Professor Duffy said that the Middlesex group is beginning to define its interests with respect to a project for Carnegie. At present, they are planning to focus on environmental influences on motivation and student developmental factors. During the sharing session, UML faculty discussed action plans they are testing in their classes. Several faculty members provided brief summaries of action strategies with assessments. For example, instead of using lecturing with overhead projection of graphics to teach the topic of skeletal muscle contraction, Alease Bruce now uses a simulation involving the entire class.
Students prepare for the activity by reading prior to the session.
Prior to the simulation, a pretest is administered and collected. After the simulation, a post test is administered and the grades of the two compared. Marlowe Miller uses an action research project in the Great Books Modern course. With 40 to 50 students with diverse backgrounds in literature, Marlowe uses a pretest to determine which ideas were and which were not familiar to her students. Marlowe noticed that the pretest had introduced students to key course concepts, and she decided the next time she used it to administer the same questionnaire as a post-test at the end of the semester.