March 19, 2008

GLCA Receives Teagle Grant

More than a dozen faculty members representing Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) colleges and universities (including two professors from Ohio Wesleyan), are exploring that topic. They comprise the initial project team that developed GLCA’s proposal to the Teagle Foundation, to create a Pathways to Learning Collegium. The team’s good work has resulted in a $150,000 grant from the foundation.

“The importance of this project is that it seeks to encourage alternative approaches to teaching and learning that derive from research on how learning occurs,” says Greg Wegner, director of GLCA program development. “In the most basic sense, the project will set about to apply theories of learning to pedagogical practice, and to assess the results in terms of student learning, both in context of a given course, and over a longer period of time, say a semester or two after the course has occurred.”

Representing Ohio Wesleyan in these research efforts are Harry Bahrick, research professor of psychology and Lynda K. Hall, psychology professor. In addition to psychology, such academic disciplines as economics, Spanish, biology, history computer science, and comparative literature also are represented by team members’ involvement.

As Wegner explains, the collegium will develop and implement selected new pedagogies in courses that are being taught in more than one curricular area.

“The project will assess the impact [of these pedagogies] on appropriate components of learning,” he says. That includes factual content, but also the broader analytical, critical thinking, and expression skills.

“I believe the work on the Teagle grant is important because it will help to make memory research relevant to education,” says Bahrick. “The long-term impact of education on students’ lives depends almost entirely upon the lifespan of educational content. Unfortunately, memory research has focused on event memory over very short time intervals. This is of little interest to educators, who must concentrate on long-term retention of knowledge, which has been the focus of the OWU memory research for over 30 years. Our work [with the GLCA project] will explore students’ abilities to predict their own long-term retention, and on how we can improve their judgments so that study habits can reflect more valid estimates of retention.”

The project’s “next steps” involve an early summer meeting of the faculty research team. The group will create a white paper that conveys several principles, which, as Wegner explains, will be developed into different approaches to teaching and learning. Those faculty members who are interested in developing and measuring the impact of new approaches to learning, and who would like more information about the Pathways to Learning Collegium, can contact Wegner at GLCA: wegner@glca.org.

– Pam Besel