Brown Bag Lecture

Shining a Flashlight on SMET Reform: Possibilities and Problems for Evaluation

Presented by Stephen Ehrmann

October 5, 1999
12:00 - 1:00pm
Room 259 Educational Sciences Building

It’s difficult to create meaningful, useful evaluations of improvement efforts in science, mathematics, engineering and technology education. The Flashlight Program of the nonprofit TLT group (the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Affiliate of the American Association for Higher Education) has had some experience that may be instructive. Dr. Stephen Ehrmann, director of the Flashlight Program and an NISE Fellow of the College Level One Team this year, will summarize the Flashlight approach to designing studies of teaching and learning with technology. The Flashlight Program has been shaped by several observations: (a) the value and problems of technology are determined by the details of its use; (b) the purpose of evaluation is to improve value, its findings must influence what users (faculty, students, administrators, others) do; (c) users typically ignore evaluations; d) if they are in this instance to be influenced by findings, they must be sufficiently involved in the study design so that the evaluation addresses their own uncertainties about current practice with evidence they are likely to believe. How to do this, and the problems that remain, will be the subject of Dr. Ehrmann’s remarks.