For the past 4 years, I have taught multiple sections of a large integrative business course class [2 sections of 400 each]. I wanted to investigate which teaching methods/techniques lead to student learning. First, I examined what I was doing with regard to actual assessment. I then adapted existing methods. I supervised 28 breakout discussions as a result of this class; breakouts were facilitated by volunteer business professionals. The assessment techniques that I used utilized multiple perspectives: students, faculty, breakout facilitators, teaching assistants. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected, including pre- and posttests for all students, two different surveys of 240 students each, 12 focus groups and several other methods.

What have I learned? Too much to explain here. I learned how to combine methods of assessment so that one can obtain more reliable responses. Certainly, I’ve learned that the more effective I am in incorporating and integrating my material, the more students learn. I’ve learned that students resonate to psychological contracts and try hard to not violate them --- and expect me to do the same! I am currently developing a course portfolio that includes everything from the design of the course to examples of student work to my interpretation of it all. If I survive, that is.

Anthony Catanach, Accounting, Villanova University

Recently, several colleagues and I have developed a creative approach to the instruction of intermediate financial accounting, a two-semester course generally considered the "core" of the accountancy major. This innovation seeks to develop those competencies required by professional accountants in the 21^st century by: (1) motivating students, (2) promoting technical competency, (3) developing life-long research skills, (4) advancing critical thinking, and (5) fostering communication skill development.

To date, this new approach has been evaluated principally using feedback received from student course evaluations and presentations at scholarly meetings. As a Pew Scholar, I plan to design, develop, test, and begin implementation of an evaluation strategy that will allow me to critically evaluate this new approach. My assessment strategy will investigate both learning in the specific course, as well as the innovation’s effect on subsequent classes, and ultimately, student professional success.

Barry Eckhouse, Management, Saint Mary’s College of California

This project attempts to contribute to the ongoing discussion of course content in the field of management communication, an emerging field of study, and one whose members are inclined to engage in such discussion with greater frequency than those in other more established fields. In this attempt, I have surveyed working professionals, not for their views on what ought to be taught, but for their descriptions of what they actually do as communicators when they encounter rhetorical challenges at the workplace. To do this, I have constructed an Internet-based survey, and I have converted the data it has collected into a database for statistical analysis. This quantitative data is supplemented by several essay questions.

I have at the same time collected representative syllabi from colleagues at a variety of colleges and universities where management communication is taught. These syllabi all display a remarkable similarity in design, goals, and assignment. I have used the major points of similarity to form a composite, one that represents, with a few exceptions, how management communication is taught today.

The results of my survey thus far indicate that the kind of course the syllabi above suggest may be inconsistent with the kind of challenges working professionals report.

This study focuses on the team project used in an introductory MBA course called "High Performance Management." For each of the six years the course has been taught, the team project has undergone significant reengineering as we struggle to find an effective project for this course and these students. Based on principles of collaborative learning (Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, 1991), we redesigned and pilot tested the effectiveness of this new team project in two of the four sections of our course. The final report will compare the differences in product, process, and understanding between the two sections using the new project and the two control sections.

Advances in information technologies and globalization of businesses and economies are the primary forces that continue to transform the world. Both accounting professionals and

academicians are trying to deal with this transformation and are struggling to design coursework that effectively prepares graduates to help clients "make sense of a changing and complex world."

Although many accounting educators are updating their coursework in some manner, most accounting students learn to apply their accounting domain knowledge in a single, dated information-processing context (i.e., journals, ledgers, debits, and credits). The purpose of my project is to develop and assess active learning tasks that demonstrate how to teach "accounting" knowledge using a broad business context, thereby making it less difficult for students to transfer that knowledge to a variety of alternative information processing environments and contexts.

My project is focused on an innovative program, called the Integrated Business Core (IBC), in which we teach basic business concepts in conjunction with an intensive hands-on experience. The experience comes from requiring students to create and manage two significant enterprises; an actual start-up company (funded by a real-money loan of up to $5,000) and a hands-on community service project. The integrated exposure to core business concepts as faculty from three core business disciplines deliver content instruction that is specifically sequenced to provide real-time conceptual support for managing students’ business and service ventures. Since the program began in the spring of 1995, 689 students in 20 companies have provided 32 non-profit/community service organizations with 6,500 service hours and $175,000 of direct financial support (i.e., profits of their business ventures). The objective of my Pew project focuses on developing ways to assess the impact of IBC (and other experienced-based programs) on a wide range of student attitudes and skills.

A colleague and I began a study two years ago assessing the effects of incorporating several collaborative teaching strategies into our yearlong course in organic chemistry. Our objectives were to promote students’ productive preparation time before each class, to develop students’ ability to articulate concepts and to accommodate the different learning styles of our diverse student body. Our results suggested that students took more responsibility for their own learning relying less on the professor as an information source. Students taught collaboratively also performed better on questions designed to assess their critical thinking abilities, though we saw no change in the students’ ability to retain content.

I wish to extend our prior work on collaborative learning by:

• adding three problem-based learning modules and assessing their effect on students’ content learning and critical thinking skills, and
• correlating learning styles with different types of student performance and competence.

There are three parts to my project, and all focus on teaching strategies that develop a deeper understanding in General Chemistry. The first and largest portion of my project deals with the development and implementation of guided inquiry laboratory exercises based on a constructivist philosophy. The second part of my project deals with students generating self-constructed assessments from their laboratory data. This forces them to use chemical vocabulary actively and accurately while making explicit links between laboratory and lecture. The third and final segment addresses misconceptions students bring into the classroom about boiling based on their previous experience with water. Individual interviews were conducted to determine if there was shift in student understanding. Results from these three portions are interesting and have taken me in unanticipated directions. I look forward to sharing the details with all the Pew Scholars this summer.

I have introduced cooperative learning into a large (>200 students) lecture course of General Chemistry. The retention rates, test performance, and interest level of students in the cooperative learning course have exceeded those for students of similar ability enrolled in a more traditional General Chemistry course on the campus.

Through conducting surveys, interviews, and analyzing student performance on standard test questions, I hope to address the following questions:

1. Which particular features (pairing students in lecture to analyze and predict chemical behavior, small-group problem-solving activities, weekly graded homework, on-line quizzes, increased socialization, etc.) of the new course have had the greatest impact on student learning?
2. What design elements of cooperative learning activities are most successful in stimulating meaningful discussion, promoting deeper conceptual understanding, and developing individual problem-solving skills?
3. What is the long-term impact of a course such as this? Are students more successful in advanced courses if they have had a collaborative problem-solving experience in a foundational course?

The main focus of my course redesign was a nine week experimental unit I called a "rotation assignment" consisting of three three-week rotations. In the rotations, students were asked to open up and pose questions about a particular literary text in light of their work in particular archival contexts, with the task of leaving behind a trail of pointers for the next group to take further in its inquiry. By the end of the nine weeks, each group had read each of the books, and contributed, each at a different stage, to a common collection of themes and sources for the books.

I'm looking at everything they produced as my data: online postings for all the assignments, their continuous reflections on the learning process, and their "performances" of understanding (a midterms paper and a final project). I'm especially interested in looking at the evidence to discover if their developing sense of "complexity" (vis a vis the relation of texts to contexts) seems more like "understanding" through these student-centered approaches, than in a traditional literature course. I'm looking to answer (or begin answering) several questions that bear formatively on the revision of this course approach: Where are the right boundary points between "emergent" student understanding of complexity and my intervention as guide and expert? What roles can digital technologies play? What is the right balance of online and face-to-face? What is the right kind of "scaffolding" to help students "staircase" through the materials without short-circuiting the open, inductive, student-discovered nature of the course approach?

I want to theorize an approach to teaching (reading, writing and thinking) that develops a teacher’s attentiveness to her students’ "moments of difficulty" for their hidden potential to produce understanding and to instruct. The premise of my argument is that for a student (indeed, for any learner) to perceive and to name something as "difficult" is to demonstrate a form of knowledge, incipient perhaps, incomplete, not fully communicable, but knowledge nevertheless, and one that it is both profitable and responsible to tap.

I have been working with the concept of difficulty for many years. I am interested in writing about how different theories of reading construct it, and with which educational consequences. I have constructed courses around the concept of difficulty, and taught undergraduate and graduate students to transform difficulties into opportunities to learn. The work this approach produces is exciting. During the two weeks with all of you, I would like to test this theory of mine, and see to what extent it is or it is not discipline specific. To this end, I would like to ask all/some of you to produce for me a brief description of a characteristic learning difficulty you or your students think functions as a stumbling block in learning, and I would like to study how other disciplines confront this aspect of teaching.

One of my regular teaching assignments at Temple University is the first half of the US history survey course. I have taught it for years, using a basic text and a reader. It is my goal as a Pew Scholar to reinvent this course by linking it to the growing cache of primary source materials available online. Beginning students of history have only a dim idea about what history is and historians do. Many confuse history with facts and historians with journalists or talk show hosts. By presenting my students with carefully selected primary sources that they can access through the web site for my course, I hope to disabuse them of these misunderstandings. By requiring them to write about these sources in response to queries posed on my syllabus, I hope to teach them that history is all about creating argument from data and relating that argument to what other historians have said before.

My project explores how the use of the world wide web in history courses helps or hinders student learning about the past. My goal is to establish a baseline for evaluation of the impact of historical sources presented in a multimedia format as compared to those presented in traditional print. In particular, I hope to be able to assess the degree to which student learning changes in response to the medium used to present essential source materials. I will run two parallel sections of the same course (Western Civilization) in which I offer students in one section all their primary research materials in a multimedia format and in the other all the materials will be offered in print. Both sections will have the same assignments, and at the conclusion of each semester I will assess their results with a particular emphasis on how use of the web influenced student learning.

My project seeks to bring together the scholarship of integration with the scholarship of teaching and learning. The questions I will examine more closely are: 1) can interdisciplinary study, multi-media, and multiple instance approaches, help students learn more deeply? 2) what assumptions underlie the use of these methods? 3) does helping students think beyond one time frame, one-discipline, or one-medium promote their intellectual growth? 4) can creating learning communities (‘real’ or ‘virtual’) assist faculty and students in combining these methods of study?

I am seeking to answer these questions because although each approach has been used successfully by itself, their use together has rarely been a subject of study, and because I believe that integration—both in teaching and research—helps promote understanding of sometimes common material in uncommon ways.

I will carry out this project in two classes I will teach in the Spring 2000 semester: Women in the Biblical Tradition and Methods in the Study of Religion and Theology. Both are upper-level classes, and both are highly integrative and interdisciplinary in nature. In addition to creating new multi-media and multiple instance components for the courses, I will conduct three types of assessments: a base-line and end of semester tool, use of classroom assessment techniques, and a longitudinal study involving students who have taken the courses before and ways in which these approaches may have enhanced their learning.

Teachers in American Studies (and other interdisciplinary fields) often take the value of interdisciplinary courses as a given. Our teaching builds on our critical understanding and appreciation of the connections between history, texts, ideas about culture, and social structures. But students don’t always see the web of interconnections as clearly as their teachers do, and despite their enthusiasm, they don’t always learn to use multiple disciplines well. My project will explore this gap between teachers’ visions of interdisciplinarity and students’ use of such approaches. In addition, because so much of the research on interdisciplinary teaching is just that—research on teaching, I will focus on students’ experiences in interdisciplinary courses—on interdisciplinary learning. Thus, the primary research tool of my project will be ethnography, using a combination of interviews with students and participant observation in courses using interdisciplinary approaches.

For two years I have been developing "Math and Social Justice: A Capstone Course for Undergraduates." Last year I piloted a shortened version and am currently teaching the complete course. A key goal in this critical theory-based class is for students to enhance their quantitative worldview while working on projects which meet each student’s definition of social justice and which benefit local communities. By "quantitative worldview" I mean the ability to produce, analyze, and interpret numerical or graphical data as a part of addressing complex, real-world issues. The primary focus of my proposed research project is to analyze the data on student learning from the course and then to revise the course design. Of particular research interest is the assessment of each student’s growth in her/his quantitative worldview. A starting point for the assessment research is Dubinksy et al’s Action, Process, Object, Schema model of undergraduates’ mathematics understanding.

I have been using computer graphics in my teaching and research in one form or another ever since I arrived at Brown in 1967, and as technology has changed, my student assistants (who do all the programming) and I have collaborated on one project after another, giving students more and more access and involvement in our courses and laboratories.

The Internet represents a discontinuity, a quantum leap that allows for "paperless" courses, with all work submitted on the web, and all work and instructor comments ultimately viewable by everyone in the class. After six courses taught in this fashion over the past three years at Brown and Yale, we are ready to turn to a critical examination of the model and to try to see how to evaluate its effectiveness for different types of students. Evaluations at the end of my most recent course are mysteriously inconsistent, and I am looking forward to the chance to digest them and the other written commentary we have collected.

My principal goal is to develop a course, accessible to all students with a mastery of the mathematical prerequisites for admission to the University of California (three years of college preparatory mathematics), which will enable them to become more active learners of mathematics. Thus, when faced with a novel mathematical situation, for example, a new method, definition, concept, or theorem, students should be able to draw upon a set of well defined means to make sense of it. In addition to requisite knowledge this should include:

1. A mathematical disposition (i.e., the student is always skeptical of claims and demands sound reasoning and strong arguments);

2. Sense-making skills and methods (i.e., the student can work out an example, make an analogy to a previous concept or problem, relax one or more conditions, pose questions, apply heuristics), and;

3. The ability to monitor one’s process of thinking.

Very few, if any courses in the undergraduate mathematical curriculum assist students in developing 1 - 3. Rather the entire undergraduate mathematics curriculum, ranging in courses from calculus and linear algebra to real analysis and abstract algebra, focuses on the acquisition of knowledge. In the lower division this knowledge usually takes the form of skills and algorithms (optimize a function, compute the area of a surface, solve a system of linear equations) necessary to move on to subsequent courses in mathematics or science, while in upper division courses it may be organized towards achieving some ultimate goal, such as the proof of an important theorem (e.g. not every rational polynomial of degree five or greater can be solved with radicals; a real-valued continuous function on a compact set attains a maximum and a minimum. And, almost in its entirety, this knowledge is delivered to student by professors in the form of lectures. Though this method predates the university and has over two thousand years of history there is no learning theory to support its efficacy and much of the literature on undergraduate mathematics suggests that this is successful with only a fraction of our students.

The course I have in mind will be devoted to problem-solving in the context of learning some basic concepts from combinatorics, number theory, logic and abstract algebra. Students will acquire mathematical knowledge by doing mathematics - by working on novel problems. In working on the assigned problems they will get a "feel" for the situation by formulating experiments, working out cases, searching for patterns in data, posing questions, making conjectures, searching for counterexamples, attempting plausible proofs. They will also have the opportunity to propose extensions to problems and to formulate new problems.

It is expected that the challenging nature of the problems will create situations in which the students have an opportunity to discover concepts before they are explained. Additionally, much of the work in class will be done in small groups and through cooperative learning. Through this and other means I will create an environment conducive to intellectual risk-taking.

I am interested in investigating the impact on conceptual understanding that results from creating an environment that supports a "learning by teaching" mode of inquiry. For the past seven years we have made significant changes to our three semester calculus sequence. We use a variety of teaching methods all designed to promote self-discovery of mathematical ideas and cooperation with other students. Despite these changes, we continue to see significant evidence that students are unable to apply the methods used in a practiced problem to a new situation. My project will involve building a learning community of calculus students across the three semester calculus sequence. The primary communication network for the community will be through a web-based threaded discussion. Students will be encouraged to frame thoughtful questions of their own, pose new problems and respond to questions and problems posed by others. I will be asking if student performance on conceptual questions can be correlated with the quality of their participation in the web-based threaded discussion.

Two years ago, in response to the racial and ethnic diversity of students in my college, I created a new course titled Musics of Multicultural America This course traces musics such as blues, jazz, Tejano, Cajun, and rock ‘n’ roll from their roots in the ethnic traditions of a specific immigrant group through their hybridization and development into new, uniquely American musics. Because of the high demand for this course, I am now offering it in both on-line and face2face versions. I am interested in investigating the benefits and detriments from a student perspective of on-line and face2face formats to identify strategies to enhance learning in both delivery models.

Could the ensemble be structured so that students can develop an in-depth understanding of music as they do in their applied lessons? Furthermore, can understanding about music (which is initially learned in music theory, music history, and music pedagogy courses) be brought to bear on understanding music in the ensemble setting? These are the questions that will guide my Pew Scholars project.

My project arises out of the problem of subjectivity in assessing a single performance (i.e. an audition or juried performance) as an indicator of student learning in the performing arts, especially acting. For an undergraduate program, I believe the process of acquiring the technical and intuitive skills of the art form may be a better focus for assessment. I’d like to develop a model for process assessment based on student self-evaluation using such already popular means as journals, self-critiques, videotapes, and portfolios but that addresses the following questions: 1) How does self-evaluation specifically contribute to or affect the development of an actor’s skills? 2). Does it advance or hinder that process and in which ways? 3). How can data about it be reliably collected for assessment?

For my project I want to revise my class called "Children and Government" by focusing on critical thinking, technology skills, and the assessment of longer-term or deep learning. These topics are at the fore in higher education and related to major initiatives on my campus. I hope to encourage critical thinking in students by having them take a stand on a controversial child policy issue and to express their opinions by creating a World Wide Web site that critically examines multiple sides of that issue. I want to learn how to teach students to critically assess the credibility of information found on the World Wide Web. Finally, I hope to assess the longer-term impact of student learning by studying students’ commitment to maintain their web sites after the class ends.

My project focused on the renewal of an upper division course in learning that I have taught for 15 years. Encouraged by the metaphor of "teaching for understanding" I wanted to upgrade the course assessment so students would have an understanding that they could use in a variety of specific contexts and that they would remember years after the course was complete. I changed the assessment by replacing abstract essay questions with contextual problem questions that asked for the use of ideas and not just the description of ideas. Students’ performance suggests that the contextual intellectual skills are in fact harder than reproducing a rehearsed conceptual description. I also used an out of class web exercise to promote attention to pre-class reading assignments, allowing more class time for discussion of higher order aspects of the content. The web exercises were very popular and generated excellent class participation, but they had no impact on examination performance.

This project focused on two enduring learning dilemmas in an undergraduate educational psychology course. One problem is that students bring prior knowledge and beliefs to the course that impedes new learning. The second problem is the difficulty students have transferring what they learn to new situations. The course used a problem-based learning format in which students simultaneously learned disciplinary content as they applied it to complex problems. I have documented ways that students’ understanding advances beyond their intuitive beliefs, and the extent to which they can use the subject matter to analyze and solve new problems. Some aspects of student performance in the PBL class are clearly superior to that of students in a previous non-PBL course.

My research project focuses on the use of examples in teaching. Specifically, I am examining three related questions: 1) What are the properties of a good example, 2) What is the best way to utilize examples in teaching, and 3) What do students learn from examples.

Various disciplines utilize examples in different ways and in different forms. In math and science, examples often take the form of worked-out problems or exercises. In literature, an entire work is often considered an example of a concept such as point of view or imagery. In management and psychology, examples are usually concrete manifestations of an abstract concept.

In general, any example can be broken down into surface and structural components. Surface components do not affect the strategies used to find a solution. This would include the example context or story line, grammar, vocabulary and numbers. The structural components of an example determine the correct choice of strategy for finding a solution. In a math problem, the structural aspects of an example determine the proper formula to use. Most teachers believe that the surface components of an example are inconsequential, but that is far from true in terms of student understanding. Research shows that the surface components strongly influence both student understanding and the likelihood that the student will generalize from the example to other appropriate situations. Most teachers focus only on the structural components of examples, but more attention should be paid to surface characteristics.

I believe this research has potential benefits for helping teachers structure examples and problems in such a way that optimizes student learning and understanding.

The question of what makes people resilient weaves through readings and assignments. In a critical incident group project, a student engaged in service-learning describes a critical incident from a site, two other students try to connect course concepts to the incident, and then all students reflect on their new understanding. Students are learning ways to grapple with complex problems and to foster resiliency in communities.

My project will investigate the challenges students face when viewing the complexities of child and adolescent development through the conceptual lenses of human diversity. It focuses on the prior beliefs students have developed and bring with them to the study of human diversity, and the ways in which these affect their learning. Two questions are of concern: what do they believe/know about diversity, and, perhaps even more importantly, how do they believe/know it to be so? This project seeks to develop more effective ways for students to make explicit both what and how they know what they know. In so doing, it will explore ways to enable students to become more skilled in the self-assessment of their emerging understandings.

For the past three years, I have served as editor for Teaching Sociology, an official journal of the American Sociological Association. I set out a number of goals that I hoped to achieve as editor and I think I have been successful in attaining some of these.

One of these goals was to improve the quality of the papers published in the journal by insisting upon the kind of evidence (data) of success that we require of papers reporting basic research. If teaching is to become respected and accorded value in tenure and promotion decisions, then journals such as Teaching Sociology must publish papers that contain this type of data and analysis of that data.

My project will focus on the evolution of the scholarship of teaching from 1983-1998, using papers published in Teaching Sociology as a database. I will look at what kinds of papers have been published in the journal during this time and comparing the results with an earlier paper (Baker, 1983) that covers papers published in the journal from its inception (1973) to 1983. It is my hope to be able to arrive at a more positive conclusion than Baker who found "that there is little evidence of cumulative scholarship or a convergence of teaching-learning strategies during the first decade of the journal" (1983:361). If my research shows that there has been little improvement from the situation Baker describes, then I hope to get a better understanding from our discussions together what we as a community must do to produce such a scholarship.

I hope to: 1. Redesign the course into a seamless learning experience which connects service-learning to learning the concepts of sociology, 2. Strengthen the service-learning component by more intentionally planning community partnerships and using problem based learning to build on student experience, 3. Develop an analysis and assessment strategy, and 4. Disseminate the course model for others to use and the assessment results to convince skeptics that service-learning is effective in supporting deep learning.

My project comes out of two competing goals for the contemporary social theory course taught at Spelman College. The first goal is to give students a sense of "theory" - and those who are named "theorists" within the discipline. The second goal is to get the Black women I teach to situate themselves in the middle of a process of thinking about/"theorizing" the worlds in which they live. The second goal is reached, I think, when the women and I are clear that "theory" is not something outside of them/ourselves, but is a process that they/we engage in everyday of our lives. Therefore one course is asked to do a lot in a limited amount of time. Added to the wonderful burden of the course is my own uncertainty about the value of the first goal since so few of the students actually pursue doctorates in sociology. However the work of the class has been made easier by the publishing of a few "social theory" interdisciplinary textbooks.

I must also say that my project comes out of a wonderful journey my students and I have traveled together as we have sorted through the goals/desires/hopes for the course over the last 4 years I have taught it. Throughout these 4 years we have moved through varied texts - from Pulaski’s The Death of Social Class to Angela Davis’s The Blues Women with varying degrees of "success." (engagement?). My hope for my project is to investigate what are the most valuable outcomes of a course like contemporary sociological theory when taught at Spelman College (or perhaps anywhere else). I also plan to think through and develop ways of assessing the "outcomes" (and process) of a class experience shaped by DuBois’s "double consciousness" (and Deborah King’s "triple consciousness" ) that cannot be captured through traditional assessment tools currently in use.

I wish to further examine the intellectual journey students take when they study sociology as a major. What are the core concepts, principles, and skills students should incrementally master? What role does the introductory course play? How can we strengthen the connections among courses? How does the capstone course build on students’ experiences? How can we better teach these core concepts so that students retain and use them more? What assessment strategies help document learning?

I will conduct interviews and focus groups with faculty, as well as with students. I will apply to sociology what I learn about progress being made in other disciplines on these issues. I will develop some specific teaching and assessment strategies.