Funded Projects
| Project Title | Overview of the Project |
|---|---|
| Online Components for Intensive Language Learning (OCILL): Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Hindi and Urdu Adi Raz LSA Nilay Sevinc LSA Syed Ali LSA $10000.00 |
The proposed project is aimed to allow language instructors to develop online drills students can do at home and receive immediate automated feedback in preparation for material activation in the inverted classroom setting. |
| Integrating basic and diagnostic sciences using team-based pedagogy in the DDS curriculum Carol Anne Murdoch-Kinch Dentistry Vidya Ramaswamy Dentistry David Brzezinski Medical School Erika Benavides Dentistry Theodora Danciu Dentistry $10000.00 |
Oral Health practitioners need to draw upon the basic sciences to make high quality clinical decisions for optimal patient care. Supporting this principle, the American Dental Association will implement an integrated national licensure exam as of 2020 testing students’ ability to use basic science knowledge to inform clinical practice. One challenge at the School of Dentistry (UMSoD) is the reliance on lectures to teach basic sciences. Team-Based Learning (TBL) is an instructional strategy that allows active learning, fosters better integration and decision making than lecture and promotes critical thinking. The TBL focus is on application of knowledge with immediate feedback from the instructor; this instructional strategy promotes student engagement and assists in the development of team skills while allowing a single instructor to manage several small groups in a large classroom. Team skills are a necessary foundation for interaction between healthcare professionals. Our intent is to conduct this study as a pilot in the Winter 2018 2nd year diagnostics course and, if results are promising, to implement across the basic sciences 1st year curriculum (Fall 2018-2019) and eventually in parts of the entire dental curriculum. This project thus will provide foundational data for ongoing efforts to reinforce integration of basic science concepts with clinical practice skills in the UMSoD curriculum using the TBL pedagogy. |
| Understanding task allocation on first-year undergraduate engineering teams Robin Fowler Engineering Laura Hirshfield Engineering $5000.00 |
When student teams divide work and conquer, students develop relevant skills and self-efficacy differently depending on the tasks they complete. Most research on task allocation on student teams has investigated student traits that lead them to take on specific tasks. Based on conversations with students who talk about the tasks they were "assigned," we are interested to better understand how task "assignment" happens, to whom it happens, and what the effects of it are (on satisfaction with the team and learning from the project). We propose a set of surveys and interviews, along with weekly project RASIC charts, to better understand task allocation on first year engineering teams. |
| The Impact of Assessment Collaboratives on Secondary Mathematics Teaching Interns' Development Maisie Gholson Education $10000.00 |
The project is designed to improve the system for collecting and analyzing secondary mathematics teaching interns performance in field placements by providing timely, coherent, and authentic feedback. Assessment collaboratives will be comprised of faculty, field instructors, and local-area cooperating teachers, and will leverage automatic following devices that record and live stream video data to remote computers. The use of an automatic following device system allows multiple members of the assessment collaborative to provide immediate feedback regarding the enactment of specific teaching practices. Assessment collaboratives will participate in training sessions to learn the technology and clarify the performance criteria of teaching interns. At the end of the semester, the project will be analyzed as a set of case studies that describe the functioning of different assessment collaboratives and teaching interns growth and development around programmatic teaching competencies. |
| To App or Not to App: An innovative instructional approach to preparing preservice teachers to critically evaluate educational applications for teaching and learning. Elizabeth Keren-Kolb Education Elliot Soloway Engineering $10000.00 |
We are proposing a unique instructional approach in our teacher preparation program, where UM students engage in authentic professional collaboration. This project will improve teaching and learning at the School of Education by situating student learning in an authentic context. The United States Department of Education clearly stated in the 2016 National Education Technology Plan that preservice teachers must be able to use digital technologies effectively to leverage learning in classrooms today. Towards preparing preserve teachers, then, in EDUC 444, we will have them critically analyze educationally-oriented mobile apps that are being used in classrooms, asking if those apps are meeting specified learning outcomes. Still further, those analyses will serve as the focus of collaborative conversations supported by eHallway, a professional, social network used by industry professionals and inservice teachers. This is an approach to instruction that to our knowledge has never been done before in teacher education and will give UM student teachers a truly engaged learning experience. And, by design, our approach in 444, then aligns well with the UM Provost’s call for instructional methods to include more engage, authentic, learning experiences. |
| Fortifying Diverse Cultural Content in Spanish 231 with Audio Mini-Lectures & Conversations Ann Hilberry LSA Tatiana Calixto LSA - Romance Languages and Literatures $10000.00 |
Spanish 231 is the largest course in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures with over 1,000 students taking the course each year. Since the majority of students come from high school, Spanish 231 plays an important role in shaping the students’ experience in their first year at U-M. The course is an opportunity to provide incoming with encounters with a rich scope of cultural topics. Commercial textbooks for Spanish instruction tend to highlight common, almost stereotypical cultural themes, and overlook the diversity of social identities and ways of life that would offer a broader and more accurate picture of the pan-Hispanic world. We will create audio materials to support the development of students’ listening skills, and to expose them to more inclusive topics such as topics such as trial marriages in Central and South America, indigenous sports such as tejo in Colombia or chueca in Chile, urban agriculture in Venezuela, and same-sex marriage in Argentina. We will design this material introducing these cultural themes so that the students will engage intellectually with the pan-Hispanic cultures, and also reflect on their own culture(s) using this added perspective of the world. With pre and post-reflective surveys, we will analyze the students’ expectations and interests, as well as the impact these audio materials have in influencing their cultural perceptions. We will use data from Canvas to investigate the correlation of students’ use of extra audio activities with their level of interest in Hispanic cultures, and their development of listening skills. |
| Enhancing Success of Underrepresented Minorities in Graduate Education by Fostering Support and Self-Agency Robert Duncan Medical School $10000.00 |
University initiatives to strategically enhance diversity campus-wide are essential to building a thriving educational community. Every unit, every program is charged with implementing grassroots initiatives to enhance recruitment and retention of historically underrepresented minorities (URM) in our programs. The Neuroscience Graduate Program has seen tremendous growth and success in recruitment, building strong relationships with several undergraduate institutions across the country and undergraduate research mentors with a history of serving URM students. Recruitment is only the initial step toward success. Increasing retention, creating equity, and fostering inclusion are among our next challenges to ensuring success and building a rich educational program for all of our students. As next steps toward success, we propose a set of monthly Peer-Mentoring Workshops that address three Focus Areas: Academic Support, Social Support, and Self-Agency. The workshops are structured around near-peer mentoring with limited direct faculty involvement to create a safe, interactive space for building Focus Area skill sets. The workshops are supported by a pre-post survey instrument to assess student attitudes, experiences, and growth. Workshop facilitators will be trained at two major conferences dedicated to the development of minority graduate students in the sciences (SACNAS and ABRCMS). Successful implementation of this proposal will help foster inclusion and stronger social support structures as well as enhance research skills and build a stronger sense of autonomy over the graduate school experience. |
| Middlebrook: an anthology web series about campus life $9500.00 |
"Middlebrook: an anthology web series about campus life" is an innovative independent media production project comprised of three classes: SAC404-The Indie Film and Web Series, SAC404-Advanced Editing, and PAT 441-Image, Sound and Story. Each year, students will produce a season of a web series set on the fictional Middlebrook University campus. Each season will deal with an important issue related to campus life. Gilbert Whitaker funding will be used to support the production of season one in which a sexual misconduct complaint serves as a springboard for a complex story about the issues surrounding campus rape. |
| Development of an inquiry-based C.elegans project for Genetics Laboratory $6000.00 |
MCDB 306: Genetics Laboratory is an upper level laboratory course for CMB, neuroscience, biology and microbiology concentrators that is offered each fall and winter term. For the past 10 years, a portion of the lab used the animal model, C. elegans, to introduce students to genetic mapping of a known mutation. I propose to transform the C. elegans project into one that is more exploratory in nature and update the genetic methodology. Students will pursue new regulators of a highly conserved cellular signaling pathway, Wnt signaling, using RNAinterference (RNAi). This technique is commonly used in C. elegans research labs and allows one to specifically inhibit the activity of a particular gene. Students using transgenic C. elegans lines displaying Wnt-dependent fluorescence will introduce to the worms bacteria that express a variety of dsRNA that correspond to a specific set of C. elegans genes. Alterations in the fluorescence patterns would suggest a modification of Wnt signaling and allow students the chance to find something new about this important pathway. At the end of the term, students will have learned new, modern techniques and have received a true research based experience, as opposed to following cook-book lab instructions to genetically map a known 'unknown.' |
| Interactive Video Demonstration and Self-Reinforced Teaching and Learning to Customize Oral Hygiene Behavioral Shaping Chin-Wei Wang Dentistry Martha McComas Dentistry $6000.00 |
Teaching and modifying a life-long habit such as oral care is a great challenge for any dental health care provider. However, improving patients’ daily home care for oral hygiene is a critical therapy by itself. The complexity of successful oral hygiene therapy in a dental school clinic constitutes both student education and patient education. Key skills needed for successful therapy are the ability and motivation of the students to implement critical thinking, recognize individual differences, formulate customized oral hygiene instructions, and shape patient behaviors through effective teaching. Customized oral hygiene instructions include “teaching” each individual patient a targeted approach according to their needs using selected adjunctive devices and evidence-based methods. Often, students give only general instructions instead of utilizing a more personalized interactive demonstration, which includes an evaluation program to assess how much patients “learned”. By integrating customized interactive videotaping into the teaching and learning dynamics during patient care, it will establish a more effective and self-motivated education, culture and successful therapy. This project empowers both students and patients a tool for self-assessment and reinforcement about their instructions and performances with the instructors. Videos will be sent to patients for easy-access “at home” review. Patients’ treatment outcome will be a new evaluative process for which student competency will be assessed. (indicating they can actually teach and apply clinically). This project will establish a collection of case-based materials with interactive videos as resources for sustainable education and improve patient care culture for oral health care students and future providers. |
| In-Situ Critical Care Simulation to Improve Critical Patient Care by Senior Medical Students Michael Cole Medical School Deborah Rooney Medical School Matthew Stull Medical School Brendan Munzer Medical School $5998.00 |
This project employs medical simulation to instruct senior level medical students on essential aspects in the care of the critically ill patient. This is a novel method of critical care instruction at the University of Michigan and will train students in multiple facets of care involving ICU-level patients including: therapeutics, pathophysiology, interprofessional skills and procedural competence. These are skills that contribute to competency-based learning that has become an essential component in modern medical education and this method of instruction provides students a unique method for students to experience autonomy in clinical care. |
| From Methods to Applications: A Proposal for Redesigning a Course Providing an Interdisciplinary Educational Experience for the Modern Quantitative Epidemiologist Sung Kyun Park Public Health Bhramar Mukherjee Public Health $6000.00 |
The present curriculum for doctoral students in epidemiology does not offer the option of in-depth learning of statistical models and methods in various contemporary topics that arise frequently in the present scientific context, such as modern techniques for model building and variable selection and methods for causal inference. Present doctoral students in epidemiology are still challenged when asked to explain or interpret the analysis they carried out using a software module in actual statistical terms or write down the models governing/underlying their analysis. In addition, courses designed for biostatistics majors are too technical for epidemiology students. On the other hand, the present curriculum for biostatistics students is not sufficient enough to cover modeling epidemiologic data and communications with epidemiologists. The need for such a “fusion” course that bridges the gap between the technicality of modern statistical methods with the broader application context for non-majors (especially doctoral students in epidemiology) have been felt for a number of years in the School of Public Health. In order to make the course accessible, useful and interesting to the applied scientist, a unique format is needed that blends statistical theory with compelling and relevant datasets. The proposal and the course will be developed primarily by a collaborative team of two faculty members, one from Biostatistics and one from Epidemiology, with expertise in the statistical theory and knowledge of the applications context. The course will equip the new generation epidemiologists with state of the art statistical methods, and teach them the craft of translating a practical problem to mathematical equations. |
| Enhanced Free-form submissions in WeBWorK: Deductive Proofs Gavin LaRose LSA $6000.00 |
WeBWorK is a popular on-line homework and assessment package that is in wide use at the University of Michigan and at other universities. We propose to extend WeBWorK’s current capabilities to allow it to determine the correctness of free form responses such as are needed to write out a formal proof in any area of mathematics. This represents a large step forward in the capabilities of the system, and will allow us to use WeBWorK better in existing mathematics courses, and will extend its applicability to other courses in the mathematics curriculum. By doing this, we expect to improve student learning by providing students with more extensive, immediate feedback on their homework, and by thus freeing up class and instructor time to focus on students’ conceptual understanding of the material being covered in their classes. |
| Technology Integration into the Musical Theatre Cirriculum Catherine A. Walker Music, Theatre & Dance $6000.00 |
General trends in education as well as the genre of musical theatre have continued to evolve toward the consistent use of technology. It is important for the Musical Theatre Department to remain current and well versed in the technical trends of the industry as used in both rehearsal and performance. The objective of this proposal is to help students achieve success as musical theatre performers and also to prepare them with the technical skills required to excel and sustain a career in this the industry. By integrating new technology into the Musical Theatre curriculum, we will be able to offer the students in our department the opportunity to strengthen their technical competency as well as their musicianship fluency. These combined skills will improve their flexibility and effectiveness as an artist in this highly competitive and rigorous field. This project is designed with two major components. Part One involves the creation of a Computer Workstation/Music Writing Lab for Musical Theatre Majors in the Walgreen Drama Center. This workstation will include software for: Sibelius, Logic, Pro X, Mainstage, and Kontakt. Part Two is designed as a “flipped classroom” This will provide students with On-line Musicianship Tutorials specifically designed for our curriculum. These tutorials, called F.L.I.P. [Facilitating Learning & Instructional Programming], will not be course specific and will be available to all majors in the Musical Theatre Department. |
| The Use of a Web-based Application in an Integrated Pharmacology and Medicinal Chemistry Course Mustapha Beleh Pharmacy $10000.00 |
A new course series introduced in 2011 at the College of Pharmacy integrates the pharmacology and medicinal chemistry courses, aligns topics with the therapeutics series and provides struggling students with in-class remediation. Assessment data show that the integration process is a success, however a few problems linger; a perceived heavy workload, students viewing the content as separate courses and having difficulty correlating the material to clinical applications and the lack of tools to further aid the remediation process. A new web-based application to address some of these concerns is the focus of this project. This application is based on an online textbook integrating the course content from both disciplines for each section of a topic. The online textbook will use an interactive learning environment, with a split screen; the first provides the information as text with links that are projected as interactive animations and media into the second window. Clinical case studies designed in a hierarchical model that allows students to review and modify their decisions based on outcomes will be included. The final component of the application are remedial tools tailored specifically for struggling students to help them address knowledge deficiencies. These tools allow students to pick their own learning path and provide an assessment at the end of each path for immediate feedback. The effectiveness of the web-based application will be assessed using surveys, focus groups and comparing students’ scores on course examinations prior to and after introducing the application and based on patterns of use. |
