HOWARD HUGHES MEDICAL INSTITUTE PROGRAM
Professor
Jo Handelsman
Department of Plant Pathology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Program | Teaching Fellows | Undergraduate Researchers
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute program contributes to the enhancement of science education through the development and implementation of new teaching tools based on well-founded pedagogical principles and by training teachers who are adept at using these tools. These initiatives build upon my previous work in science education with undergraduate learners and graduate and postgraduate teachers and expand my target student population to the general public through web-based active learning.
HHMI Undergraduate scholars. The first initiative is to develop a group of UW-Madison undergraduates to conduct research over a long stretch of their college years and to augment this group with students from other institutions during the summer. The HHMI scholars support enables me to attract students regardless of financial need, expanding the diversity of students in my research group and others. The target group is approximately 6-7 undergraduates per year, with a total of 10-20 over the four-year program. We will recruit minorities and women and a mixture of biology and science education majors. The LEAD Center, a national leader in educational assessment, is studying the impact of the research experience on the undergraduates. Outcomes will include an influx of undergraduates into research; research experience for undergraduates who might not have had access to a research lab; a cohesive group of undergraduates researchers; and an assessment, conducted by a scholarly and experienced assessment team, of the impact of the research experience on the students' scientific and professional development.
Expand 'Teaching Biology.' I am expanding my course designed to help graduate students, postdocs, and faculty improve their teaching, and the materials from the course are broadly available. The HHMI Teaching Fellows Program will allow graduate students and postdocs to take the course and then either teach in an undergraduate biology course or mentor an undergraduate in the research lab and attend a discussion group about mentoring. The students will observe and provide critiques of each others' teaching and I will provide detailed evaluation and feedback throughout their mentoring or classroom teaching experience. The LEAD Center is evaluating the program and the impact of these teachers on their undergraduate students by comparing their performance with that of mentors not enrolled in the HHMI Teaching Fellows Program. The Program includes 10-15 graduate students and postdocs per year or 40-60 over the entire program. Target groups are graduate students and postdocs in the biological sciences and master's students in K-12 science education.
Expand 'The Spud Files' to include virtual experiments. I am also expanding the website, "The Spud Files," which is based on the critically acclaimed "Why Files," a website that presents the science behind newsworthy stories in a lively and visually appealing manner. The Spud Files, built around the story of the Irish Potato Famine, present biology in sufficient depth to be useful to college biology courses and interesting to the general public. The goal of the expanded project is to introduce interactive, inquiry-based modules into The Spud Files to bring modern pedagogy to distance education. The target audience includes the public, which is likely to include 20,000 people per week, as well as biology courses across the country. The material is freely available on the web for any teacher to use. Evaluation will be conducted by a survey that is already an integral part of The Why Files website.
These initiatives answer the call to improve science education by directly implementing inquiry-based approaches in undergraduate education, thereby expanding the community of scientists who use these approaches. The initiatives develop and expand innovations in the classroom and research laboratory, the two most important contact points for undergraduates in science. Outcomes will include developing a new generation of science educators. The evaluation will provide other educators with empirical data on which to base pedagogical choices.
For more information about the HHMI Teaching Fellows program, click here.
For more information about the HHMI Undergraduate Researcher program, click here.
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Last updated 10/10/03