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

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 free access to these activities online via national digital libraries (APS Archive of Teaching Resources and BiosciEdNet).
• Disseminate information on the project and its products through publications, email, and presentations at meetings.

The summative (impact) evaluation of the project will take place in the final year of funding and will focus primarily on the project product, the 21st Century collection of laboratory activities. Two criteria of success in dissemination will be considered: (1) How many people request download resources from the 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 21st Century activities whether they used them and will ask them to provide feedback on the activity usefulness and impacts.

The final component of the project evaluation will be a review of the comments and ratings posted at each 21st 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.