Vol. 19, No. 22 |
March 2, 2000 |
23 faculty receive Instructional Improvement Grants
| Fifteen instructional projects have been funded through the Center for Teaching Effectiveness (CTE) Instructional Improvement Grants, designed to provide seed funding for faculty instructional projects that enhance, extend or change current practice in learning and teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
All of these proposals were peer reviewed by the CTE Faculty Advisory Board. Twenty-three faculty members, including seven faculty teams, received a total of $33,195 in funding for instructional improvement. The 15 grants, ranging from $4,000 to $1,000, have been awarded to the following projects: “Enhancing Inequality Courses,” with Elizabeth Higginbotham, Jeffrey Davidson and Carole Marks, sociology, will create problem-based learning assignments to help students better understand social issues related to poverty, race and gender. “Performance-based Assessment Systems,” with Carol Vukelich, education, will develop performance-based assessment systems in each of UD’s 41 teacher education programs. “Transforming BISC 103/113 for Elementary Teacher Education [ETE] Majors,” with Steve Fifield and Robert Ketcham, biological sciences, will bring the content of science together with collaborative, inquiry-oriented pedagogies to provide ETE majors with experiences learning science the way that they are trained to teach science. “Computer Imaging in Biology” will enable Roger Wagner, biological sciences, to attend a training seminar to learn computer image processing so that he can integrate the process into his courses and mentor faculty on its use. “Integrating E-commerce into the BUEC Curriculum,” with Mark Serva and Clinton White, accounting and Management Information Sciences, will hire a student assistant to work with new software that will integrate the use of e-commerce into the business school curriculum. “Online Physics Demonstration Index,” with Edmund Nowak, physics and astronomy, will develop an on-line index of lectures, demonstrations, interactive simulations and other instructional resources that faculty and teaching assistants will be able to use to plan their classroom demonstrations. “Food Science Capstone,” with Catherine Davies and Martin Lo, animal and food sciences, is for design of a team-taught course that enables students to develop a new food product by working in real-world product development teams. “Biomechanics,” with James Richards, Susan Hall and Patrick Castagno, health and exercise sciences, will develop a series of online lessons incorporating 3-D representations of the human body in order to help students visualize biomechanics principles. “Agricultural Education Materials and Approaches,” with Patricia Barber and Richard Bacon, food and resource economics, will design distance learning opportunities aimed at increasing students’ skill levels at working in multimedia classroom environments and at participating in virtual classrooms. “Foundations of Libraries in Society,” with Allison Kaplan, education, will enable a graduate student assistant to help design library courses that can be offered via distance learning. “Critical Reading and Writing– Web Module–Parallel E110,” with Barbara Christensen, Office of the Dean of Arts and Science, will support design of a six-unit web module used with freshmen that will take into account multiple skill levels. “Art Foundations,” with Rene Marquez and Vera Kaminski, art, will continue development of a comprehensive web site for students and instructors that will provide access to images and text that summarize and supplement classroom activities. “Physical Properties of Solids,” with Ismat Shah, materials science and engineering, will prepare the course MASC 807 for electronic format. “Data Analysis for Political Science,” with Theodore Davis, political science and international relations, will design a new research methods course required for undergraduate majors. For information, contact CTE at 831-2027 or see the CTE web site at <http://www.udel. edu/cte/> |