Presentation:

A research university is founded on the premise that the best researchers make the best teachers. However, the divide between research advancement and undergraduate instruction are often in conflict, and this struggle impedes access to the diverse resources offered by the institution. This session considered two questions:

• How best to intellectually center the entering college science student?
• How to intellectually empower graduate/postdoctoral students in University instruction?

Both questions are conceptually addressed by unifying the university’s graduate and undergraduate educational missions

The presentation centered on an innovative freshman seminar entitled ORDER (On Recent Discoveries by Emory Researchers), developed by session leader Lynn, with support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The goal in developing ORDER was to create an educational experience that unifies undergraduate and graduate education to the benefit of both. A second interest was to facilitate rapid translation of ongoing research into the undergraduate curriculum.

Background

At Emory, and most research universities, graduate and undergraduate education are separate and disconnected. Several factors underlie their separation:

• Graduate student appointments are limited by the number of undergraduate teaching lines
• First-year graduate students generally TA early science courses
• Graduate and undergraduate student interactions are limited to independent research
• Few undergraduates take graduate-level courses
• There are separate seminars for graduate students and undergraduates
• There can be separate faculty for graduate and undergraduate education.

The separation is also driven by federal funding for research.

Yet, both graduate and undergraduate education would benefit from increased interaction.

• Advanced graduate students need to develop skills in presenting their discoveries coherently beyond their specific discipline
• Undergraduate freshmen must capture intellectual opportunities and resources at the institution quickly
• Unifying the graduate and undergraduate missions would effectively empower both groups by celebrating graduate/postdoctoral student discoveries in a setting where undergraduates can hear about them. .

ORDER

ORDER is a freshman seminar course taught in five modules, each given by a graduate/postdoctoral student in a natural or social science on his or her individual research findings/discoveries. The course is unified through the larger scientific issues that cut across the natural and social sciences, yet diversified by the specific discoveries of resident graduate/postdoctoral scholars across these disciplines. The key features are:

• Five modules centered on research discoveries. Students are walked through a discovery made specifically by Emory graduate/postdoctoral scientists: the underlying question, selection of the system, experiments and controls are placed in context. The undergraduate’s final assignment is to design an experiment to test a scientific question selected by the student.
• Emphasis on interactive lessons and connectivity. This emphasis is particularly important because the course is directed at incoming freshmen with no pre-requisites in science. The graduate and postdoctoral students need to find creative links between concepts in modules, bringing students to the forefront of research discoveries at Emory and in the scientific community.
• Campus-wide competition to present “Origins of Order.” The graduate and postdoctoral students who teach the modules are chosen through a campus-wide competition. In the first round, there were 76 applicants from all natural science departments (biology, chemistry, physics, math/CS, psychology, pharmacology, school of public health, etc.). A committee, composed of faculty and students, selected ten from this group. Emory departments committed an additional $50K to cover the costs of five applicants. Two separate courses were developed over the summer of 2003

Discussion:

The discussion was seeded by the challenges faced in starting the ORDER seminar and in attempting to assess its effectiveness and its limitations, as well by future challenges that will need to be addressed in light of the assessment. The session leaders presented four questions to the group:

• What are the ways to integrate GS/UG missions at your institution?
• Challenges, struggles, rewards/benefits of integration?
• IInstitutional Limitations?
• Growth opportunities for next 5 years?

One concern was whether graduate students’ research supervisors, who are often PIs of their own grants, are amenable to their graduate students taking on the ORDER responsibility, given all their other obligations? PIs in the natural sciences are given a $5,000 ORDER stipend directly to cover the time the student will devote to ORDER, but for the graduate students in the social sciences who may not be working for a PI and whose stipend comes from the Graduate School, the situation is a little different. In their case, since the Graduate School stipend covers only nine months, the graduate students typically use their $5,000 stipend as summer funding. The stipend serves two important purposes. It provides an incentive to both the graduate students and their supervisor, and it offers a cost-effective way to teach this kind of courses.

For the ORDER seminar, the graduate students are at an advanced level and completely in charge of developing their own curriculum, and teaching and evaluating the students. Using Emory’s Chemistry Department as a reference, session leader Lynn noted that the teaching assistantship is a subservient position, responsible for assisting with the professor’s curriculum; this often means leading labs and little serious involvement with teaching or with the entire teaching process. In the ORDER program, the graduate students own their teaching experience. This program is about empowering the graduate students as the expert, not as subservient to the research of others or to the professors.

Furthermore, ORDER seminars have about 16 students, in contrast with introductory chemistry classes that enroll over one hundred students. The idea behind the ORDER freshman seminar is to capture undergraduates early. At the same time, it presents the perfect opportunity for graduate students to share their discovery and be creative in that process.

The graduate students who apply to ORDER come from a wide range of disciplines. In the program’s first year, the call for applications was directed only at graduate students in the natural sciences, but it was then extended to graduate students in the social sciences in response to the proposals submitted by the students taking the course. Overall, the program has received a lot of applications from biologists and the basic sciences in the Medical School. In total, it has never been able to fund more than 10% of the applicants.

The undergraduates who enroll in the seminar are self-selected. All first-year students at Emory are required to take a freshman seminar. While there are other freshman seminars being taught at the same time, there have been few options for students who are interested in either the sciences generally or in a particular science discipline. The ORDER seminar gives them an exposure to a broad diversity of sciences.

In conceiving and designing ORDER, the goals were to answer the following questions: Is there a way to better position the freshman when they come in so that they have role models to go to in order to find out more about the resources at Emory? Is there a way to empower graduate and postdoctoral students to be involved in undergraduate education? Can we find ways to integrate these two things? This seminar does just that.

Evaluation is built into the project. With reference to undergraduates, Director Lynn and his staff are administering pre- and post-seminar surveys to determine how their perceptions of science have changed over the course of the semester. The survey also asks questions about whether they feel their understanding of scientific concepts has improved, as well as their ability to present and understand scientific material. In addition, they are conducting interviews with the undergraduate students a year after they have completed the course to find out if it has influenced their current/future selection of courses, their understanding of scientific concepts in those courses, their future career plans, and their general perceptions of the big picture of science.

Similarly, the graduate students are surveyed, first, when they begin their position, and, then, at the end of their term. Questions cover topics such as their background in teaching and research experience; their expectations from participating in the program; their feelings about collaborating with the other students; their role as a mentor for undergraduate students; and their future career goals and how this might be influenced by their participation in this program.

Recommendations:

For Individual Campuses

• One method of translating ongoing research into the curriculum is to have the graduate students teach courses about their own discoveries. Campuses should encourage and support efforts to make this happen.
• Campuses should re-think their reward systems to give greater consideration to those who value teaching. We need to value graduate students contribution to the institutional educational mission in addition to the research mission. We need to stop apologizing for having graduate student teachers.
• Campuses should train researchers to become educators early in their careers. They need to provide opportunities for them to hone their teaching skills as part of their graduate education.
• Departments and campuses need to unstuff the curriculum. We keep adding facts, but we never take anything out of the curriculum. We need to revamp and figure out the key concepts that we want students to understand. Further, we need to teach students about inquiry-based work rather than overloading then with memorizing facts.
• Teaching should not be optional for graduate students. We need to train our graduate students, using some of the literature from educational studies so that they can figure out what they need to do to become better teachers.

For the Reinvention Center

• The Reinvention Center should create an inventory of initiatives like ORDER in which graduate students serve as conduits to connect the undergraduates with faculty at the university.
• The Reinvention Center should sponsor forums on connecting undergraduate and graduate education to the benefit of both
• It seems like the participants at this conference all value graduate student teaching. The Reinvention Center should take advantage of this unity and bring the message to the higher levels of administration.

References/Resources:

Websites

1. The Summer Undergraduate Research Program at Emory (SURE) allows undergraduate students to conduct supervised research with a faculty mentor. Students receive training in the research methods applicable to their research plan, analyze their data and create written and oral presentations of their results. At the end of the summer, each participant takes part in a formal research symposium. http://www.cse.emory.edu/sciencenet/undergrad/SURE/SURE.html
2. In the “Origins of ORDER” (On Recent Discoveries by Emory Researchers) Freshman Seminar at Emory University, students learn about cutting edge scientific research going on in laboratories at the university. For information about the course visit: http://www.cse.emory.edu/sciencenet/coll_curr/order/index.html
3. For news releases about ORDER visit http://www.news.emory.edu/Releases/lynn1069363205.html and http://www.news.emory.edu/Releases/davidlynn1090849234.html