Spreading the word

In August 2007 the Indiana University History Department met in an all-day retreat to share the results to date of this project. Faculty and graduate students discussed what we have learned, the implications of this work for our curriculum, and directions that we will take in the future.

In the following years, we have worked to develop new teaching and assessment strategies to address specific bottlenecks and continued to improve our ability to assess student learning in each of these areas.

We have already presented the first stages of our work at the meetings of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (IS-SoTL) in Washington, D.C. in November 2006, in Sydney in July 2007, in Edmonton in October 2008 and Bloomington in October 2009.  

David Pace and Arlene Díaz on right with other participants in Freshman Learning Project, Bloomington IN 2006
(photo by Joan Middendorf)

We expect this to be followed by a series of papers and articles that track this research as it develops. We hope that this project will culminate in a book that will help define many of the operations required of undergraduates in history courses and tested strategies for helping students master each.