FEB. 25, 2000

8 present

Jan Thornton, AIRE Project Director opened the discussion by asking where faculty were in their curriculum development, where they were with curriculum assessment (what has worked and what hasn't worked) and asked them to think about what would best help them in future attempts at curriculum development and assessment. Thornton also informed faculty that there is an AIRE website.

Luis Fernandez and Robert Piron from Economics spoke about their curriculum development. They designed a web-based experiment on Expected Utility Theory. This web-based experiment can be used for research purposes and to help teach students more about what underlies choices under risk. Expected Utility Theory is taught in a number of courses including Game Theory and Intermediate Microeconomic Theory. Fernandez and Piron designed a complex experiment that has all the needed pieces. Next, the faculty members will pull out modules of this program to use in class next fall. They did a simplified version in class this year and it went well. In the future, students will be able to run this experiment on themselves and find out how risk aversive or risk loving they are. In the past they were able to demonstrate this on only a single student from a class. Now all the students can be active participants. Fernandez and Piron are currently working on strategies for assessment. As for dissemination, the work is web-based so they anticipate that they will be able to publish it and make it available to others.

Patty deWinstanley from Psychology said that in the past she had been concerned about the level of student misunderstanding about psychology and science so she has developed a first year course that incorporates scientific methodology and research to try to mitigate some of these misconceptions. She is currently teaching this course, called Applied Psychological Science, for the first time. She has developed a set of goals and a number of research activities that the students in the course will do over the semester. The students have already constructed a survey as part of the course. Students will also learn to critically evaluate media presentation of science. As for curricular assessment, deWinstanley has already administered a pretest and will give a post test at the completion of the course to try to ascertain any gains made by the students. She recognizes that there is no perfect control group but plans to administer the same tests to Intro Psych students as a partial control. DeWinstanley shared some of the results of the pretest.

Michael Loose spoke briefly and said that he has also given a pretest to determine what level of knowledge his students enter his class with and to determine to what extent that is improved when they leave.

The group of faculty talked about assessment and what could be done in the future to help with assessment. Some mentioned that some of the broader goals faculty might have, such as enhancing critical thinking skills, are more difficult to assess than particular content knowledge. Some felt that it would be helpful to hire a professional to spend time on the campus and develop a series of models that could work in various classes. Others were less confident that this would work. It was suggested that we look at the resources of places like Ohio State to see if they might have something to offer. It was suggested that it might be useful to have a consultant in to Oberlin during winter term or summer when faculty are developing their courses. It was also suggested that we should look more closely at our on-campus resources and that perhaps we could offer a summer stipend to someone on-campus who could act as a consultant.