WPI CEDTA: Davis Report - Background

More Student Learning, Less Faculty Work? The WPI Davis Experiment in Educational Quality and Productivity

II. BACKGROUND

Worcester Polytechnic Institute
WPI is a four-year college of engineering, science, and management. It enrolls about 2600 full-time undergraduate students and about 1000 full time and part time graduate students. It falls into the Carnegie Commission doctoral two category. Slightly less than 80% of its undergraduate students are male, and slightly above 60% major in engineering. WPI is selective in its admissions policies, with a mean combined Verbal and Math SAT score of 1280 for the entering class, and with about 56% of its students ranking at or above the 90th percentile in their high school classes.

WPI is unique in its project-based undergraduate Plan, implemented in the early 1970s. All students must complete three projects in order to graduate. These project experiences represent the heart of the WPI approach to undergraduate education. The Humanities Sufficiency consists of five thematically related courses followed by a course-equivalent faculty-supervised individual research project and is normally completed in the sophomore year. The Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP), normally done in the junior year, involves a topic that concerns the relationship between society and technology. Teams are multidisciplinary and faculty advisors can be from any department. WPI maintains resident project centers all over the world, and about one-third of our students go off-campus for their IQPs. The Major Qualifying Project (MQP) is done in the senior year. The project is within the student's major and conducted under the supervision of a faculty advisor from that department. The projects usually consist of discipline-specific research, or in the case of engineering, capstone design. The IQP and the MQP are each equivalent in credit to at least three courses, or one-fourth effort for a full academic year. In order to allow scheduling flexibility to accommodate off-campus project experiences, WPI has adopted a calendar consisting of four seven-week terms in a regular academic year, with a fifth seven-week term in the summer. A normal academic load for one seven-week term consists of three academic activities (courses or projects), in contrast to the five usually found in a quarter or semester system.

WPI's grading system is unique and has some bearing on the outcomes of this project. Course and project grades are awarded on an A-B-C-NR system, with A, B, and C carrying the usual meaning. NR denotes "no record", and literally means that no record, i.e. no failing grade, appears on a student's grade report. (Fortunately for our data collection efforts, the Registrar's office does keep track of NRs even though they don't appear on grade reports.) An NR in a student record may mean that the student failed to complete the academic activity at all, or that the student's work was unsatisfactory.

Peer Learning Assistants
Universities often provide opportunities for undergraduate students to assist faculty in teaching and their peers in learning. The most commonly accepted instructional role for undergraduates is as peer tutors who instruct, coach, or assist other students (Bruffee, 1978; Fantuzzo et al., 1989; Whitman, 1988; Trimbur, 1987). Previous investigations of the effects of peer tutoring on the performance of students have revealed positive outcomes for both the tutor and the tutee (Annis, 1983; Bruffee, 1978; Magolda and Rogers, 1987).

The use of undergraduate teaching assistants has been described for courses such as foreign languages and psychology (Egerton, 1978; Janssen, 1978; Romer, 1988; Sugnet, 1978). Peer tutors have been used for writing instruction either in drop-in writing centers (Bruffee, 1978) or attached to a specific composition course (Kail and Trimbur, 1987). Undergraduates have also been used as section group leaders (Diamond, 1972; White and Kolber, 1978) and laboratory assistants (Kohn and Brill, 1981). In the Supplemental Instruction model, peer tutors facilitate study sessions outside of class (Reitz and McCuen, 1993; Wilcox, 1994), and Brooklyn College uses undergraduate peer tutors in five initial courses of its Core Curriculum (Brooklyn College, 1991). In all of these cases, the undergraduate teaching assistant or tutor has specific instructional duties and in some cases is involved in grading. In a different model, Lincoln (1978) describes the use of peer facilitators in a psychology self-help course. Recently, however, (Dembner, 1997) the Boston Globe severely criticized the use of undergraduate teaching assistants as an abdication of faculty responsibility and a watering down of the educational experience.

In 1992, with support from the Davis grant, WPI began employing undergraduate students in a way that differs significantly from other descriptions in the literature. Upper division undergraduate students were selected and trained to serve as PLAs to support CL activities. In their original conception, PLAs work with small groups of students to facilitate group problem solving and to help manage group dynamics issues. They are neither peer tutors nor peer teaching assistants, though they may occasionally provide educational guidance (for example, help with editing initial drafts of project reports) and limited academic instruction (Table 1). The primary responsibility for teaching is maintained by the instructor and the graduate teaching assistants; the primary responsibility for learning rests with the students themselves. PLAs are a support resource that allows for the inclusion of small group problem solving both within and outside the classroom. They are especially useful in large classes where the instructor cannot monitor or support all CL activities occurring outside of class. In this model, the instructor becomes the manager of, instead of the sole performer in, an educational process which relies on the contributions of many participants.

JOB FUNCTION	PLA	TA	Tutor
Grade homework, exams, reports	-	Y	-
Evaluate student work	-	Y	Y
Conduct help sessions	(Y)	Y	-
Assist lab sections	Y	Y	-
Hold office hours	-	Y	Y
Coach individuals	-	Y	Y
Manage group dynamics	Y	-	-
Facilitate group process	Y	-	-
Assist report preparation	Y	-	-
Mentor academically/socially/personally	Y	-	-

Cost Effectiveness Analysis
This section uses the terms cost analysis, cost-benefit analysis, and cost-effectiveness analysis with reference to the standard works of contemporary economists working on problems of productivity. Standard references include Layard and Glaister (1997), whose contributors explore issues in cost benefit analysis in the public sector generally, and Stanford University education economist Henry M. Levin, whose book is a standard reference for cost analyses applied to issues in education (Levin, 1985). In addition, a collection of examples of studies applying cost benefit analysis to various social programs can be found in Catterall (1985). Education programs are underrepresented in the cost-benefit analysis literature, with the exception of the many "returns to education" studies reported by economists worldwide which assess relationships between public and private investments in education (such as the costs of providing or of completing years and levels of schooling and college) and the impact of education on the lifetime incomes of education leavers and graduates (Schultz, 1962; Hansen, 1970; Psacharopoulos, 1973).

There are two fundamental ways that relationships between the costs and benefits of a project such as this one can be explored. In a traditional cost-benefit analysis, the dollar costs of a program are compared to the dollar values of the benefits of the program variously conceived. Examples from the Davis Project could include comparing the marginal costs of a PAC course sequence (the additional costs of mounting the alternative teaching design over the traditional model) to the added tuition received (or marginal revenue) from added numbers of retained students. Another true cost-benefit analysis might weigh the costs of the PAC initiative against future increments in student earnings attributable to higher graduation rates or increased academic achievement generally. As these examples alone serve to point out, the business of cost-benefit analysis involves exploring and choosing "frames" for linking resources and outcomes. These examples also reveal confounding problems in this sort of analysis. For example, instruction produces multiple outcomes that involve different metrics and would be difficult to estimate in terms of dollars.

Most cost analyses applied to education programs depart from traditional cost-benefit analysis where dollars are featured on both sides of the cost-benefit equation. There appear to be many important outcomes of the Davis Project that might be weighed productively in their own terms against related costs -- for example effects on student persistence (or retention) and graduation rates, effects on academic achievement indicated by student grades, effects on student problem solving and interpersonal skills, effects on student attitudes about WPI or their departments, or effects on faculty attitudes about the achievement and development of WPI students. These suggest situations where cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) can be informative. CEA weighs the costs of a program against outcome gains (or losses) in their natural units of measurement rather than in dollars. An example is analyzing the marginal costs of the PAC sequence taken by an identifiable group of students in relation to the number of students retained, or against an increment of increase in the upper-division course grades of participants. These latter perspectives play a featured role in the cost-effectiveness analysis described in this report.

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Last modified: Jun 21, 2005, 16:35 EDT