Goals

The Preparing Future Faculty to Assess Student Learning (PREPARE) initiative at Cornell University is a training program funded by the Council of Graduate Schools in order to accelerate learning assessment skills for our graduate teaching assistants and postdocs. It has entailed focused disciplinary and cross-disciplinary experimentation in multiple modalities across campus.

Discipline-specific efforts centered around:

1. working with graduate teaching assistants and faculty for gateway STEM courses in Biology and Physics to develop new assessment strategies, as part of a larger course overhaul effort in the College of Arts and Sciences, and
2. developing training opportunities for humanities graduate instructors of First-Year Writing Seminars to conduct Teaching as Research projects on assessing student writing.

Campus-wide initiatives centered around:

1. a future faculty lunchtime workshop series on assessment,
2. a certificate program on Assessment Practices for the STEM Classroom,
3. practical opportunities for mentorship and scholarship around assessing undergraduate student learning in all fields,
4. campus visits and public workshops by nationally recognized assessment experts such as Dr. Barbara Walvoord.

People

Key contributors to PREPARE include the Graduate School and its Future Faculty and Academic Careers program; the Center for Teaching Innovation; the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines; the Office of Undergraduate Biology; and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Personnel

Principal Investigator: Dr. Barbara Knuth, past Dean of the Graduate School
Co-Investigator: Dr. Theresa Pettit, past Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence
Co-Investigator: Dr. Colleen McLinn, past CIRTL at Cornell Program Director
Teaching Support Specialist: Dr. Kimberly Williams, past CIRTL at Cornell program and Center for Teaching Excellence
Workshop Leader: Dr. Kendra Letchworth Weaver, Ph.D. alumna in Physics

Past Personnel

Communications and Outreach Specialist, 2013-2014: Elizabeth Kim, Center for Teaching Excellence
Project Coordinator, 2013: Dr. Catharine (Clark) Young, past Postdoctoral Scholar in Biomedical Engineering
Project Coordinator, 2013: Dr. Carolyn Fisher, Ph.D. alumna in Biochemistry, Molecular, and Cell Biology, and Graduate Research and Teaching Fellow
Project Coordinator, 2013-2014: Dr. Jared Hale, Ph.D. alumnus in Genetics, Genomics, and Development, and Graduate Research and Teaching Fellow

Partners

Dr. David Faulkner, Senior Lecturer in English and Director of First-Year Writing Seminars
Dr. Amy Godert, Director of The Learning Strategies Center, Executive Director of Academic Student Success Programs
Dr. Derina Samuel, Associate Director, Center for Teaching Innovation
Dr. Paul Sawyer, Professor of English and past Director of the Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines
Dr. Jed Sparks, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and past Director of Undergraduate Biology