DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Assessment and Reflection

 

 

Review of Assessment Goals and Progress

 

As planned, we used 5 sections of Introduction to Psychology as our control sections in Fall 2011. In each of these sections, students completed the cultural awareness quiz and implicit association task (see links on left) in the first week of the course and then again in the final week of the course. In brief, these assessments include a survey examining universality of human behaviors and an online implicit association task that reflects attitudes about diversity. Data entry from all of these sections has been completed. These data provide a baseline against which to compare the spring courses in which some of the diversity units developed by the group, in Fall 2011, were included.

 

During Spring 2012, students in an additional 5 sections of Introduction to Psychology  completed the same cultural awareness and implicit association task, again in the first week of class and final week of class. In these course sections, instructors voluntarily selected and included 2-3 of the prepared diversity units (see Diversity Units section) that fit their planned coverage of topic areas. The pre-test data from these experimental sections have been coded and entered, but as the semester is not quite finished, the post-test data are still being collected in these courses.

 

Following conclusion of the spring semester, we will analyze the data, comparing the fall and spring sections to assess whether use of the diversity infusion units increases knowledge relating to diversity issues. Our results and full conclusions cannot reasonably be completed until the summer, given the data will not be in and entered until the final days of spring semester. Depending on our findings, we hope to submit this work for presentation at a professional conference in the next year.

 

Reflection on the Success of the Project 

 

We feel our project has been a success; we have met our primary goals in accordance with our stated timeline. We have established a small departmental library that focuses on diversity and curricular issues; we have compiled a list of useful resources available to the entire department and adjuncts teaching in our department, and we have created a compendium of readings and activities, with suggested uses, for each of the major areas as listed in most introductory psychology textbooks. That compendium is already available to all faculty teaching in our department via a dedicated folder on our departmental resource site as well as this digication site. We further plan to provide the department with our assessment information in the fall, after completing the data analysis and interpretation in early summer. 

 

We have reason to believe that our resources and the unit compendium will continue to grow as we all (members of this group and beyond) come across additional materials and try out new activities in our classes. A testament to this potential has already come, as one of our adjunct instructors, who was aware of our project, offered an additional activity with which he has had success, for inclusion in the set. We anticipate and look forward to continued growth to our resources in this manner. 

 

We acknowledge that one difficulty, from the instructor's point of view, is deciding how to include these additional or new units into an already planned course. This is not a new struggle, of course, as we always must make decisions about what to include and what to delete from a given course. But determining how best to use these additional resources--e.g., in class, homework, a multi-unit project, in addition to or in substitution of previously used material--takes consideration and time, and may itself produce some discomfort at first. Nevertheless, anecdotally, having researched and compiled these units for inclusion in Introduction to Psychology, we all feel more aware of the possibilities for diversity inclusion and more confident bringing these issues into our classroom. As such, we maintain that this Diversity Infustion Project for Introduction to Psychology was both valuable and successful.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.