Appropriate projects for the MIL Fellowship will:

• focus on teaching for understanding
• investigate how and under what conditions student learning can be fostered;
• be tried out with students;
• be documented and made public;
• be relevant to and extend the scholarship of teaching and learning in a discipline; and
• have implications beyond an individual classroom.

The following are examples of projects completed in previous years:

* Dana Fladhammer: The goal of Ms. Fladhammer's project is to research and put into practice assessments in a computer applications course that are not only relevant to the business student in general but relevant to each student's career goals. This project is designed to increase knowledge of the application of the authentic assessment process in which the student is asked to construct his/her own response to a task and/or how the task replicates challenges in the real world. Pre-testing and post-testing will be conducted for intrinsic motivation to be combined with rubrics designed to evaluate the individual assessments, which will be created with student input.

* Dr. Nancy Siefer: Nancy, along with Elizabeth Skinner, submitted a proposal for a joint project called View From the Back of the Room. One of the Fellows will serve as a "master learner" in a course outside her discipline and the other as an in-depth interviewer of students, instructor, and master learner. By comparing and integrating information gained through these insider-outsider roles, Fellows will begin to define a common framework within which meaningful dialogue about learning can occur.

* Dr. Roselyn Turner: The goal of Dr. Turner's project is to increase student learning by ensuring "brain compatible" instructional practices in the community college service learning classroom. Moreover, she wants to examine the elements of emotional intelligence theory (a result of brain research) to determine how emotional intelligence can best be taught to, or fostered in, community college students within the service learning classroom. She will engage in primary and secondary research to learn the most current learning theories resulting from brain research, including Emotional Intelligence Theory. Research findings will be analyzed and synthesized with Service Learning practices.

* Ms. Roberta Gray: The goal of Ms. Gray's project is to improve the quality, quantity, and range of critical reading and critical thinking performances and behaviors in Critical and Evaluative Reading students. She will conduct research to determine the articulation between learning theory and instruction theory and the impact of that articulation on critical reading and critical thinking performance. She intends for the research to allow her to modify and refine teaching and learning strategies, to increase student knowledge of critical thinking skills and related behaviors, and to create a more dynamic and interactive learning environment.

* Pushpa Ramakrishna: The main goal of Ms. Ramakrishna's project is to research how visualization of structures and dynamic processes enable students to develop a better understanding of biological concepts and to determine if there are specific combinations of modalities for teaching (e.g., hands-on activities, role playing, web animation, etc.) that are more effective for certain specific biological concepts.

* Diane Clark: The primary goals of Ms. Clark's project are to determine if a separate English 101 class designed specifically for students who have self-declared writing anxiety helps students significantly reduce their writing anxiety and thus increases their ability to learn how to write more effectively; determine which anxiety reduction techniques are effective; and develop new techniques to help students overcome writing fears.