High school teachers from Alamance and Orange counties and Elon University professors meet to design research projects that will measure how students absorb classroom lessons.
The new cohort arrives as the inaugural group of scholars from 2008 completes its own projects that range in scope from evaluating the way high school students may use testing scores to the effects of single-sex classrooms on teaching world history.
To read the latest research findings from the 2008-09 participants, click on the link to the right, which directs web visitors to a gallery on the ETLP site.
“I am now much more mindful of the impact of students’ perceptions on their learning and behavior,” said Sophie Adamson, an assistant professor of French who explored how, and if, college students fluent in French use information written in that language when researching topics for other courses. “Understanding our students’ perceptions and motivations is critical to our teaching, to student learning and to the success and sustainability of our language programs.”
By focusing teachers on specific problems of student learning, ETLP offers a new model for addressing, and potentially resolving, important issues in high school and post-secondary education. ETLP is funded by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and coordinated by Elon University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning.
Stephen Bloch-Schulman, an assistant professor of philosophy, took part in the inaugural cohort last summer. He researched the way his students move from “non-evidence-mindedness” to “evidence-mindedness” – in essence, how students begin to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of arguments using evidence and facts.
“ETLP allows us, as faculty who teach first year students, to better understand what skills, habits of behavior and habits of mind that our students arrive on this campus with,” Bloch-Schulman said. “By working with high school teachers, we university faculty got a sense for the questions that motivated learning in high school, giving us a fuller context in which to understand the job that we do.
“ETLP is a nice introduction to how to do classroom research – that is, how to systematically investigate classroom problems, and to reconceptualize problems in the classroom as something to study and learn from, rather than as something to ‘solve’ and ‘overcome.’”
The group of ELTP participants on campus Aug. 3-5 will spend the next year investigating questions that include:
• How do students approach complex disciplinary problems?
• How do students transfer what they learn in one academic context into their other academic work?
• How do students learn from informal and formal feedback?
Participants will share the results of their research at their schools and may also present at regional and national conferences and write articles for both academic and practitioner journals.
Elon University professors for 2009-2010 are:
• Kirsten Doehler, Mathematics
• Harlen Makemson, Communications
• Rebecca Pope-Ruark, English
• Omri Shimron, Music
• Kerstin Sorensen, Political Science
• Safia Swimelar, Political Science
• Anthony Weaver, Leisure and Sport Management
High school teachers include:
• Jeanne Allen, English, Alamance Burlington Middle College
• Amy Efland, Social Studies, Cedar Ridge High School
• Robert Flanagan, Social Studies, Cedar Ridge High School
• Jolene Alley, Business and Marketing, Southern Alamance High School
• Susan Crane, Digital Communication, Southern Alamance High School
• Jacqueline Quick, Environmental Science, Williams High School
• Neil Schledorn, History, Williams High School
