Academic Preparation for Your Future

1. What do you think you will do in this field (sooner or later) after graduation? _______________. If you do not plan to do graduate work or to seek a job that relates to what you have been studying, skip to the next section.)

2. How would you rate your course of study as preparation for this job or graduate work? Very well prepared - well prepared - adequately prepared - not well enough prepared - poorly prepared - don't know

3. What is your GPA?
   [If you have the student's name and ID number and if you get appropriate permissions, can you get the student's grades in the major from the university's database rather than by asking the student.]

Teaching-Learning Practices in Courses in Your Major
In order to discover which instructional practices are helping students learn, we need to ask which of the following practices were common in many of your courses and, of those, which most helped you learn.

Column 1 lists a teaching-practice

Column 2 on "frequency" deals with how often you have been involved in this activity in your major (courses, clubs, competitions, internships, etc.) Enter a number between 5 and 1:

• 5 if the practice has been used frequently in your major
• 1 if it was used little or not at all in your major. If you enter "1" skip to the next item; you don't need to fill in columns 3 or 4

In column 3, enter a number between 5 and 1:

• 5 if the practice has been extremely important to helping you master the concepts, techniques, ideas or values you need for your future work and life
• 1 if the practice has not helped you learn what you need
• NR (no response) if you have no opinion

In column 4, enter a number between 5 and 1

• 5 if computers or other technology were used frequently to make this activity possible or helpful
• 1 if computers were never, or almost never used, for this activity.
• NR if you don't recall

Teaching-Learning Practice	Frequency of this activity in your major (5-1)	How helpful was the activity in preparing you for life after graduation (5-1, NR)	Frequency of computer use for this activity in your major (5-1)
Lectures, textbooks or software that helped me visualize abstract, complicated phenomena and ideas
Instructional software that explained something, tested our understanding, and then taught us something else
Assignments or discussions that were valuable because of the differences between the ideas and approaches of different students
Assignments that could required me to create a problem and then solve it
Assignments that required me to predict what would happen, observe what did happen, and then explain what did happen
Assignments that required us to create our own models or simulations of phenomena or ideas
Simulations where we learned by changing settings or parameters and observing the results
Laboratory work or assignments that showed us carefully what to do at each step and sometimes even showed us what was supposed to happen next (for example, in a laboratory experiment)
Laboratory or assignments that required us to investigate, explore, create or think in other ways
Analysis of data from laboratory experiments or real world observation
Use of the Web, library and/or other sources to locate data, research or explanations not available through regular instructional material
Projects so large that they were only possible because students collaborated (e.g., gathering different types of data; doing different parts of the analysis or design)
Working on homework with other students
Working on homework with people who are not students or staff at this institution
Work on projects of academic value outside the institution (e.g., internship, co-operative program, outside job)
Using experts from the real world to help us do assignments or to assess our work

Technology Availability and Support
How strongly do you agree or disagree with the following statements.
1=strongly agree, 3=don't agree or disagree 5=strongly disagree

"When I need to use computers, video, telecommunications or lab equipment to do an assignment for the courses in my major, access to that sort of technology is not usually a problem."

"When I need to use that sort of technology for an assignment in my major, I usually already know how to use the equipment or software to do that kind of work or, if not, I know there usually will be instructions or assistance to learn how to use it."

"To do at least some of the work in my major, I need to be able to use college equipment like this at night or on weekends."