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The Carleton Interdisciplinary Science & Math Initiative (CISMI) website has not been significantly updated since 2011. We are preserving the webpages here because they still contain useful ideas and content. But be aware that it may have out of date information.
CISMI was replaced by the Carleton Integrated Math & Science initiative.

Project Assessment

Initial Publication Date: April 15, 2011

Carleton's Science Education Resource Center (SERC) and Carleton staff will evaluate the program by: (a) identifying concrete ways that a collaborative, problem-oriented approach to problem-solving affects student learning, and (b) identifying concrete ways in which the pedagogy of integrative modeling enhances students' understanding of real-world environmental problems, especially their holistic, interdisciplinary understanding.

The following is a list of assessment tools in order of priority:
  1. Surveys of faculty and student participants in courses, research projects, and workshops to understand how the project has effected their teaching and learning.
  2. Collection of course descriptions, activities, and student/faculty projects on the website (including documentation of student comps and team projects). Web forms will be created - accessible from LTC and/or ENTS.
  3. Interviews with a selection of participants to get a deeper understanding of the program's effects (especially faculty members currently teaching courses with a spatial imaging component and a student from their courses).
One possible evaluation question is whether there is a difference in learning gains between introductory courses that incorporate GIS and those that incorporate Google Earth.