Project Aims

Quality learning is most likely to occur when instructors and students are communicating clearly and have shared vision and goals. Often instructors are unaware of the expectations students have regarding the role(s) of the instructor and the course. To begin the dialogue between faculty and students, faculty may find it useful to assess student expectations at the start of a class.

The first aim of the project, therefore, is to pilot and develop an online student survey tool to assess student expectations at the beginning of the semester. To address this aim, faculty will be recruited to distribute a short pilot survey to the students in their classes. A follow-up faculty survey will assess the utility of the survey and suggestions for further development of the initial student expectation survey.

The second aim of the project is to answer three research questions:

• What are students' expectations of their course experiences?
• What are faculty perceptions of students' expectations?
• What are the points of congruence and dissimilarity between their respective expectations?

Tool Development

The 2011-12 Graduate Lilly Fellows developed an online student survey tool to assess student expectations at the start of a course. This tool focused on the following course components:

• Use of Technology
• Learning Activities
• Learning Assessments
• Instructor Communication

This tool has been refined based on the results from the 2012 faculty and student pilot surveys. There are directions available to use this tool in your own classroom both for on-campus and off-campus (not UM affiliated) teaching faculty.

Presentations

The 2011-12 Graduate Lilly Fellows will be presenting this work at the 2012 Lilly-DC Conference on College and University Teaching. In addition, the group has made several presentations to the UMCP community to share preliminary findings from this project.

• Building a Tool for Pre-assessing Student Expectations: Poster Presentation at the UMCP Graduate Research Interaction Day [Awarded Best Presentation in the Education: Pedagogy and Learning poster session]. Click Here for PDF of Poster
• Seed to STEM: Cultivating Understanding of Student and Faculty Classroom Expectations: Oral Presentation at the UMCP CTE Lilly Presentation.
• What do students expect?: Oral Presentation at the UMCP Innovations in Teaching and Learning Conference. Click Here for PDF of Powerpoint Slides

CTE-Lilly Graduate Fellowship

The CTE-Lilly Graduate Fellowship is a venue to develop and sustain a cross-disciplinary learning community of graduate students as future faculty. It productively focuses on undergraduate teaching and learning. The CTE-Lilly Graduate Fellowship program is modeled after the very successful CTE-Lilly Fellowship program for faculty, which has been in place for nearly 20 years.More information about the CTE-Lilly Graduate Fellowship can be found at this page.

The 2011-12 Graduate Lillies' individual profiles can be found at this page.

Publication

Expectations of Computer Science and other stem students ITL 2013-Presentation (pdf)
Expectations of Computer Science and other stem students ITL 2013-Presentation (pptx)
Schmitt et. al. CS vs. STEM Student Expectations -- Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges Vol.28 No.6 June 2013 CCSCNE 2013 -Presentation.pdf
CCSCNE 2013 -Presentation.pptx

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