Enhancing Student Learning in Health Screening Implementation through use of Decision Trees Heuristics and Branching e-Learning

Jeanie Abrons, Department of Applied Clinical Sciences, received $15,000. Healthcare professionals are required to gain professional service exposure as part of training requirements, but often do not know how to properly identify at-risk patients or be able to engage in decision making heuristics when at-risk patients are identified. Students need an immediate feedback mechanism to make alterations in providing health screenings to patients. eLearning modules and authoring tools may provide guidance on why specific screening questions are used, where critical decisions are made, how to communicate the decision making, and mechanisms to target resources based on patients risks and needs.

Online tool for learning about taxonomy, biodiversity informatics and species identification

Tiffany Adrain, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, received $10,484. Teaching paleontology and organismal biology provides opportunities and challenges for practical activities involving real specimens. An additional challenge is teaching students how to identify species when taxonomy (identifying and naming species) is underemphasized in science in general, let alone the classroom, even though it is one of the foundations of modern biodiversity informatics. We propose to involve students in class labs with the development, testing and use of an on-line identification tool as an innovative means of using technology to learn about taxonomy, practical techniques in identification, and biodiversity informatics.

New Tools for Musicianship and Theory Pedagogy

Matthew Arndt, Department of School of Music, received $5,000. Like foreign language acquisition, aural skills acquisition depends on discriminating minimally different stimuli, but current learning materials do not necessarily facilitate this discrimination. I propose to meet these challenges in two ways:

1.  Having students record keyboard exercises at the new computer lab for the School of Music and submit them for individual feedback, using a program called SmartMusic, and

2. Having students use electronic flash cards that allow them to focus on discriminating minimally different stimuli, using a free app called Anki.

An Interactive Simulation Environment for Learning Statistical Concepts, Phase 2

Sheila Barron, Department of Psychological and Quantitative Foundations, received $25,400. This proposal is for funding to continue, and somewhat expand, the development of the interactive simulation environment for learning statistical concepts. This project was initially by ATAC last year. Thus, in order to understand what we hope to do this coming year, it may be helpful understand what we have done with our year one funding.

A Virtual Laboratory and Game-based Testing Application to Facilitate Self-directed Learning in Histology and Histopathology

Nathan Swailes, Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, received $40,000. The project will allow Virtual Microscopy (VM) and flexible learning in histology to reach their full potential by providing students with a complete, self-directed learning experience through the development of two complementary applications: a virtual laboratory and a game-based testing app.