21st Century Project

	Physiology for the 21st Century A Sourcebook of Effective and Economical Experiments

Program Components Selection of Experiments Experiment Development Publication & Dissemination Project Evaluation Discussion Bulletin Board	*Project Evaluation* The measurable objectives of the project are to: Build the skills of project personnel in adapting cookbook laboratory experiments to student-centered, inquiry, or discovery-based activities. Select, peer–review, and adapt laboratory experiments from two existing print manuals to create a collection of activities with clearly defined learning objectives that promote a student-centered curriculum. Produce these peer-reviewed activities in a format that makes them suitable for adaptation to multiple educational levels (K-12 to graduate and professional schools). Provide access to these activities both online via national digital libraries (APS Archive of Teaching Resources and BiosciEdNet) and through distribution on a CD-ROM. Disseminate information on the project and its products through publications, email, and presentations at meetings. The project evaluation will focus on two aspects of the project: the development phase and the dissemination/implementation phase. Phase 1: The workshop and development process leading up to it will be evaluated by an exit survey of all participants at the workshop and lead developers of each of the lab activities. The survey will assess both the development process being pursued and the results produced at the workshop. This will provide formative evaluation to both guide the remaining development process and plan future workshops and activities. Phase 2: The summative (impact) evaluation will take place in Year 3 of the project and will focus primarily on the project product, the 21^st Century collection of laboratory activities. Two criteria of success in dissemination will be considered: (1) How many people request copies of the project CD or download resources from website, and (2) Where geographically these people are located and in what kinds of institutions they teach. Success in implementation would be indicated by the actual *use* of individual experiments by teachers (note that no one teacher will ever use ALL of the experiments in the collection). Evaluation will include the following steps: Statistics will be tabulated on the number of users accessing the pages describing the materials and the number of users downloading each activity. The Archive programming allows identification of the users’ institution and provides an email address for a follow-up survey. The follow-up survey will ask those who downloaded the 21^st Century activities whether they used them and will ask them to provide feedback on the activity usefulness and impacts. Those receiving the CD-ROM version will be surveyed by email or mail to determine which activities, if any, they have used and asked for feedback on usefulness and impacts. The final component of the project evaluation will be a review of the discussions at each 21^st Century activity bulletin board in the Archive. This evaluation will not only provide an overview of materials use and general impact, but also provide feedback on activities that need further revision or resources to be useful to the wider community. Results of the evaluation will be disseminated through the same outlets that we use to publicize the project. Questions concerning project evaluation can be addressed to Project Team member, Marsha Lakes Matyas, Ph.D at the American Physiological Society.
Partners Univ. of Texas at Austin American Physiological Society Rush Medical College IUPS
Participants Project Team Project Participants
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