Ruth Maki - US grants

This proposal is one component of our plan to increase the participation of psychology majors in independent scientific research. We have two goals: One is to increase the quality of scientific thinking among our majors so that they will receive more effective liberal educations; the second is to encourage more students to pursue careers in cognitive science. The requested microcomputer cluster will allow us to integrate research methods courses and cognitive core courses on learning, memory and cognition, and perception. In addition, we will have greater flexibility to add timely experiments to the laboratories. Students will be able to manipulate the parameters of those experiments so that they can participate more fully in the entire research process rather than simply doing experiments to confirm principles. Finally, a supervised cluster in the Psychology Department will give the students expert assistance in using the computers, and it will create a place where students can gather, carry out their research projects, and discuss the results. This increased student involvement in research should lead to more students performing independent projects. Thus, we envision an integrated, laboratory based curricular path beginning with basic instruction in research design and analysis and culminating in a piece of independent research.

9450017 Maki Proposed project builds upon an already successful program which provides enriching experiences for junior high girls. The overall objective appears to be retention of girls who have expressed and interest in and demonstrated some ability in SEM careers by providing on-going contact, increased exposure to hands-on activity and professional role models. In addition, the project proposes to expand the pool of individuals who can encourage the interests these girls express in SEM careers on an on-going basis by conducting workshops for significant adults in the lives of these girls (parents, organization leaders, teachers) to SEM careers and engaging them in hands-on science and math projects and demonstrations which show these subjects as fun and easily replicable in other situations. The overall project approach and the evaluation plan have merit and will make specific attempts to encourage the participation of Native American female participants. As participation of members of this target group have been minimal in previous projects, it is recommended the PI's contact the American Indian Science & engineering Society Headquarters (located in Boulder, CO) and get recommendations on the best approach for including Native American girls in this project and a letter of endorsement which can be taken to the reservation during the recruitment effort ***

The lecture-test method of teaching introductory college courses focuses on the teacher rather than the learner, encourages passive rather than active learning, promotes individual more than cooperative learning, and targets short-term retention at the expense of long-term learning. An alternative course format for Introduction to Psychology emphasizes active learning using computer-based laboratories and collaborative groups. The world-wide web is used to deploy course materials, laboratory experiences, information retrieval and evaluation exercises, and practice quizzes "any time, anywhere." Nearly 200 students have been taught during two offerings of this course. Evaluations of student satisfaction and learning showed that students appreciated the flexibility of the on-line format, and that they learned as much as students taught in the traditional lecture-test format. The evaluations also revealed those components of the course that need improvement. The proposed project aims to improve the quality of the collaborative group interactions, to increase the amount of student learning through increased opportunities for active learning enabled by technology, to identify those students for whom an on-line course is most appropriate, to conduct a thorough evaluation of the on-line course format to determine how it can be used to improve both immediate and long-term learning of content, and to disseminate the findings so that the course may serve as a national model for the social and behavioral sciences. Additional laboratory experiences will be created for delivery on the web, and course materials will be enhanced during Year 01. During the next four semesters, course components will be developed and evaluated, always comparing the on-line course to concurrent versions of conventional lecture courses. The project will also develop four Web based courses in the College of Education using the same set of principles and tools to allow elementary education majors to take initial courses in ma thematics teaching and science teaching in this format. It is hypothesized that this will further sensitize future teachers to the importance of teaching approaches and to learning how to assess what is working and not working with their students. Various group activities and different advanced organizers will be evaluated. Learning styles and personality traits will be assessed in order to determine the characteristics of those students who benefit most from the on-line course format.