2007-2008 Miller Faculty Fellowships
| Deconstructing Stereotypes: Undergraduate Curriculum Development to Engender Empathy and Tolerance Toward Obese Persons | ||
| Mary Lynn Damhorst, Jennifer Paff Ogle | ||
| Apparel, Educational Studies, and Hospitality Management | ||
| Human Sciences | ||
| The project is one phase of a larger effort to develop a multi-faceted education program that promotes two ends: (a) healthful lifestyles and (b) socially responsible attitudes toward obese persons. In this phase filmed interviews in which obese persons talk about their struggles with weight in U.S. society will be developed and tested for effectiveness in reducing negative stereotypes about obese persons. A course unit that encourages critical thinking about obesity will be developed around the films. | ||
| Developing the New Professional: Connecting Student Learning and the Workplace | ||
| Steven K. Mickelson, Jean Anderson, Tom Brumm, Lesya Hassall, Anne Oldham, Cheryll Reitmeier, Denise Vrchota | ||
| Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering; Food Science and Human Nutrition; English; Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching | ||
| Agriculture, Engineering; Human Sciences; Liberal Arts and Sciences | ||
This proposal intends to transform educational programs in the Departments of Food Science and Human Nutrition and Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering to contribute to economic, workforce, and technology development of the State of Iowa. The proposal is particularly focused on changing the organizational culture of the participating constituencies through:
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| Enhancement of ecology field labs via training videos | ||
| Arnold van der Valk, Thomas W. Jurik, Thomas M. Isenhart | ||
| Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology; Natural Resource Ecology and Management | ||
| Liberal Arts and Sciences; Agriculture | ||
| Funds ($34,445) are requested to produce a series of videos that will be used by both teaching assistants and students in the ISU Biology Program’s introductory Ecology course (280 students each year, in 12 lab sections). This is an inquiry-based course in which students have a significant role in designing their lab exercises, most of which are carried out in the field. A basic problem with this approach is that the students must design the exercises before having seen the field sites or having any experience with appropriate sampling techniques and equipment in the field. These videos will be used to familiarize both teaching assistants and students with various field sites near Ames, IA where they will be conducting studies and with the basic methods that they will be using. The effectiveness of these videos will be assessed by making both within- and between-year comparisons of teaching assistant and student performance in labs and evaluations of labs with and without videos. | ||
| Enhancing the Career Development Experiences of Undergraduate Students: Integration of the National Career Development Guidelines Into a Career Exploration Course | ||
| Levon T. Esters | ||
| Agricultural Education and Studies | ||
| Agriculture | ||
| Career development activities are becoming an increasingly important component of the undergraduate learning experience. One of the most common strategies used to provide undergraduate students with the necessary career development experiences needed to make solid career decisions is through the use of a career course. Career courses are an effective means of helping students improve their career decision-making ability, increase the frequency of career exploratory behaviors, decrease career indecision, and increase levels of career maturity. Currently, there are few career courses offered in the College of Agriculture with those being offered having no established set of competencies or standards that are used to develop or evaluate course content. The primary goal of this project will be to re-design an undergraduate-level career exploration course offered in the Department of Agricultural Education and Studies through the integration of the National Career Development Guidelines (NCDG). |
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| Implementation of the BioPac® data acquisition system for teaching veterinary respiratory physiology and clinical anesthesiology | ||
| Dean H. Riedesel, Bill Robertson | ||
| Veterinary Clinical Sciences; Biomedical Sciences | ||
| Veterinary Medicine | ||
| Respiratory physiology involves dynamic processes including pressure changes in the thoracic cavity and lungs causing air to flow into and out of the lungs. These changes in pressure can be recorded in live animals, digitally stored with the BioPac, and replayed in the classroom. The students would have an experience very similar to a live-animal laboratory. Comparison of test scores from students that participate in a BioPac lab session with scores from students that participate in the lecture/lab as presently taught will be used to determine its value in teaching. More complex data sets will also be recorded with the BioPac system from clinical cases during anesthesia for scheduled surgical procedures. This data will be replayed to students studying anesthesia in a format similar to observing an anesthetic monitor. This exercise/experience will hopefully improve the confidence, accuracy of interpretation, and response time in veterinary students during actual anesthetic care of live patients. |
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| Improving Student Problem Formulation Skills Through Scaffolding | ||
| John Jackman, Dale S. Niederhauser, Craig Ogilvie, Sarah M. Ryan | ||
| Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering; Curriculum and Instruction; Physics and Astronomy | ||
| Engineering; Human Sciences; Liberal Arts and Sciences | ||
| The ability to solve complex, ill-structured problems has become increasingly important across a wide range of professional disciplines. This project builds on previous work on problem-solving by a cross-disciplinary team of researchers and educators to improve student learning related to problem formulation, a key element in the problem-solving process. Successful problem formulation involves analysis, evaluation, and synthesis tasks that produce a formulation leading to a viable solution. For this Miller Grant we will modify an existing web-based problem-solving learning environment to scaffold (provide support structures that are gradually faded as student competence increases) problem formulation tasks for a junior-senior level engineering economics course and an introductory physics course. We will assess the impact of this scaffolding on student learning. In addition, we expect to gain new insights into the critical problem formulation stage of the complex, ill-structured problem-solving process. | ||
| Re-Envisioning ISU’s History of Technology Survey to Expand Cross-Disciplinary Intellectual Exploration and Enhance Internationalization | ||
| Amy Bix | ||
| History | ||
| Liberal Arts and Sciences | ||
| This project will develop new approaches and incorporate updated pedagogical methods to improve the two-semester History Department survey courses in the history of technology and engineering, History 284 and 285. This revision should affect up to two hundred undergraduates each year, plus graduate students (and the students they will go on to teach). The orientation will re-position these courses to serve students from various majors, including history, other liberal arts, engineering, business, science, and secondary social-science majors. Today’s historians define “technology” broadly, to encompass not just machines and structures, but also skills and knowledge, everything from planting crops to designing a dress or playing computer games. Our new approach will explore the long global history of innovation and invention, construction and development across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. These courses will become truly international in scope to explore the nature of innovation and its widespread impacts over centuries. | ||
| Sacred Play: What Games Teach Us about Religions | ||
| Nikki Bado-Fralick, Eric Northway | ||
| Philosophy and Religious Studies | ||
| Liberal Arts & Sciences | ||
| We will explore the use of religious games, especially board games, as a pedagogical device in the Religious Studies classroom and will develop and assess a methodology for their use. Most students enter the classroom with limited, presupposed, and rigid notions of what religion is and how it should be understood. One important goal of this project is to evaluate whether the non-traditional nature of these games, as pedagogical tools, help students move away from the formal, bounded categories they apply to the concept of “religion.” By employing an active learning environment that uses the experiential and embodied practice of game play, students learn about the various dimensions of religion, and apply them–to the games, to the religions under consideration in the classroom, and to the living religions they practice or observe around them. Students actively engage in doing religious studies, not just learning about religious studies. | ||
| Secondary Science Teacher Education for Today’s Complex Classrooms | ||
| Joanne K. Olson, Michael P. Clough | ||
| Curriculum and Instruction | ||
| Human Sciences | ||
| In 2000, secondary science teacher education was moved from LAS to the current College of Human Sciences. We now prepare more secondary science teachers at ISU than ever before. While our students take part in laboratory activities in several of their science courses, those experiences do not prepare them for the laboratory responsibilities they must assume as middle and high school science teachers. The pick up what they can during field-based internships, but enter the teaching profession ill-prepared for laboratory instruction. This project seeks funding to purchase science equipment for use in several required and elective science education courses. This equipment is essential for better preparing students for the pedagogical, safety, and liability responsibilities they must assume as professional educators. Success of this project will be assessed by our students’ performance in their field-based experiences when preparing for and conducting laboratory activities with middle and high school students. | ||
| Utilization of the Process Tracing Methodology to Directly Assess Student Competency in ‘Customer Focus’ | ||
| Nir Keren, Steven A. Freeman, Steven K. Mickelson | ||
| Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering | ||
| Engineering; Agriculture | ||
| In an era where consumers dictate the fate of businesses, a customer oriented approach in design, production, etc. is necessary for success. Customer focus has been identified by the college of engineering as one of student competencies tracked as part of the ABET accreditation process. Engineering students as well as their internship supervisors rank this competency very low. The overall goal of this project is to develop a process to assess the 'Customer Focus' competency as a direct measure of student thinking rather than perceptions or observations. This direct measurement will be based on a methodology that monitors and records information processing during decision tasks. The level of emphasis on customers during information processing will be used as a director indicator of 'Customer Focus'. Project activities include developing the assessment tool, evaluating the assessment tool, and developing a curriculum enriched with customer-related content based on the findings of the assessment. | ||
