This post is from the CAPER Team, including Chasity O’Malley, Murray Jensen, Kerry Hull, Ron Gerrits, Kyla Ross, Suzanne Hood, and Betsy Ott.
Have you thought about making changes in your classroom, but lacked the time and resources to do it? If so, keep reading, because we have an opportunity for you.
What’s this about?
We are in the final year of the NSF-funded Community College Anatomy and Physiology Education Research (CAPER) program, in which we worked with twelve community college instructors to expand their knowledge base about teaching and learning and conduct a simple education research project. We are now planning for CAPER 2.0, and hope to give the opportunity to at least 30 new participants.
Who can participate?
A&P instructors who want to improve their classroom teaching skills, especially those teaching at community and technical colleges with large numbers of underserved student populations. We are also recruiting instructors at four-year colleges, especially those with links to nearby community colleges. Experience in education research is not required.
What would I do?
Over a 2-year period, participants will engage in the following activities:
- Complete two 1-credit HAPS Institute hybrid courses covering best practices in Anatomy and Physiology education and the fundamentals of education research.
- Conduct a small research project in their own classrooms and present their results at a HAPS annual conference and in a peer-reviewed journal.
- Participate in a multi-institutional research project investigating the impact of different teaching practices in different student populations
What are the benefits?
- Involvement in a supportive community of engaged instructors
- Mentorship from experienced researchers, as needed, to complete all stages of the research project (experimental design and implementation, statistics and qualitative analysis, poster construction, and article writing)
- Funding to attend at least three conferences:
- Year 1 (September-November): the in-person portion of the teaching and learning course will be combined with a HAPS Regional meeting
- Year 1 (January): the in-person portion of the education research course will be combined with a SABER West meeting in Sunny California
- Year 2 (May): participants will present their poster at a HAPS Annual Meeting
- Funding for the two HAPS-I courses
- A modest financial reward for completing all the components of the CAPER 2.0 project.
- Potentially, the provision of funds for teaching buy-outs (i.e., course load reductions)
- Opportunities to support the teaching and research goals of future participants by acting as a mentor (which would involve additional funded travel)
How do I join in on this amazing experience?
A survey for interested individuals can be completed here.
If you are interested in learning more, contact Chasity O’Malley (chasityomalley@gmail.com) or Murray Jensen (msjensen@umn.edu).
For more information on the first CAPER research project, see these references:
- Ron Gerrit’s Blog summarizing the CAPER 1.0 project.
- Jensen, M., Hull, K., Hood, S., Lawford, H, Ross, K., Gerrits, R., & Ott, B. (2020). Community College Anatomy & Physiology Education Research: Conducting Research Where It Ought to be Done. HAPS Educator, 24(1).