Funded Projects
| Project Title | Overview of the Project |
|---|---|
| Competency Assessment Tool (CAT) Mustapha Beleh Pharmacy $14960.00 |
This project plans to implement and evaluate a Competency Assessment Tool (CAT) that will be used to track individual student's competency level for each of course outcomes. This tool will allow students to self evaluate their competency level for each course outcome and provide evidence and artifacts that support such evaluation. Instructors can then use the tool to support the students' self evaluation or make changes, providing students with a rationale for the changes. This tool allows for constant evaluation of students' progression and provides them with instant feedback as they progress through the course. The tool may serve as an alternative to examinations and other traditional evaluation methods particularly in case of certain skills such as communication or clinical skills and as a learning tool that allows instant and continuous evaluation of students' competency. The project plans to assess the use of the CAT tool in two courses. In the first course, the CAT will be used as part of a remediation plan for struggling students in the course to track their competency level for course outcomes and provide feedback to help them succeed in the course. In the second course, the CAT will serve as an integral teaching and assessment tool, where the instructor will examine students' self evaluation on the competency scales of the CAT and make changes providing feedback to students. This will continue throughout the semester providing an excellent opportunity for constant assessment and interaction between student and instructor. To assess the usefulness of this CAT tool both students and faculty will be surveyed to explore perspectives, perceptions and usefulness of the tool. The study will also compare individual students' scores in the course with the level of achievement of students regarding outcomes as set by the CAT tool. Conclusions from these comparative studies may help in providing evidence for expanding the role of CAT in student assessment and making changes in how graded tasks are designed. |
| Longitudinal Musculoskeletal Education for Medical Students Seetha Monrad Medical School Lisa DiPonio Medical School $10000.00 |
The goal of this project is to:1.Develop and maintain multidisciplinary, interactive musculoskeletal educational activities for 3rd and 4th year University of Michigan medical students that provide opportunities for formative assessment and feedback2. Create and administer a validated, reliable musculoskeletal skills assessment for 4th year medical students3. Increase medical students' confidence in their ability to examine and diagnose patients with musculoskeletal disorders. |
| Scarlett Middle School Summer Program for ESL Teaching Interns and Adolescent English Language Learners Debi Khasnabis Education Catherine Reischl Education $10000.00 |
This proposal requested funds to investigate and grow opportunities for learning for graduate students, teacher education faculty, local English as a Second Language teachers, and elementary- and middle-school English Language Learners. Building on a pilot program conducted in summer, 2011, UM faculty worked with Ann Arbor teachers to create an ESL science and social studies curriculum and assessments grounded in culturally relevant pedagogies. The program took place for 4 weeks in July, 2012 and was extended for a second summer in July 2013. Teacher education graduate students who were learning to teach ESL enacted carefully designed practices that support their learning of ESL teaching and completed a performance-based assessment used to evaluate their ability to enact high-leverage ESL teaching practices. Analyses of these efforts have led to refinement of practice-based teacher education pedagogies and have informed larger efforts to reform teacher education. |
| Faculty Seminar on Critical Issues in the Translation Classroom $10000.00 |
Christi Merrill from the Department of Comparative Literature led a collaborative seminar of 11 UM faculty, 9 of whom taught a translation course in conjunction with the Fall 2012 LSA Theme Semester on Translation (http://www.lsa.umich.edu/lsa/theme/upcoming) and expressed interest building a vibrant interdisciplinary undergraduate program in translation. Seminar participants were chosen in university-wide competition; they were asked to meet regularly over the course of the theme semester and to contribute to an online toolkit of materials to be used in the translation classroom. Whitaker funds were used to award research funds of $1000 to each seminar participant. |
| Enriching Undergraduate Environmental Science Education in the Rockies Gregory Dick LSA $10000.00 |
Introduction to Environmental Science in the Rockies (EARTH 202) is a new interdisciplinary field course taught for the first time at the Camp Davis Rocky Mountain Field Station in Wyoming in the spring of 2011. This proposal requests support from the Gilbert Whitaker Fund for the Improvement of Teaching to broaden and enrich the curriculum and student participation in EARTH 202 through the acquisition of scientific equipment and media technology for use in team research projects and production of video logs. |
| Leveraging Technology to Develop Collaborative Communities of Inquiry in Social Work Education Mary Ruffolo Social Work Elizabeth Voshel Social Work $10000.00 |
This innovative initiative will use a range of technologies to offer blended learning opportunities that combine web-based e-learning with periodic in-person class sessions to assess student attainment of professional social work practice behaviors over the course of their program. Using as a guide the Anderson (2008) model of online learning, the initiative will facilitate the development of a community of inquiry that involves students, field instructors and classroom instructors learning together, and will incorporate communication (asynchronous and synchronous), paced collaborative learning, independent development of products and structured learning resources. The innovative initiative builds on the integrative learning and e-portfolio activities already in place at the School of Social Work (SSW). Since 2004, the SSW has piloted optional courses that involved developing e-portfolios focusing on integrative learning (combining classroom learning and field internship learning). In the preliminary evaluations of these courses, it is clear that students who engage in developing e-portfolios that integrate classroom learning with field internship learning are better able to articulate what skills they have demonstrated and how these skills will continue to be enhanced in their emerging professional career. Instructors can view artifacts that students have developed in their portfolios to assess the degree to which students have met core professional practice behaviors. To date, this pilot work has been limited to approximately 60 students a year. The mechanism to assess demonstration of professional practice behaviors and to link these to student-centered outcomes-based program assessments has not been adequately developed yet. The current format for integrative learning requires significant instructor feedback and peer interactions. With the emergence of a range of technologies that can help bring to scale integrative learning and outcome based assessments, the SSW in this proposal is seeking to develop web-based learning tools to help us expand our pilot work and bring integrative learning methods using e-portfolios to scale. To meet this demand, we want to develop and evaluate a blended learning program that guides students through the process of portfolio development using technology to support this initiative. We need to adapt our current classroom-based portfolio pedagogy to a model that leverages new technologies and expands the activities, contexts, and processes in which students engage. Students in the MSW program spend more time out of the classroom than in one, and would benefit from technological tools that allow them to capture learning in the moment and context in which it happens. This program must also facilitate the participation of instructional staff guiding students through this process, including faculty, lecturers and staff in SSW, field instructors in several hundred sites across Southeast Michigan, SSW alumni, and members of the community at large. Technological tools will allow us to connect all of the educators that guide MSW students through the program, and will allow students to connect their field and classroom experiences to each other. |
| Developing a Framework for Hands-On Collaborations between Engineering and Medical Students on Open-Ended Projects Amy Cohn Engineering Michelle Macy Medical School $9700.00 |
We propose to develop and test-pilot a program in which small teams of engineering and medical students, an engineering faculty member, and a clinical member of the medical faculty will work together on hands-on projects within the clinician's practice. The educational goals are to: A) Provide students with improved skills for solving open-ended problems; B) Engage students in learning about the application of engineering tools to improve healthcare delivery; and C) Develop interdisciplinary communication skills between students, with a particular focus on functioning in new environments, reducing barriers caused by technical jargon, and collaborating across fields to identify relevant problems and collectively formulate solution approaches. |
| Teaching Design Heuristics for Creative and Diverse Concept Generation A. Harvey Bell, IV Engineering $10000.00 |
The project will survey the students of various Engineering 100 sections to understand the specific course instruction on the students' creative engineering opportunities. The analysis of this data will allow an understanding of the techniques which best allow to students to experience creativity and develop an understanding of the students' attitude toward the creative engineering process. Importantly, the methodology which is developed by this proposal can be used for assessment of the creative learning opportunities in other engineering courses. |
| Assessment of Student Learning in First-Year Writing Requirement Courses Anne Curzan LSA $9994.00 |
This project aims to develop an innovative assessment tool to measure students' achievement of the goals of first-year writing requirement (FYWR) courses. Similar assessment initiatives have often focused on final essay and course grades as a way to measure student achievement, and have aimed to standardize grading and rubrics to make the process a more efficient and effective one. This project adopts a very different approach, using the revised Directed Self-Placement as a model. The FYWR courses aim to hone students' skills at reading critically and at writing academic arguments that put their arguments in conversation with published scholarship. They also aim to develop students' meta-awareness of the rhetorical demands of different kinds of writing situations and genres as well as their awareness of their most effective writing process. Therefore, in order to measure students' achievement of these goals, any assessment tool needs to ask students both to produce written academic argument and to reflect on the reading and the writing they have produced, in terms of genre conventions and rhetorical strategies and in terms of their writing process. This project is financially modest yet pedagogically sweeping: it promises to benefit every year over 4000 undergraduates' experience in our writing classrooms and further the pedagogical development of over 80 GSIs, most of whom plan to pursue careers in education, and over 30 Lecturers. |
| Michigan Learning Communities Collaborative Assessment Project Carol Tell LSA $10000.00 |
The Michigan Learning Communities (MLCs) are nationally-recognized programs aimed at assisting students in their transition from high school to college, as well as assisting their sophomore mentors with the challenges unique to the sophomore experience. MLCs at the University of Michigan are also models of integrative learning as they seek to have high impact on student academics as well as co-curricular activities during the students' time in the programs and well beyond. The MLCs have many common goals and missions, yet each has a unique identity that appeals to a wide array of student interests. For many students, the MLCs are a key factor in choosing to come to Michigan because they help to make a large university feel much smaller and close-knit. The MLC directors have implemented individual program assessment tools but recognize the paramount importance of MLC-wide assessment in order to assess [determine] how well we are collectively achieving our goals and how we can best achieve even highter levels of success for our students. In the short term, we want to see what we are doing well and what areas we can improve on; in the longer term, we are looking to stay ahead of the curve and be innovative and dynamic as we continue to assess ever-changing student needs. This project proposes to secure financial support for a part-time researcher who can devote the staff time needed to implement this long-anticipated collaborative assessment across the MLCs. In order to create a relevant and eficient survey assessment tool, we propose that the 22-month long pilot phase involve four MLCs that form a representation of the larger community of MLCs. The development of a collaborative assessment tool will allow LSA Undergraduate Education to evaluate more accurately the overall role that MLCs play in student development and success, as well as to evaluate how both their common and unique structures work within the larger Undergraduate Education framework. Severaly integral themes that are common across our programs have already been identified by the MLC Directors. These themes will provide a foundation to begin development of an assessment tool and include: academic excellence, retention, student leadership, civic engagement, research, and internationalization. This project will also allow faculty affiliated with MLCs to take eveidnce-based practices regarding high-impast pedagogical approaches back to their respective home units. |
| The School of Kinesiology Curriculum Reform Project Patricia VanVolkinburg Kinesiology $9940.00 |
The Curriculum Analysis Project will examine two of the four undergraduate majors in the School of Kinesiology (movement science and sport management) along with the discussion about adding a fifth major. Over the past five years the school has grown tremendously. In addition, several new tenure-line and tenured faculty have been hired in each academic area. As is normal, some faculty have been lost due to retirement (2011) and family relocation. The sizable increase in enrollment in both majors requires that we examine how best to meet the academic needs of our students. In the end, we hope to have answered a few key questions including: • Given the increased enrollment of these programs, how well are we preparing lower-division students for upper level coursework? • Additionally, how well are we preparing upper division students for future careers or graduate study? • How can we best maximize the learning of critical knowledge and skills needed for graduates to work in a global environment? • How will the inclusion of a new major meet the needs of current studnets and new students? |
| Portable Physiology Computer Lab: Enhancing Student Learning of Physiology and Computational Modeling Elizabeth Rust Medical School Santiago Schnell Medical School $10000.00 |
Mathematical and computational modeling, along with the recording and analysis of physiological signals using computational devices are at the forefront of the biomedical sciences. We are requesting partial support to create a Portable Physiology Computer Laboratory. This lab will be used in the Human Physiology Laboratory and Computational Systems Physiology courses. The lab will provide hands-on experience in computational modeling and analysis tools to biomedical sciences students who otherwise have limited exposure to mathematical modeling and computer science. At the start of the term, our project will assess the level of student knowledge of relevant material from previously taken traditional courses. Data will be collected to monitor student progress throughout the semester and then reassessment will occur at the end of each course. Biological concepts and models are becoming more quantitative, and biological research has become critically dependent on computational approaches. By increasing the students' knowledge of and experience with sophisticated computational modeling and analysis tools, we expect students to be better positioned to contribute to the future discoveries in biomedical research. |
| Sculpting Light Sculpting Space Cynthia Pachikara Art & Design Tsz Yan Ng Architecture and Urban Planning $10000.00 |
The aim of this project is to develop an interdisciplinary light-based studio pedagogy that would serve students in both Art + Design (A&D) and Architecture (TCAUP). The project aims to explore the collision of the physical behavior of projected light with architectural drawing conventions that employ projective logics. Additionally, the ambition is to treat light as medium and event. In so doing, the project intends to cultivate teaching methods that challenge normative ideas of architecture and installation art as static forms, and instead, nurture the idea of product-as-process. This grant would assist in conceiving innovative teaching methods that nurture real scale light play in the studio context and promote creative production of illuminated, inhabitable environments. This project would expand the knowledge base and help to improve the teaching approaches of Cynthia Pachikara (A&D, TCAUP) and Tsz Yan Ng (TCAUP) who would use the funds to collaborate on curricular development. |
| Interdisciplinary Design Education Strategies Shanna Daly Engineering Papalambros Panos Engineering $10000.00 |
Designing products, systems, or services offers students a unique way to explore the disciplinary knowledge accumulated in their chosen curriculum in a hands-on manner, representative of the problems they will face in their chosen careers. In engineering, application of technical knowledge through design is essential; however, the ability to apply disciplinary knowledge through design is dependent on students' design skills. These include strategies to approach design tasks, decision-making, innovative thinking, dealing with ambiguity, understanding the user, interdisciplinary communication, working within constraints, evaluating alternatives, and iterating on solutions. The goals of this project are to (i) assemble and analyze qualitative data of design pedagogies from design educator, and form a collection of strategies that can be used in diverse disciplinary design education contexts; (ii) develop curricular materials to help introduce innovative educational strategies into undergraduate design curricula and experiences. Our experience over the past several years in teaching the courses Analytical Product Design (ME455, DESCI 501, ARTDES 300) and Design Process Models (PSYCH 541, DESCI 502, ARTDES 350) have encouraged us to pursue a more systematic documentation of practices across campus, and a codification suitable for curricular implementation, not only in the above courses but in several other courses, including mainstream core classes (e.g., ME 250, 350, 450 and MDE 350). The faculty team associated with the Design Science (DESCI) Program provides a natural vehicle for curricular dissemination. |
| Thinking and Teaching in Global Dimensions: A Joint Proposal for A May Seminar Bob Bain Education $10000.00 |
The applicants propose a May Seminar for up to 10 faculty and 12 graduate students on the topic of "Thinking and Teaching in Global Dimensions," to be held at the University of Michigan from May 18-June 4 in nine four-hour sessions (9 a.m.-1 p.m., three per week). The Seminar is conceived as a training site in global and world history, a relatively new field for both research and teaching. There is very high demand in particular for accomplished teachers of world history at both the university and K-12 levels, but few UM faculty and graduate students have any formal training in this area. We see this seminar as a springboard for curricular reform in both History and Education—by reaching beyond the national, regional, and temporal frames that shape most History classes at UM. The seminar aims to better prepare graduate students for the future teaching demands they will face, and simultaneously to work with faculty to infuse their teaching with more sensitivity to global and interregional concerns. Globalizing the curriculum also provides clear benefits and new skills to undergraduates, such as the ability to move more fluidly among and between global, national and local scales. Specific outcomes from this Seminar will include new course proposals in global history; substantial modifications to existing courses; new collaborative teaching initiatives across disciplinary lines; expanded K-12 outreach activities; and preparation of new teaching modules. These outcomes address the state of Michigan's new content expectations for world history and geography—of direct relevance to our undergraduates and graduate students pursuing careers in K-12 education—and also help Ph.D. students prepare more effectively for the new contours of an academic job market. |
