Grant Opportunity: Investigating Student Learning

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U-M Faculty, are you interested in...

• evaluating the impact of innovative teaching strategies in your courses?
• using academic data to understand and improve student learning?
• supporting your department's assessment efforts by documenting how students learn key concepts?
• presenting or publishing research about your teaching?

If so, you might want to apply for an Investigating Student Learning (ISL) Grant [2] from CRLT. These grants fund faculty (or faculty-student teams) who wish to investigate aspects of student learning in U-M courses or departments. This year, the Provost's Learning Analytics Task Force [3] will be providing additional funding, allowing a greater number of grants to be awarded on a wide range of topics and approaches.

Recent winners' projects are quite varied, including studies of Medical School flipped classrooms, Africentric social work methods, and engineering design team communication processes. Many ISL recipients publish their studies or apply for larger external grants, using their ISL research as "seed funding." Past winners have also leveraged their ISL work in their applications for the Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize [4] (TIP). Examples include Joanna Mirecki Millunchick [5] (Materials Science and Engineering), who studied the impact of screencasts on student learning, and Theresa Tinkle [6] (English), who examined how students can learn to perform close readings of literary texts in a large lecture setting. 

Awards of $3000 are available for individual faculty members, and grants of $4000 are available to teams including a faculty member and graduate student or postdoc. In addition to financial support, this grant offers CRLT assistance for the design of projects, including IRB approval. 

You can find further information, including application guidelines and examples of past projects, on our ISL Grants page [2]. The proposal deadline is coming up on January 22, 2013.