Assessing Student Learning and Evaluating Faculty Capacity Development in the NSF-Funded Regional Workshops Project

University Of Rochester, Rochester NY

Investigators

Abstract

An NSF-funded national dissemination project, "Disseminating Successful Strategies for Fieldwork in Undergraduate Science Curricula" (DUE 0088217), also known as the "Regional Workshops Project" (RWP), began a 5-year effort in 2001 that will eventually conduct 15 regional workshops for 300 undergraduate faculty at the rate of 3 per year. The RWP is engaged in establishing professional learning communities of faculty who 1) create and deliver undergraduate SMET courses that demonstrate that environmental problem solving is an integrative, challenging, effective way to engage undergraduate majors and non-majors, 2) use concepts and field/ laboratory techniques suitable for teaching undergraduates how science is done in a real-world, problem solving context, and 3) use research-based knowledge of how to assess student learning and support their capacity for development as educators on an environmental problem solving-based curriculum for undergraduate SMET courses. This ASA project is simultaneously examining the effects of the NSF-funded Regional Workshops Project (RWP) on improved faculty capacity to foster increased student learning. The approach is to study both the faculty capacity development initiated by the RWP workshops and sustained by interactions and resources (both planned and unplanned) available to faculty following their workshop experience, and the effects of these faculty capacity building processes on student learning. More specifically, this project is studying: 1) the development of RWP participants' capacity to use research on SMET learning and assessment practices in ways that result in changes in the participants approaches and attitudes toward teaching; 2) the extent to which faculty are supported while undertaking significant change in their curriculum and pedagogy (where pedagogy includes assessment activities) in ways that result in improvements in the participants' abilities to develop, sustain, and institutionalize their new environmental problem solving-based courses; and 3) the extent to which students in SMET courses : a) learn SMET concepts in a meaningful way (as defined by Novak, 1999); b) construct a view of SMET disciplines that is consistent with views held by experts in those disciplines; c) construct integrative conceptual frameworks to facilitate their understanding of SMET disciplines; and d) develop positive attitudes and perceptions about SMET disciplines. The project is providing the RWP PIs and regional workshop leaders with formative evaluation of the effectiveness of the regional workshops, and tested instruments and an easy-to-use analysis and report process that workshop leaders can use to undertake formative evaluation of other faculty development workshops with similar goals. These formative evaluations will be designed to help workshop leaders improve the format, content, delivery, and "climate" of the workshop. A tangible outcome will be a tested longitudinal assessment/evaluation process that SMET faculty can adapt to gather credible, dependable, transferable, and confirmable feedback that 1) guides course changes in support of improved student learning and 2) fosters their own professional growth and development.