ThinkSpace Grants

CCLI Grant - Sep 2010

Title:

Progress in our technological society depends on people with strong quantitative, diagnostic and problem-solving skills; yet our current methods for teaching problem-solving are inadequate. Most students are unable to deal with complex real-world problems because the problem-solving tasks

typically encountered in school require use of limited strategies like identifying and applying the correct formulae or strategies from the textbook. Building on our successes in helping students develop more effective problem solving skills, we propose to build a community of faculty engaged in problem solving education, and to disseminate a new online case delivery tool (ThinkSpace) to that community so that complex real-world problems can be incorporated into existing courses. Our model to achieve systemic change is to build core groups of faculty at participating universities who are committed to problem-solving education. ThinkSpace can be used in a broad variety of disciplines and will be maintained by sharing the load in an open source software environment. Making ThinkSpace open source will lead to continuous improvement as its use in the classroom stimulates suggestions for improvements. The team we have assembled for this dissemination task has expertise in faculty development and dissemination of teaching innovations, as well as extensive experience in using online tools to introduce authentic, complex, problems in their courses.

USDA HEC Grant - Sep 2010

Title: Helping Future Agricultural Professionals Learn to Solve Complicated Multi-disciplinary Problems Related to Sustainable Agriculture and Food Safety.

As documented by the National Research Council report, “Transforming Agricultural Education for a Changing World,” (National_Research_Council 2009), it is essential that agricultural education be transformed to meet the challenges inherent in attempting to provide a safe, plentiful, and sustainable food supply for earth’s population. Graduates who are prepared to meet such challenges must be capable of solving complex problems whose solutions draw from a number of content areas. As noted in a recent APLU report, (APLU 2009), “subject expertise” is not longer sufficient. Graduates must understand issues beyond their own disciplines such as globalization and how their products/processes affect environmental sustainability. Furthermore the APLU notes that skills such as critical thinking are twice as important for career success as production agriculture experience. Currently, however, graduates of programs in agriculture-related disciplines struggle to integrate information when attempting to address problems that cut across relevant disciplines or sub-areas of one discipline. Thus far, educational programs have not successfully addressed this problem. It is not enough simply to expose students to a variety of disciplines; the National Research Council recommends that students must work on complex, multidisciplinary tasks that give them a chance to develop these skills (National_Research_Council 2009). This project will provide faculty members with a case delivery tool and relevant multidisciplinary. This extends an innovative method for teaching complex problem solving that has proven effective within the sub-disciplines of veterinary medicine and horticulture. The successful completion of this project will: 1. Improve the multidisciplinary problem-solving ability of students in six specific agriculture programs at four universities, 2. Improve the teaching effectiveness of faculty in those programs, and 3. Lay the groundwork for additional implementation in other multidisciplinary agricultural programs across the United States.