Educational Leadership and Counseling
Psychology
Innovative Models to Transcend Boundaries
Globalization raises new challenges for educating and training graduate students to understand and integrate scientific, technical, business, social, ethical, and policy issues. Innovative approaches to graduate education seek to provide students with a breadth of skills, strengths, and understanding to work in interdisciplinary environments while developing greater depths within a major field. To meet the new challenges of educating U.S. graduate and doctoral students and to provide opportunities for faculty to experiment with new approaches to graduate education, the National Science Foundation developed the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program. It aims to generate a “cultural change” in graduate education by establishing innovative models for collaborative research that “transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.” The program supports projects that combine interdisciplinary research with advanced education and training activities, curricula enhancement, and other educational features that foster strong interactions among students and faculty.
Dr. Michael Trevisan proposes to conduct a three-year study of IGERT projects to better understand how these graduate education and training activities effect deep interdisciplinary integration. The integrative nature of IGERT projects provides a unique opportunity to investigate the pedagogical structures that define, support, and extend interdisciplinary integration, thus producing a new kind of professional. This project will seek answers to the following research questions:
• Pedagogical content knowledge: What models, methods, strategies, and experiences are used to educate and train graduate students to do interdisciplinary research work? Are there signature pedagogies that have evolved in IGERT projects that support and extend integration? Do these pedagogies differ at various points in the project or across fields? What are the operative assumptions? What are the student assessment practices?
• Student learning and development: As students progress through the program are there unique stages that mark their interdisciplinary development? What variables influence this progression? Does student progress in IGERT projects differ from that of students in disciplinary programs? How so?
The concept of integration will provide the lens through which we examine these questions, Dr. Trevisan says.
Contact Information
Michael Steven Trevisan, Ph.D.
Professor
Educational Leadership and Counseling Psychology
Washington State University
PO Box 642136
Pullman, WA 99164-2136
Telephone: 509-335-7063
E-mail: trevisan@wsu.edu
Society, Communication, and Learning
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An educational psychologist, Dr. Michael Trevisan has devoted his career to program evaluation and student assessment, both classroom and large-scale. He has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications, including work on the technical characteristics of large-scale tests, assessment competencies of school personnel, classroom assessment that supports student learning, and assessment processes in engineering education. His work in program evaluation includes evaluation capacity building, methodology, and the education and training of evaluation professionals. In 1995, Dr. Trevisan established the Assessment and Evaluation Center (AEC) to support his work. The AEC is externally funded through grants and contracts. To date, he has been principal investigator or co-principal investigator for projects funded at more than $6 million. |
