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Disseminating Effective Practices and Products
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is a nonprofit medical research organization dedicated to advancing science education and biomedical science worldwide. Through its grants programs, the Institute seeks to enrich science education and biomedical research by supporting current and future leaders in their efforts to advance scientific knowledge, develop educational products, and put exceptional educational innovations into practice1. In 2002, the HHMI Undergraduate Science Education Program launched the HHMI Professors Program. HHMI awarded 20 four-year grants, of $1 million each, to faculty members renowned for their research successes and long-time interest in undergraduate education. The grants empowered these leading scientists to fully engage in undergraduate teaching at their own research universities, while providing other institutions with innovative models to convey the excitement and values of scientific research to undergraduate students. The HHMI Professors Program stimulates and supports accomplished research scientists in their efforts to advance undergraduate science education; it also introduces graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to the challenges and rewards of mentoring undergraduates. The hope is to develop a core group of science educators who are leaders in research and excel in undergraduate teaching. Each professor uses his or her HHMI grant to develop distinct, effective methods of sharing the beauty of science with all students. Some focus on providing research experiences for first-year students; others work to attract more women and minorities into science. Whether communicating the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of cutting-edge science or using technology to develop new teaching tools, these professors infuse undergraduate science education with the excitement and rigor of scientific research by sharing their advancements in teaching. The HHMI Professors Program is becoming a model for fundamental reform of undergraduate science education at research universities2. “How best to tell the world about our experiments and the various tools, materials, and other contributions we developed” is one of the greatest challenges facing the selected HHMI professors, according to Graham Walker, HHMI professor and professor in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Final products yielded from the professors’ projects will eventually be shared, but little documentation exists regarding process and progress in the early stages of the project. Recognizing the KEEP Toolkit as an effective mechanism for collecting and organizing data in a systematic way, the Undergraduate Science Education Program decided to tackle this issue by asking current HHMI professors to use the KEEP Toolkit to document their ongoing work.“The KEEP Toolkit is all about clear, efficient hypertext communication via the Internet,” said Dr. Walker. “As a result, we have been able to use the Internet as a routine way of continuously communicating our progress to the world without the need for a Webmaster.” Using Snapshots to document their work, the professors share their work with HHMI, their peers, and eventually the greater educational community, in a comprehensive and accessible format. To this end, the HHMI Professors Program has created two Snapshot templates—a Homepage template and Topic Page template—to help professors highlight the design and specific implementation of their work. Using the Homepage template, professors describe project overview and essential elements. With the Topic Page, they detail a particular element of each project. Some professors produce several Topic Page Snapshots, highlighting different aspects of each of their initiatives. These Snapshots provide a window into the successes and challenges encountered by these professors as they implement their innovations, and also present the essence of each project. The HHMI Professors Program strives to enhance science education beyond the classrooms of these 20 HHMI professors. A strong first step in tackling this matter is to ensure the wide documentation and distribution of materials and educational practices developed by the professors over the course of the program. Use of the KEEP Toolkit is one way to encourage the exchange and broad distribution of ideas and best practices developed through the Professors Program. Although some of the HHMI professors’ innovations require support and infrastructure, many of these products can be implemented at institutions without extensive organizational or financial resources. "The Snapshots we created have generated a great deal of interest in our work,” said Dr. Walker. “I am increasingly finding that people are contacting me because they have read about our HHMI work on the Internet." Although some institutions and faculty may not have the resources to implement this work, exploring and investigating these projects can initiate a dialogue to further advance science education in other environments. The KEEP Toolkit also supports program assessment from an institutional perspective. By evaluating project outcomes and impact in this way, an organization like HHMI can facilitate program reform as it develops and determine whether it is meeting stated goals and proceeding as planned. Exploring the program’s specific outcomes will ensure that it is living up to the institution’s initial intentions. And by offering feedback to program participants and administrators, the potential exists to increase or re-ignite professors’ collaborative efforts. “Using the KEEP Toolkit to communicate results is a substantive process, in the sense that one must carefully consider the past, present, and future of the work,” said Dr. Walker. Rewards from this kind of increased information flow include professors’ ability to build upon each other’s work and explore a broader viewpoint for tackling reform in undergraduate science education. In collaboration with the Knowledge Media Lab, HHMI has created a group portal page to aid professors in sharing ongoing efforts through Snapshots. This portal page provides project information, resources, downloadable templates, and links to other professors’ Snapshots. The Undergraduate Science Education Program also plans to reorganize the information collected through the professors’ Snapshots and present it on the HHMI website.
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1Howard Hughes Medical Institute | Biomedical Research and Education (HHMI). 2005. 1 May 2005 http://www.hhmi.org/ |
