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The Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) Systemic Reform
in Science-Phase I Project will involve faculty from the 10 colleges of the nation's
largest community college system (200,000 students) in interdisciplinary activities
to better prepare them for teaching students who have a wider range of learning
needs than in the past.
The project's overall goal is to improve student success
through increased faculty use of methods that link science courses through real-life
applications. The major activity is the adaptation of content to create 20
interdisciplinary modules for science courses.
Implementation of these modules will
be accomplished through the Management Team (MT) whose members will be the
PI, co-PIs, and nine science faculty who will serve as Peer Mentors (PM) at the
individual colleges. The MT will implement activities to support integration and use
of the interdisciplinary modules through faculty workshops and seminars, including
an annual 1-2 day workshop on implementing active learning in science classrooms,
and the establishment of Collaborative Learning Teams (CLT) of science faculty at
each college who will work together with PMs to implement interdisciplinary
modules and active learning in science classrooms.
Outcome objectives include:
- Increasing, by 75% over the baseline year, the number of full-time science faculty
who use approaches aligned with systemic reform; and
- Bringing the overall
proportion of full-time science faculty who routinely use new approaches to 50%
(50 faculty of 100).
Major evaluation activities are:
- Regular monitoring by the MT;
- Pilot-testing of modules;
- Pre-post-test evaluation design to measure implementation levels.
Following preparation of a Final Evaluation Report, project
processes/outcomes and interdisciplinary modules will be disseminated through the
Project's website and through presentations at selected regional and national
conferences.
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