John A. Muffo

Pilot testing of a new design for presentation slides to teach science and engineering

Pilot testing in a large geology course shows that a new sentence-headline design of presentation slides was more effective than the traditional phrase-headline design at teaching science to undergraduates. Rather than having a phrase headline supported by a bullet list, the new design relies on a succinct sentence headline supported by visual evidence. In the new design, bullets are not used. The testing of the new slide design involved comparing test scores between a prior section that viewed the traditional design and the test scores of a current section that viewed the new design. On 7 of the 20 questions, the section viewing the new design achieved improvements in test scores that were statistically significant at the 99.9% confidence level. On no question did the prior section viewing the traditional design achieve a higher test score that was statistically significant. The mean test scores on the 20 questions were 71% correct for the earlier group (traditional design) and 82% correct for the latter group (new design). In addition to analyzing the test scores, we conducted surveys that indicate the students preferred the new design over the traditional design by a more than 7-to 1 ratio. These test scores and survey results have implications in the way that presentation slides should be designed not only for science and engineering classrooms, but also for forums of scientific and engineering research

Work in progress - spiral curriculum approach to reformulate engineering curriculum

A theme-based spiral curriculum approach is being adopted to initiate the department-level reform (DLR) of the freshman engineering and the bioprocess engineering curricula at Virginia Tech. A large number of engineering faculty members are collaborating with experts in educational psychology and academic assessment to accomplish the objectives of this 3-year NSF supported project that began in September 2004. Successful implementation of the spiral approach will be used as a model for incorporating similar reforms in other engineering departments and elsewhere

THE STATUS OF STUDENT OUTCOMES ASSESSMENT AT NASULGC MEMBER INSTITUTIONS

A survey was conducted of the member institutions of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC) to determine the status of outcomes asessment on their campuses, as well as the usefulness of the NASULGC “Statement of Principles on Outcomes Assessment.” In general it was found that, while many purported to be involved in undergraduate student outcomes assessment, most had only recently begun efforts in this area and could not point to changes that had occurred as a result. Most found the “Statement of Principles” useful, however. Several observations are offered regarding the responses to the survey.

Using Faculty Publication Rates for Comparing "Peer" Institutions.

This paper reports the results of a study of faculty publication productivity at five major research universities. Data on publication rates were gathered for two years from theCorporate Indexes published by the Institute for Scientific Information, while numbers of faculty by academic discipline were computed using standard reports generated annually by the participating universities. The primary conclusion drawn from the study is that institutional publication rates can be estimated from references in theCorporate Indexes and provide one, albeit imperfect, measure of relative university research productivity.

Changing conditions, changing responses: A case study of minority participation in indiana higher education

The underrepresentation of blacks in higher education in the state must be remedied by increasing the pool of potential colleagues, not by shifting hiring patterns.