ED 882
Casey White, Ph.D.
Hilary Haftel, M.D.

Students in this course will explore professional education in the U.S., including medicine, dentistry, law, business, nursing and pharmacy. Topics to be covered include history (of professional education), curriculum, internship and practice, legal issues, accreditation and governance, and policy and funding. Students will participate in a constructivist approach to learning the material; i.e., the approaches will be active and will include peer sharing and teaching, and peer feedback. Underlying theories and practices related to education in specific disciplines will be presented by experts in each of the fields, and students will learn through interactive presentations accompanied by in-class activities and an out-of-class project chosen by each student. The goal of the course is to introduce students to the disciplines that comprise professional education, and to the educational methods and the current management, legal and policy issues within each of the disciplines.

Larry Gruppen, Ph.D.
Brent Stansfield, Ph.D.

Much of education in post-secondary and professions education is fundamentally focused on developing expertise in a specific domain of knowledge and skills. Although a variety of educational methods and curricular designs may be appropriate for this goal, it is critically important that educators understand the nature and development of expertise as a cognitive and social phenomenon. In this course, students will review critical literature in research and theory on expertise and will examine the implications this has for educational efforts to develop expertise. Each class participant will identify a specific content domain (e.g., teaching, dentistry, music, troubleshooting) which will they use as a means of applying the course content. Participants will use this domain to analyze educational practice and design a research study to investigate that form of expertise. This application will enable the participant to develop skills in critically analyzing the characteristics of the domain and how educational interventions can be designed to facilitate the development of expertise. The class will be highly interactive, with participants and faculty sharing insights and observations from their own areas of expertise.

Casey White, Ph.D.
Caren Stalberg, M.D.

Professional education, with its focus on introducing students to simulated and authentic environments in which they will be practicing, has historically employed active, practice-based learning formats that include internships, clerkships, interactions with standardized patients/clients, computer- and mannequin based simulation, and case- or problem-based learning. The goal of this course is to introduce students to research and theory underlying these active, practice-based instructional methods, and to the application of these methods across higher and professional education including medicine, dentistry, nursing, law and pharmacy. Along with this broad, multi-disciplinary approach to the course material, students will also study in depth a particular discipline and the common instructional methods within that discipline. Learning methods will be active and student-centered, and will include peer teaching, peer feedback and self-assessment.

ED 865 Fall 2007
Larry Gruppen, Ph.D.
Patricia Mullan, Ph.D.

This course offers a strong theoretical, conceptual and practical foundation
related to educational assessment of student performance. The primary goal
of the course is providing students with assessment tools that will be
relevant to and useful in their future careers. The course is highly
student-centered -- students are expected to participate in and contribute
to a variety of activities that will be explored in class sessions. Each
student will define an assessment project early in the term, drawn from
their own goals and current or anticipated applications. The projects will
guide how we examine and apply a range of assessment methods that target
learner knowledge and understanding, attitudes and beliefs, and skills.
Specific topics address in the course include:

• educational theories related to learning and assessment
• connections between intended learning outcomes and assessment,
• reliability and validity
• technical underpinnings of high quality assessment
• constructing assessment instruments
• standard setting and grading
• cultural and ethical issues in assessment

Students will examine assessment issues and skills that are relevant through
the entire spectrum of education (K-12, higher education, professional
education, and continuing education). Note that this course does NOT include
a major focus program evaluation.

Patricia Mullan, Ph.D.
Tom Fitzgerald, Ph.D.

This course offers a conceptual and practical introduction to program evaluation. The course will make extensive use of recent applied examples of evaluations, drawing from a wide range of applications. Students will examine techniques for involving stakeholders in the planning process, identifying questions that evaluations can address, selecting evaluation strategies, anticipating ethical challenges, and reporting and disseminating evaluation findings. The course will include examples of quantitative and qualitative methods used in program evaluation. The rationale and standards for assessing outcomes, effectiveness, and quality of evaluations will be examined. Students in this course will critically examine examples of prominent program evaluation models, to promote their ability to choose models that anticipate barriers and decisions important to stakeholders. The course does not assume or require that students have previous coursework or experience in program evaluation, research design, or statistics. Intended learning outcomes for the course include

• enhancing students’ knowledge and skills in identifying major purposes and approaches for conducting program evaluation;
• providing students with opportunities to apply standards to program evaluations, to determine the utility, practicality, appropriateness and accuracy of program evaluations.