A model for using a concept inventory as a tool for students' assessment and faculty professional development

This essay describes how the use of a concept inventory has enhanced professional development and curriculum reform efforts of a faculty teaching community. The Host Pathogen Interactions (HPI) teaching team is composed of research and teaching faculty with expertise in HPI who share the goal of improving the learning experience of students in nine linked undergraduate microbiology courses. To support evidence-based curriculum reform, we administered our HPI Concept Inventory as a pre- and postsurvey to approximately 400 students each year since 2006. The resulting data include student scores as well as their open-ended explanations for distractor choices. The data have enabled us to address curriculum reform goals of 1) reconciling student learning with our expectations, 2) correlating student learning with background variables, 3) understanding student learning across institutions, 4) measuring the effect of teaching techniques on student learning, and 5) demonstrating how our courses collectively form a learning progression. The analysis of the concept inventory data has anchored and deepened the team's discussions of student learning. Reading and discussing students' responses revealed the gap between our understanding and the students' understanding. We provide evidence to support the concept inventory as a tool for assessing student understanding of HPI concepts and faculty development.     

Psychological causation and goal-based episodes: Low-income children's emerging narrative skills

This study examined the association between an understanding of psychological causation and the ability of young children to produce goal-based episodes in narratives. Participants were white, pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children living in a low income neighborhood in an industrial city in Appalachia (n = 34). They were asked to “read” Mercer Mayer's A Boy, A Dog, and A Frog to a researcher, and the resulting narrative was examined for use of psychological causation and number of goal-based episodes. Overall 68% of the children used psychological causation and 71% of the participants produced at least one goal-based episode. Use of psychological causation was related to age, and was a stronger predictor of producing goal-based episodes than was either age, or overall language ability. Further research is called for.     

Investigating trait emotional intelligence among school leaders: demonstrating a useful self-assessment approach

An exploratory study of two grammar schools in the South East of England is used to justify and demonstrate a self-assessed approach that investigates trait emotional intelligence (EI) among school leaders. First, the theoretical underpinnings of ability and trait EI approaches are critically compared based on recent relevant literature. Then the results from TEIQue-SF, a self-evaluation questionnaire, are presented and discussed. Finally, notwithstanding limitations of the study and the approach taken, we suggest that with further empirical research, a refined and usable self-assessed approach could be a useful way for practitioners to evaluate trait EI among school leaders in the future.     

Learning the Ropes of Program Evaluation: A Case Study

This case study describes a program evaluation framework that works well for both simple and complex projects. The subject was a retreat designed to integrate graduate students into a five‐year research project. Key elements of the evaluation comprised working with stakeholders and developing a logic model to identify what dimensions to evaluate, gathering and identifying data needed to answer the evaluation questions, constructing rubrics to evaluate the data, and then synthesizing and integrating the data to provide recommendations.