HHMI Undergraduate Science Program

To facilitate the development of cross-disciplinary courses and to disseminate the pedagogical approaches and assessment paradigms that we create, we will host a summer workshop for UMass and peer institution faculty modeled after the Summer Institutes offered by Handelsman and colleagues in Madison, WI. Six to eight pairs of faculty will be invited to participate in years three and four of the program (summers of 2009, 2010). The products of the UMass Summer Institutes will be new cross-disciplinary undergraduate courses with active learning environments that facilitate learning in a broad population of diverse students.
The UMASS 2010 Summer Institute will convene for one week in early summer. Interdisciplinary faculty teams will be chosen from UMass and peer institutions that form the AGEP Northeast Alliance. Each team will commit to the creation and presentation of a new course and will be asked to:

• Define course learning goals specifying what students should know, understand and be able to do.

• Define teaching challenges such as identifying common misconceptions, difficult concepts and skills, and effectively communicating with students from different majors and backgrounds.

• Engage students in active learning by defining activities that help students understand the connections and applications of the concepts in the course.

• Develop formative and summative assessment tools that measure progress toward learning goals.