Breakout Session Descriptions

In Introductory and Foundation Courses: Bringing research to the Classroom

The Boyer Commission Report, which forms much of the backdrop for this conference, enumerated ten ways to change undergraduate education at research universities, the first two of which, “Make Research-Based Learning the Standard” and “Construct an Inquiry-Based Freshman Year,” are particularly relevant to this session. Our charge is to determine to what extent research can be introduced into introductory and foundation courses and to make specific recommendations for doing this. At Rutgers, in the Chemistry Department, we have created a new introductory course designed to bring first-year students into faculty laboratories as active participants in research, and to bring them to local industries where both fundamental and translational research is being performed. The session will begin with a brief presentation of this project, followed by a general discussion in which we may address questions such as those that follow.
• How can the thrill of discovery, and of the creation of new knowledge be introduced to beginning students, the great majority of whom have not chosen majors? Are there guiding principles or methodologies that transcend disciplines? Would interdisciplinary programs be helpful?
• For beginning students, could/should research be introduced in the laboratories? In large classes/lectures? Small classes? In the library? On-line? How?
• In foundation courses, can appropriate programs be designed for all or should research be restricted to a subset of students?
• Are cultural changes required? If so, what are they and how can they be effected?
• What should be the role of central administrators, deans, department chairs and faculty?
• How much would effective programs cost? Who would pay?
• What is involved in scaling up pilot programs? Can this be done? How?
• How can the effectiveness of such programs be assessed so that ineffective ones can be improved or replaced with ones that are more effective?

Within Learning Communities

Institutions of higher learning routinely reflect their values into their learning opportunities. With the growth of learning communities, research institutions have the unique opportunity - and challenge - to integrate the delivery of research into their programs. In addition to the issues of assessment and faculty participation universal to all undergraduate research programs, participants in this breakout session will explore the unique opportunities and challenges in delivering undergraduate research programs in learning, and living-learning, communities. Brief overviews of student research programs in the College Park Scholars (2-year) and Gemstone (4-year) living-learning communities at the University of Maryland will precede the group's discussion.

Research Service Learning

The strongest educational advantage offered by a research university is to link undergraduate education to the culture of research. This linkage requires the formulation of an undergraduate intellectual agenda, in terms of student learning outcomes, to provide a basis for assessment of the “value added” of curricular and pedagogical initiatives. In addition, appropriate infrastructures need to be developed to foster this linkage. This session presents an infrastructure we have termed Research Service Learning that is a blend of two pedagogies of engagement: Field-based research and service learning. In Research Service Learning courses the service provided to a community partner is field-based research on an issue or problem of importance to the community partner. Students produce a research product for their community partner and through reflection and analysis integrate their community service project with the objectives and content of an academic course. A specific Duke programmatic initiative, “Scholarship with a Civic Mission”, funded by the U.S. Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE), is presented as an example of a research service learning program with integrated curricular and experiential components. The model has a three stage structure: Gateway courses that provide an introduction to service learning, ethical inquiry, and field based research; community-based research; and a capstone course. The assessment protocol for determining “value added” in relation to specific student learning outcomes for each stage is presented.

Research as an integrative experience

This session will consider various models for engaging undergraduates meaningfully in the intellectual work of faculty and graduate students. The approaches that will be discussed include "research-designated" courses, “vertically integrated” projects and research centers, and interdisciplinary certificate programs and capstone experiences.

Technology and Pedagogy: Faculty Development’s Piece of the Undergraduate Research Puzzle

Inquiry. Creation. Discovery. Understanding. Advancement. These words characterize the world of research and the key ingredients in deep learning. A vibrant undergraduate research and creative accomplishment program would allow students to experience for themselves the importance of inquiry, the intellectual demands of creation, the excitement of discovery, the awe of understanding, and the tremendous sense of accomplishment in the advancement of knowledge. This session will begin with an overview of examples in which faculty have infused research and creative expression into the curriculum, cutting across the entire academic career and all fields of study, including general education. Special attention will be given to the array of pedagogical approaches, appropriate use of technology, information literacy, and methods to assess student learning gains with regard to research understanding. Additionally, the session will describe a novel program (InSPIRE Academy) used to support faculty as they alter their classroom approach to engage students in inquiry, discovery and creative expression. Finally, participants in this session will have an opportunity to explore for themselves how to create an activity or assignment to embed research approaches, i.e., opportunities for inquiry, creativity, and persuasive argument, into one of their own courses.

Performing and Fine Arts

The breakout session on the Performing and Fine Arts will focus on the dual role of arts education in the research university: the creative act and the examination, analysis, and study of the creative act. Areas of discussion will focus on: the balance between creation and scholarly pursuits, the acquisition of skill in the practice of the arts as pursued by the arts major and by the non-major, forums for presentation in the arts as an integral part of the creative experience.

Bringing Research to the Classroom Within Engineering and Computer Science

Active and experiential learning are two modern-day teaching activities that are both well-documented as successful, and transparently relevant to Engineering and Computer Science. "Learning by doing" is a natural learning technique for those who make things (be they automobile engines, cell phones, new polymers, or computer hardware/software). Perhaps the most effective way to incorporate discovery-based learning is through truly novel discovery, i.e., research. This session will address numerous issues that arise as a result of efforts to integrate research into Engineering/Computer Science Education. Examples include:
• Interdisciplinary research: Whether to cross or not to cross disciplinary boundaries in core classes
• Infrastructure: Are animation/simulation enough? Where should the resources come from for experiments or simulations?
• Dissemination: Is it possible to make a "one size fits all" plan or do resources, credit
counts, faculty size, etc. necessitate many paradigms?
• Implementation: How early is too early? should research only be confined to capstone course or can we trust our Sophomores not to "blow things up?”

Humanities and Discursive Social Sciences: A Template Approach to Undergraduate Research

All experienced academics are masters of certain standard conventions that govern academic research. What they have mastered, in other words, are the various forms for framing a problem, considering competing solutions, and then developing their own independent claims. This session will demonstrate how these conventional forms can be represented in basic templates that can be given to undergraduates to help them become insiders (rather than mere spectators) to the powerful world of research. The discussion will focus on the "They Say/I Say" template that forms the basis of the Graffs' forthcoming textbook, They Say/I Say: The Basic Moves of Argumentative Writing.

Life Sciences and Related Areas within Psychology

In engaging students in the life sciences, we want to create opportunities for them to explore (to take the cruise--to see new sights that we describe in lecture), to investigate (to understand the process of knowledge acquisition by re-creating experimental data), and to join the research process, generating new knowledge through their own experimental work. Traditionally, undergraduates have entered research through an individual apprenticeship with a postdoc or graduate student. To generate broader access to research earlier in the curriculum, faculty have experimented with a wide range of formats. Trade-offs concerning the availability of wet lab facilities, faculty time, material costs, and the number of students served must be considered. This session will explore the spectrum of research-related undergraduate curriculum in the life sciences. Several examples will be presented to start discussion, including an upper-level undergraduate lab course formed around a collaborative effort in comparative genomics (high budget, high faculty time, small number of students), and an investigatory computer-based lab designed around bioinformatics tools (low maintenance, works for a large introductory course). We will then open up the session for discussion, and welcome other examples of courses that “engage undergraduates in the act of discovery.” In designing such opportunities for students, the following questions arise:

• What formats work well for integrating research into a large class versus a small class? How do we get the most bang for the buck? What strategies work well for freshmen, as opposed to juniors/seniors?
• What strategies can/should we use to deal with the unknown component of research when teaching a course? Should this strategy change depending on course size? What is lost/gained by having a back-up plan?
• At what point on the spectrum are the benefits of research curriculum lost due to too much guidance? How much guidance is too much? For example, how detailed should we make lab guide sheets in order to keep students engaged and thinking, but not invoke chaos? Is chaos OK if there are enough coaches (TAs and faculty) available?
• How do we assess students in these courses?
• How much group work is beneficial?

Recommended reading:
Handelsman, J., et al., “Scientific Teaching” Science (2004), Vol. 304, pp. 521 – 522.
pdf available at:
http://www.plantpath.wisc.edu/fac/joh/joh.htm

Bringing New Learning Modalities to all Disciplines

While content clearly varies from discipline to discipline within the undergraduate experience, the style of curriculum delivery and teaching remains fairly universal. Particularly at the lower undergraduate level, whether the discipline is physics, English literature or 11th century Russian basket weaving, the lecture format in which an instructor presents information to many students dominates. The pervasiveness of the lecture format may be attributed to its convenience and to the low unit cost instruction it affords, but it is also a reflection of faculty culture and institutional priorities. Unfortunately, the efficiency and memorization commonly associated with the lecture run counter to the goal of undergraduate education which should be to promote genuine learning and exploration.

This session will focus on a set of technology tools designed to foster both a collaborative learning environment as well as an environment which immerses the students in exploration and discovery. These new learning modalities have been accelerated by the widespread penetration of wireless internet in the college classroom (particularly at the University of Oregon, where I teach). Instructors now have the capability to use wireless appliance to engage their students in a range of activities. The purpose of the session is to investigate how such wireless appliances can become integral to the way a class session is conducted (in any discipline) and how they may produce a real partnership between student and professor in the exploration of that discipline. Rather than asking our students to step back into the next century in order to attend class, we should instead leverage these new tools and technologies to create a superior learning environment.

Mapping Learning Principles to Knowledge Structures in the Natural and Behavioral Sciences

In this breakout session we will discuss implications of some of the differences in the manner in which different disciplines compile and organize their knowledge and the effect this has on the resultant educational goals of different disciplines. One example of this would be contrasting the pedagogical implications of disciplines that build an integrated and slowly evolving knowledge base with those that generate more evolving sets of findings with a higher rate of revision. In particular, we will focus on the way in which psychology organizes its knowledge base or findings with how that is done in some of the natural sciences and explore the implications the different educational goals and knowledge organizations might have for educational practice and undergraduate research within the respective disciplines. We will also contrast these issues with related issues that arise in engineering. Much of the discussion will be driven by the disciplines and interests of the participants in the session.

Bringing Instructional Innovations that Work in One Discipline to Other Disciplines

On your campus, do undergraduates in the social sciences and humanities have ample opportunities to engage repeatedly in original research and scholarship? Are there mechanisms in place for faculty to discuss successful approaches in their courses that resulted in students using the methods of the discipline to pose questions, apply those methods in investigation and formally communicate their findings to their peers and others? We will begin this session by discussing the Graduate Research Consultant (GRC) program at UNC-Chapel Hill (http://www.unc.edu/depts/our/GRCprogram.html) which enables faculty in the social sciences or humanities to convert conventional course projects or assignments into research projects by bringing advanced graduate students into the course for part of the semester to direct the projects. Collaboration at several levels in the design and implementation of the program (between the Office of Undergraduate Research and the Center for Teaching and Learning, between social science and humanities faculty and the GRC program directors, between graduate students and faculty), lunchtime discussions involving the participants, and a qualitative formative evaluation have contributed to a flexible and effective program that has generated much enthusiasm on our campus. A particularly interesting feature has been the willingness of faculty to recruit GRCs from other disciplines to participate. The benefits to faculty, graduates and undergraduates will be highlighted. The bulk of the session will be devoted to a discussion of innovative programs submitted in advance by session participants including program initiation and evaluation, program results, and program dissemination. The overall goal of the session will be to encourage cross-campus adaptation of successful strategies.

Engaging and Retaining Targeted Populations

Over the last two decades, and dramatically over the last decade, Stony Brook University has developed very successful programs for engaging women and underrepresented minority students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and careers. Much of that progress has come as the result of the building of sub-communities of the larger University community that help targeted populations to address special needs and interests while at the same time connect to the vast human and material resources of a research university. This notion of a community that empowers, rather than a community that isolates and marginalizes, will be used to demonstrate interconnections among such areas as the science of learning, culture and ethnicity, and institutional contexts. After a very brief presentation on current work at Stony Brook University, participants will be encouraged to reflect on their own institutional contexts with a view towards developing plans for achieving greater inclusivity and advancing excellence in STEM disciplines and careers.

Performing and Fine Arts

This session will focus on how to combine humanistic scholarship with the arts in the classroom and then how to use outside resources in conjunction with classroom work. Among these resources are the art museum, concert hall, architectural sites, public sculptures, and other venues. The session will turn to specific examples, exploring historical, cultural, and aesthetic relationships connecting literature and the arts produced in a particular period, and it will consider strategies for helping students gain the interdisciplinary perspective necessary for understanding the relationships. The goals are to deepen their knowledge of their own field by placing it within a larger context and to engage the combination in genuine scholarly or creative activity. The session will be in two parts. One part will use writings of Lazarillo de Tormes and Velazquez's “The Waterseller” as a starting point to exemplify the relationships and to illustrate the range of questions students might probe. For example: Why do we compare literature and the arts? Is it smart or is it necessary? Both of these works have poor characters. What are the similarities and what are the differences in the way they are depicted as a result of their medium? Why is it important to compare poor characters? How important are poor characters in the art of the Renaissance? When do humble characters appear in literature and the arts? Why do we compare? What do we compare? How do we compare? The second part will focus on music and will draw upon two courses--“Debussy and his Era” and “Beethoven and his Era,” that contextualize and open up the experience of art for the students. The courses have been taught in conjunction with a festival and required attendance at a variety of smaller concerts, sustained over a fourteen week period. Students have also studied the art and visual imagery of the era in which each composer worked and they have been prodded to attend the university art museum. In each case, readings were introduced from pertinent poetry and philosophy. All performances and outside events have been contextualized in the classroom, sometimes with detailed analysis. The idea underlying both presentations is to connect the cultural life of the arts with the classroom study. The visceral experience of music and art also enlivens the classroom.

Engineering and Computer Science: Do New Fundamentals Require New Pedagogies?

With the arrival of the information age and the knowledge explosion in science and technology, education that focuses on transmission of today’s facts and mastery of current skills is increasingly shortsighted. Leaders in the STEM fields and informed citizens will need to be cognitively flexible life-long learners in order to create and keep pace with the advances ahead. The primary function of our schools and universities must be to promote transfer. They must prepare student to apply knowledge and skills in new ways and new contexts. Many of the fundamental structures and teaching methods of university educational systems derive from the Enlightenment Era, when, an “educated man” was marked by his breadth of knowledge and his reasoned thought processes. Although universities have changed since then with respect to student populations, topical coverage and emphasis, pedagogical approaches, and the use of instructional technology, their underlying structure has remained fundamentally unchanged. Models of education based on simple knowledge acquisition without concern for how that knowledge will be applied in a variety of societal and personal contexts, however, no longer work. We must reconsider ‘what is fundamental’ in a university education and what educational structures will best facilitate students’ success while supporting the needs and goals of our society. When ‘fundamentals’ are reconsidered, serious evaluation and redesign of the university is implied. This session will work to create a dialog about what is fundamental for the educated engineer and computer scientist given the rapid changes created by research and development in the fields. The expectation is that emerging fundamentals will potentially require much different pedagogies.

Experimental and Data-Intensive Social Sciences, Related Areas within Psychology and Management

Bransford, Brown, and Cocking's landmark book How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School begins "Today, the world is in the midst of an extraordinary outpouring of scientific work on the mind and brain, on the processes of thinking and learning, on the neural processes that occur during thought and learning, and on the development of competence." How can university instruction become more learning-centered? Small changes in the way we carry out teaching-learning interactions can pay large dividends in student learning. We are present at the creation of a new "science of learning," with many ways in which we can better help our students create durable learning and integrated skills.

Humanities and Discursive Social Sciences

This section has a dual focus. First we will describe the role of administration in creating structures and resources that promote and facilitate undergraduate research, and how these structures and resources can be particularly helpful in the humanities and lettered social sciences which lack a tradition and models for undergraduate scholarly activity apart from honors theses. The second focus involves curricular and co-curricular activities in the humanities and discursive social sciences designed to excite students about research and prepare them to participate in research in a meaningful ways. Some of the questions we plan to address are:
• What does "student involvement in research" look like in the humanities?
• How can faculty help students develop critical analytic and interpretive skills and the mode of thinking of a scholar?
• What can university administrators do to make participation in research an integral part of college learning for students in the humanities?

Life Sciences and Related Areas of Psychology

Language for discussing assessment with scientists is critical in all educational research and projects. Together we will focus on current strategies we use in undergraduate education to design and implement active, inquiry-based instruction in life science courses and the methods for assessing and analyzing student data to determine the effectiveness of these approaches. Our research designs and strategies are derived from the methods of discipline-based research in science, engineering, and computer science. We use these approaches for diagnosing student misconceptions, developing problems to assess student understanding about key concepts in biology, and collecting, analyzing and reporting data that will influence future instruction. We argue that this approach is applicable across disciplines and is scalable for class size and academic level. We will explore, design and analyze assessment strategies and how the data can inform instruction in any course or curriculum.

Interdisciplinary Programs: Integrating Different Orientations and Perspectives

This session will discuss techniques and strategies to integrate interdisciplinary research in the arts, humanities, science and engineering in undergraduate learning. Seminar courses structured as inquiry-centered, project-based, design studios for creative problem solving provide opportunities and challenges for faculty and students to explore topics and methodologies that encourage both teamwork collaborations and independent thinking. Using a personal portfolio and a journal of daily reflections helps faculty and students track progress on individual developments as well as enrich the research experiences for undergraduates.

Developing the Resources and Funds to Support a Research-Based Undergraduate Education

Developing resources to implement large-scale research-based courses requires a campus infrastructure of support that challenges large universities already struggling with shrinking funds and competing priorities. Sources of new funding include donor support and external grants. Another option is to leverage campus resources by harnessing organizational expertise from across administrative silos. Scaling and sustaining such efforts requires the inclusion of academic partners in libraries, instructional technology, teaching centers (particularly those focused on TA training), student learning centers, and campus experts in assessment of student learning. In this break-out session you will learn about a model developed at the University of California, Berkeley, funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. At the core of Berkeley’s model is the development of a long-term, sustainable campus collaboration between the Council of Academic Partners (CAP) and the Mellon Library/Faculty Fellows for Undergraduate Research. The result is a campus infrastructure of support for large impact courses that extends beyond the classroom instructor and even beyond the department faculty and chair.

Our overall project goal is to focus Berkeley’s research strength in the service of undergraduate learning. The project employs two strategies:

• Support of a campus collaboration named CAP that acts as a catalyst for change and depends upon experts working together to provide an infrastructure of support for faculty and other instructors
• Encouraging and nurturing a community of faculty change agents, dedicated to reinventing courses by strengthening the connections between undergraduate research, information literacy, and library collections, particularly in large enrollment and other large impact courses

Participants in this session will learn about Berkeley’s collaboration at the senior administrative level as well as amongst staff throughout the partner organizational structures. They will have opportunities to consider various facets of the model, to share their own experiences with campus efforts to combine resources in support of undergraduate education, discuss possibilities in grant funding, and explore strategies for developing case statements for external donors that have broad appeal.

Graduate Students as Teachers and Mentors of Undergraduate Research

In many fields of study, success in research requires not only sophisticated experimental and analytical skills, but good mentoring and managerial skills as well. The Division of Engineering at Brown University established the "Facilitating Effective Undergraduate Research by Graduate Students and Post-docs" (FER) program to provide graduate students and post-docs, who are often responsible for the day-to-day supervision of undergraduates, with a forum to discuss issues and factors inherent in the effective management of research activities and the mentoring of undergraduates. Developed in collaboration with Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, the program consisted of five sessions, offered on consecutive days early in the summer, covering the following topics: Various extreme management styles; faculty perspectives on management/mentoring styles; managing research projects in the industrial sector; project planning and optimization; and a variety of scenarios involving hypothetical graduate student-undergraduate interactions. Although the FER program was developed for use in an experimental sciences department, the program can be modified to fulfill the needs of graduate students and undergraduates in many disciplines.

In this breakout session participants will utilize small and large group discussions to:
• Establish specific goals for graduate mentoring programs in their departments /institutions.
• Consider the best (departmentally- and institutionally-appropriate) ways of implementing this type of program.
• Understand specific obstacles, and opportunities for program implementation.
• Develop realistic and meaning assessment measures for their programs.

Promoting Connections Between 2 and 4 Year Institutions

Lessons in Promotion the Transfer Connection: Community Colleges and the University of California

This session focuses on the educational, organizational, and psychological factors affecting the transfer of students from two-year colleges to four-year universities with particular attention given to the transfer process from a community college system to a Research I university. There is an array of “challenges” facing both the community college relationship with four-year universities and the individual community college student planning to transfer to a four-year university. Some of the core issues that require discussion are: general academic preparation, the transferability of specific courses that satisfy a university’s lower division requirements, proper and timely academic counseling, transfer strategies of both the community college and the university that encourage and enhance the transfer experience, explicit “partnership agreements”, insure retention and graduation at the four-year university, and the “culture” of community college students. The session will address (1) these and other current issues regarding the transfer connection between the two-year college and the four-year university; (2) examine the approach taken by the eight campus University of California system and the one-hundred-plus California Community College system to encourage and enhance the transfer process and experience; and (3) identify and discuss general lessons from the California transfer connection experience.

Research and Creative Activity: Critical Components of a Sound Liberal Arts Education

In this session we will focus on the opportunities and challenges presented for faculty and students undertaking liberal arts undergraduate research in the context of a Research I institution with a strong focus on science and engineering. Defining undergraduate research as a presidential initiative provides considerable incentives for all faculty and students to participate. However, integrating undergraduate students into research in the humanities, where faculty more typically pursue their scholarship in solitude, or in the social sciences, where the scope and time frame of projects typically exceed one semester, challenges liberal arts faculty in different ways from their colleagues in the sciences and engineering, where undergraduate research may more easily mesh with the framework of a laboratory with numerous projects, graduate students, and post-docs. We will explore particular strategies useful for defining topics and parameters for interdisciplinary research in economics, international affairs, history, sociology, literature, communication, culture, languages, and public policy most likely to lead to satisfactory research experiences for undergraduates.

Strategies for Effecting Rapid Translation of Ongoing Research in the Curriculum

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. Our breakout session will consider two questions:
• How best to center 1st year college science student?
• How to empower graduate/postdoctoral students in University instruction?

Both questions are conceptually interwoven through their attempt to unify the university education mission. We will initiate discussion through presentation of an experimental course entitled ORDER (On Recent Discoveries by Emory Researchers). ORDER is a freshman seminar course taught in five modules, each by a graduate/postdoctoral student about their individual research findings/discoveries. This 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 breakout discussion will be seeded by the challenges faced in starting the course, our attempts to assess successes and limitations, and by challenges for the future in light of our assessment.

Teaching and Learning in an Age of Technology: The Development of a Genetics Cognitive Tutor Genetics Cognitive Tutor

This session will focus on the Genetics Cognitive Tutor, a computer-based teaching tool designed to promote problem-based teaching and learning of genetics. It is based on earlier cognitive tutors used for teaching mathematics, statistics and computer programming and may well be adapted to other disciplines as well. The approach is to identify challenging problems and for each problem do a task analysis and develop a cognitive model. Software is then written to support the students' learning. Errors are flagged and just-in-time help is provided in the form of hints that allow students to succeed in solving complex, authentic problems. The interfaces are designed to "make thinking visible".

The goals in creating the Genetics Cognitive Tutor were to speed the learning of genetics and to improve the command of genetics achieved by the students. Another goal was to find a modality that is neutral in teaching students of diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic status; the math cognitive tutors for middle and high school students have this property. The Cognitive Tutor promises to enhance student interest and involvement in the subject—and thereby ensure improved learning-- because it enables student to learn via a modality that is to most as natural as breathing, namely through computers. Eleven modules have been developed in the Genetics Cognitive Tutor to date. Several modules have been tested in class situations at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, and California State University at Los Angeles The session will report on the implementation and outcomes and consider ways Cognitive Tutors may be expanded to other disciplines

The Changing Roles of the Humanities and Social Sciences

Faculty in the humanities and in many sectors of the social sciences have adopted a generally critical attitude towards the emergence and proliferation of the research university, considering the orientation towards external funding to be part of a 'corporatization' of the university which potentially compromises core liberal arts values. However, most units in these fields also would love to have part of the resources generated by these developments, making for a complex and
often contradictory weave of attitudes and actions. Bringing undergraduate research into this picture has the possibility of creating common ground among the humanities, social sciences and sciences in ways of interest to us all.