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TEAGLE FOUNDATION GRANTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
FRESH THINKING COLLEGIA ON STUDENT LEARNING
CONSORTIA OF LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGES
Click here for Collegia from research universities.
February 2008
Associated Colleges of the Midwest
Collegium on Student Learning
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$150,000 over 34 months. The Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) will form a Collegium that seeks to deepen faculty members' understanding of how students learn, and more specifically, of how students acquire the skills and knowledge that are the hallmarks of a liberal education: critical thinking and analysis, integration across disciplines, reflection about the goals of education, and development of expertise through focused research with faculty. Recent research on "metacognition" will serve as a likely focal point for the Collegium.
A fall 2008 conference will bring together ACM faculty doing significant research in cognitive science, psychology, and education about how students learn, advanced scholars in these fields from other colleges and research universities, directors of teaching and learning at ACM campuses, and other interested ACM faculty to discuss new research developments in learning with a particular focus on its application to assignments, pedagogy, and curricula. From this broad discussion will emerge a Collegium of 13 faculty (one from each ACM campus) that will commit to reading and discussing the literature about learning in greater depth, and to developing specific, researchable questions about pedagogy and classroom practice. With support from research experts and teaching and learning center colleagues, Collegium faculty will create classroom projects that allow them to apply the learning research they discussed, and to develop ways to determine the effectiveness of those applications. Collegium faculty will report on their classroom projects in a closing conference, the results of which would provide evidence of strategies and assessment formulas that could be further extended and tested. ACM anticipates that this meeting will also generate another cycle of research questions and projects.
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Associated Colleges of the South
Planning Grant for Collegium on Student Learning
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$10,000 over 6 months. With this planning grant, the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) will convene faculty from ACS campuses and outside researchers with expertise in student learning to explore the recent research on student learning, to better define the objectives of their Collegium initiative, and to determine a comprehensive proposal to meet those objectives and assess them. The experts will play an integral part in shaping this undertaking, advising faculty on what aspects of learning should be considered; what materials should be used; what processes are most likely to elicit faculty interest and commitment; what course and pedagogical changes are most feasible and likely; what support systems are necessary for faculty who want to change their courses to make them more responsive to the way students learn; and how they should assess the incorporation of the research into pedagogical practice.
Additional smaller meetings will be held between a representative group of faculty and chief academic officers of ACS institutions in order to focus on key aspects of the process over which the academic officers have authority and control, and to ensure that ACS staff have had the opportunity to visit with faculty, deans, and experts.
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Great Lakes College Association
Pathways to Learning
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$150,000 over 30 months. The Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) will design, implement, and assess the impact of alternative pedagogies in undergraduate education as derived from some of the most salient research of the past decade on how people learn. The Collegium will consider empirical research findings about learning from the literatures of neuroscience / neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and social / cultural psychology to identify new or different approaches to pedagogy that could be applied to college learning. Based on discussions of this research, teams of three to five faculty will develop proposals to test selected new pedagogies through the use of experimental course modules that will be developed in more than one curricular area (e.g. natural sciences, social sciences, humanities). These proposals will be submitted for approval to a review panel drawn from GLCA's member colleges with expertise in the relevant research methodology and assessment.
Implementation and refinement of the approved experimental course modules will take place over four semesters, from fall 2008 through spring 2010. The impact of new pedagogies on the appropriate components of learning—not just factual content but, to the extent possible, on the broader skills of analysis, critical thinking, and expression—will be assessed. In addition to gauging the impact of these research-based pedagogies within the sequence of a given course, the Collegium will consider the longer-term effect on student learning through assessments undertaken a year or more after students' experience in an alternative pedagogical module. A final conference in summer 2010 will provide an opportunity for the Collegium to analyze results from all experimental course modules.
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Southeastern Pennsylvania Consortium for Higher Education
Creating Active Pathways to Student Learning
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$148,950 over 34 months. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Consortium for Higher Education (SEPCHE) will form a Collegium based on the following premises:
- Ongoing developmental brain research indicates that the regions of the brain associated with cognitive control are latest to mature and that the process of maturation continues well into young adulthood.
- Research on cognition at the college level draws attention to the importance of the development of higher order cognitive abilities as a major factor underlying students' academic success.
- Students' success in college depends on the development of their metacognitive capacities, that is, their ability to set goals, to develop strategies to achieve them, to monitor their own progress, and to make accommodations as needed.
Building on this basis, the Collegium will explore the question of whether shifting instruction in a sample of core courses to a "learning how to learn" approach will help students develop cognitive skills that will enable them to master more disciplinary content in those targeted courses.
The project will launch in a summer 2008 with a workshop that will introduce the initiative to SEPCHE faculty and that will get them to start thinking about how current research in cognitive science can be applied to learning strategies and performance-based learning in the core curriculum. From this workshop, 16 faculty members (two from each SEPCHE institution from across the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences), will be chosen to participate in the Collegium. The Collegium will be led by a team of two conveners (faculty members with demonstrated expertise in the field of cognition and performance-based learning), a research consultant from a research university currently studying the linkages between cognitive science and student learning in postsecondary education, and a faculty development specialist with expertise in student learning. Collegium faculty will engage in a second workshop in summer 2009 to incorporate metacognitive learning strategies into their core courses. Identifying core principles of their discipline, they will modify their courses so that students can acquire content and conceptual frameworks alongside the process skills that encourage cognitive synthesis and integration. Collegium faculty will pilot their modified core courses in the 2009-2010 academic year, and will work with an external evaluator to determine appropriate assessment measures of their students' learning in these courses. They will present the results of their work at a consortium-wide faculty conference at the end of the project period.
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