).
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.
The UST Bush grant team has evidence that our
efforts over the last three years have improved teaching here, and we believe
that the grant renewal will continue those improvements. We sincerely thank the Bush Foundation, and
UST for providing the support of significant matching funds. It is a pleasure to belong to a university
that values good teaching.
References:
Chaplin, S.B., Mankse, J.M.
2005 A Theme-Based Approach to Teaching
Nonmajors Biology. Journal of
College Science Teaching, in press for September, 2005.
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, Virginia S. (ed)., 2004, Teaching
and Learning Through Inquiry: A Guidebook for Institutions and
Instructors, Sterling, VA: Stylus Press
Hakim,
T. 2000. How To Develop and Administer Institutional
Undergraduate Research Programs, Council for Undergraduate Research. Washington, DC
Hobson, A. 2001. Teaching relevant science for scientific
literacy. Journal of College Science Teaching 30(4): 238-243.
Meyer, Jon’a and Gray,
Tara. 1996. “Peer Coaching: An
Innovation in Teaching”,: http://www.teachermentors.com/RSOD%20Site/PeerCoach/CoachLinks.html
Norton, C.G., L.H.
Gildensoph, M.M. Phillips, D.D. Wygal, K.H. Olson, J.J. Pellegrini, and K.A.
Tweeten. 1997. Reinvigorating
introductory biology: A theme-based, investigative approach to teaching biology
majors. Journal of College Science Teaching 27(2): 121-126.
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.
Wenzel, Tom. 2004.
“Systemic Reform of the Undergraduate Science Curriculum”. Council on Undergraduate Research
Quarterly, December.
[1] The Bush Grant Committee, 2004-05:
Kris Bunton, Ph.D., Journalism, Program Co-Director
Robert Werner, Ph.D., Geography, Program Co-Director
Vanca Schrunk, Ph.D., History, Program Coordinator
Bernard Armada, Ph.D., Communication
Heather Bouwman, Ph.D., English
Sue Chaplin, Ph.D., Biology
Lynn Hartshorne, Ph.D., Chemistry
Ellen Kennedy, Ph.D., Marketing
Steve Laumakis, Ph.D., Philosophy
Leigh Lawton, Ph.D., Marketing
Robert Riley, Ph.D., Economics & Faculty Development
Center
Britain Scott, Ph.D., Psychology
Susan Smith-Cunnien, Ph.D., Sociology
[2] For example, these four questions lead Professor Chaplin’s 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?