Previous Teaching Support Grant awards

Schreyer Institute Teaching Support Grants are designed to enhance courses, develop different ways of assessing student learning, assess the quality of degree-granting programs, and implement new teaching strategies by providing faculty, departments and/or campuses with the personnel or financial support needed. Project types vary and collaborations are encouraged.

Innovative teaching methods

Suellen Butler, instructor in Sociology and Education at Penn State Brandywine
This project will support teaching an Urban Sociology course as a travel-based course. The course is designed to study cities through application of a range of perspectives where emphasis is placed on concepts and theories derived from perspectives that offer explanation and understanding of urban change. Support for Professor Butler's preliminary trip to London, as an itinerary setting trip, contributed to the design of a ‘global city’ e-portfolio while permitting specification of the student field experience. It also allowed her to ensure that the student field experience component was adequately defined. Professor Butler plans to determine the effectiveness of the ‘global cities’ e-portfolio for support of learning the political economic perspective in subsequent campus-based sections of the Urban Sociology course. Traditionally this has been the most difficult perspective for students to engage and apply.

Norene Ferris, instructor in music education at Penn State University Park
This grant will help pilot a study to enable faculty supervisors to give student teachers frequent feedback, more guidance, and more authentic assessment and evaluation from a distance by using MacBooks to increase the number of "on site" visits per semester. The project will focus on one school district involving two student teachers, four cooperating teachers and one supervisor. To determine if the pilot group’s progress is different from the "in person only" visits group, the study will develop a data gathering tool to assess weekly reflections from both groups, and interview other supervisors who have been asked to join in conferences via computer. The hypothesis is that student teachers who receive frequent "on site" visits via technology will develop professionally at a faster rate than the control group.

Duarte B. Morais, associate professor of recreation, park and tourism management at Penn State University Park
This grant will investigate how embedding international travel into residentially-taught courses directly influences undergraduate academic achievement and intercultural competency development. Co-investigators are Christine Buzinde, assistant professor of recreation, park and tourism management, and Anthony Ogden, doctoral student in educational theory and policy, both at University Park. The principle goal is to significantly improve instructional quality and the overall student experience in embedded programs. Efforts will focus on developing and evaluating a toolkit for short-term, faculty-led international programming. The toolkit will complement Education Abroad services by offering a portfolio of tested and applicable instructional strategies that leverage the international travel component. The toolkit will be updated and expanded through ongoing faculty development and research. The Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, the University Office of International Programs, and a multi-campus network of faculty teaching embedded courses will collaborate to accomplish this. The toolkit and related materials will be disseminated to the Penn State community and others.

Sandeep Purao, College of Information Sciences and Technology at University Park
Received support to refine and evaluate the wiki-based learning component of his Advanced Enterprise Integration course. Information attained from this evaluation will help to extend the learning component from a smaller class size (25-50) to much larger ones (140 or more). As class sizes become larger, it becomes increasingly difficult to engineer active learning experiences for students. Early experimentation with wiki-based instruction in smaller classes has been a mixed success (anecdotally). Funding for this project allowed for a more refined and exploratory approach to assessing whether the active mode of learning the wiki provides is actually working. This technique has significant potential for addressing the variable levels of student preparation and is one of the key reasons for experimenting with the technique.

Developing learning material

Michael R. Gallis, associate professor of physics at Penn State Schuylkill
This project will evaluate the School of Science, Engineering and Technology's "Animations for Physics and Astronomy" project, which has created over 200 computer animations for use in introductory physics and astronomy courses at the Schuylkill campus. Co-investigators are Michael Cardamone, professor of physics at the Schuylkill campus, Kip Trout, senior instructor in physics at Penn State York, and Dave Richards, graduate student in physics at the Penn State affiliate, the Pennsylvania College of Technology. The animations have been well received at various local, regional and national meetings and the media files account for 15 to 25 GB a month of traffic on the department web server. This grant will focus on measuring improvements in student learning by contrasting the gains provided by the animations to those provided by traditional static diagrams in textbooks. Standard assessment tools will be used where possible. Additionally, surveys of students and animation web site users (instructors and students) will be taken to gage perceptions of the materials.

Christopher Hoadley, Learning and Performance Systems, College of Education and Information Sciences and Technology; Sameer Honwad, Instructional Systems, College of Education; and Kenneth Tamminga, Landscape Architecture and Intercollege Program in Ecology, College of Arts and Architecture
Co-proposed an international, collaborative learning class at the junior/senior course level titled ‘Learning Locally and Globally about Climate Change’ that brings together undergraduate students from Sherbutse College, University of Bhutan and Penn State. The purpose of this class is to help students understand the science of climate change and its social implications (local and global). The primary goal of this collaborative learning class is to help the students learn the basic natural and social science behind the complex issue of global warming. The second part of the class focuses on the implications and the personal relevance of the issue.

Anne Hoag, associate professor of communications at Penn State University Park
The goal of this project is to create a web site of original teaching cases for COMM 493 (Entrepreneurship in the Information Age), offered by the Department of Telecommunications. Five real life entrepreneurs who started media-related businesses have been recruited by Professor Hoag to participate; she will write conventional business-school-style cases for each. Improved student learning in COMM 493 will be measured through higher quality business plans and better quality in-class discussion as compared to pre-web site adoption. Secondary goals are adoption and use of the site by other courses in Penn State's entrepreneurship minor and by other communications programs across the U.S. and Europe. The ultimate measure of success would be an increase in the rate of media start-ups by students who use the site.

Scott Miller, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Eberly College of Science
Just completed the development of forty-five lectures for use in a purely online or blended hybrid version of ASTRO 001, an introductory astronomy course for non-science majors. Funding for his project was used to address the next phase of this project-developing a series of active/collaborative learning activities designed specifically for an online environment. After success from similar activities designed for traditional face-to-face lecture courses, he proposed to tailor the face-to-face versions of these activities to reproduce the interactive experiences achieved by the resident students for his online students. The development of this material is important not only to meet University requirements for actively engaging students in their own learning, but also to meet the needs of the modern student who, in addition to attending school, may have work, family, or other commitments to meet.

Dana Mitra, assistant professor of education at Penn State University Park
This grant will be used to revise current courses in the Education Theory and Policy program and design additional ones for a new undergraduate major, Education and Public Policy. David Gamson, associate professor of education at University Park, is co-investigator. The objectives are to extend a civic engagement dimension into existing courses, to support faculty in expanding this aspect of their teaching, to build civic engagement components into new courses, and to link students' civic engagement with work in educational organizations to bring about greater equity, opportunity, diversity, and social justice. To assess the impact, surveys which measure a range of civic involvements of young people on both personal and social levels will be administered to students at the beginning and end of courses. In addition, student focus groups will be conducted to assess course and major effectiveness and self-reported learning effects. End-of-course surveys, completed along with SRTEs, will also be incorporated.

Courtney Nagle, lecturer in mathematics at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College
The goal of this project is to redesign MATH 21, a required course for nursing students, to refocus the emphasis on math applications from day-to-day nursing practice and provide an integration of content between mathematics and the nursing curriculum. Co-investigators are Margo Kertis, lecturer in nursing, Jo Anne Carrick, senior lecturer and nursing program coordinator, and Danielle Goodwin, assistant professor of mathematics education. All are from Penn State Erie, the Behrend College. The new MATH 21 for Nursing Majors course at Penn State Behrend will be student-centered and involve practical laboratory quizzes using real world equipment from nursing and other health sciences fields. The proposed course redesign will engage faculty from two disciplines to collaborate on the development of the course. It also places content instruction in mathematics in the hands of a content expert. Success will be measured in terms of creating course curriculum materials, as well as student attitudes and achievement.

Student learning assessment

Danielle Goodwin, Jonathan Hall, Paul Ashcraft, and Andy George, all from Penn State Behrend's School of Science
This project will study student attitudes and performance in their new SCALE-UP Physics 211 class. Their research used mixed qualitative and quantitative research methods involving classroom observations, focus group interviews and data analysis on achievement and demographics. Attitudes and achievement are critical areas to study as the method of teaching this course is new at Penn State Behrend (and also at other Penn State campuses). Because physics programs historically have had lower numbers of minority and female students, with higher attrition numbers for underrepresented groups, this study focuses on effects the active learning environment has with these groups.

Robin Yaure, senior instructor in human development and family studies at Penn State Mont Alto
The goal of this project is to develop an intensive, integrated assessment system to enable the Mont Alto campus students in HDFS 229 (Infant and Child Development) to study efficiently, learn course material, and perform well on assessment measures. Jean Barlup, instructional design specialist at the Mont Alto campus is co-investigator. Historically, students have had significant difficulties succeeding on tests in this class. Faculty teaching the course and the instructional design specialist at the campus will collaborate with the new campus retention specialist to identify methods for enhancing student learning and to integrate learning assistance into the regular course curriculum. An iStudy module will be created to help students develop test-taking skills and conduct self-assessments of test preparation. Measures of project success will include student exam performance compared to past exam scores on record, self-assessments, and course evaluations.

Program assessment

Paul deGatagno, director of Academic Affairs at Penn State Brandywine
This grant has the potential to influence assessment at other Penn State campuses by serving as a model for campus-wide program assessment. The focus will be threefold: first, developing an assessment manual to guide faculty in their work; second, identifying and developing assessment techniques which can be embedded into the curricula of four-year programs; and third, identifying and developing instruments to collect, analyze and report program impact on students, alumni and employers. Project success will be measured by the production of deliverables that are easy to implement and sustain.

Donald B. Thompson, professor of food science at Penn State University Park
This grant focuses on improving the food science curriculum by developing and employing assessment tools aligned with educational outcomes. The purpose is fourfold: first, to refine a draft of program goals and learning outcomes based on inputs from faculty and other stakeholders; second, to design ways to employ these outcomes for periodic and regular assessment of the success of the curriculum; third, based on this feedback, to consider curricular changes designed to more fully achieve the stated educational outcomes; and fourth, to design means for periodic and regular evaluation of the merits of this set of educational outcomes, with the intent of revising as seems appropriate. Project success will be measured by the development of an explicit set of educational outcomes, and by evaluating the continued pertinence of the outcomes themselves over time.

Faculty development

Jacqueline M. Ritzko, instructional development specialist at Penn State Hazleton
This grant will be used to support two workshops led by guest facilitator G. Christian Jernstedt, professor of psychological and brain sciences, Dartmouth College on May 12, 2008. The workshops will address how what we know about the brain can inspire us to develop new ways of learning and how research on increasing our capacity for learning and remembering can dramatically improve the design of learning experiences for undergraduates. Information from the sessions will be used to further improve teaching and learning practices at the campus. Faculty from nearby campuses will be invited to attend on a space-availability basis, extending the knowledge base to colleagues and opening future avenues of collaboration. Faculty will continue to explore the impact of brain research on their teaching with local discussions at brown bag and colleague clustering meetings through the fall semester.