Eastern Michigan University: CSIE Program Information

20th Biennial Conference on Chemical Education
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
Amy Johnson and Harriet Lindsay. July 2008

The Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (BCCE) is a national meeting sponsored by the Division of Chemical Education of the American Chemical Society. The conference is designed for middle school science teachers, secondary school chemistry teachers, graduate students, and college chemistry instructors and professors. The conference provides chemistry teachers with opportunities for interacting with colleagues at all levels in formal and informal settings. Teachers who are new to chemistry teaching and those who have teaching experience will find this conference to be an excellent source of materials, techniques, and chemistry content. The BCCE helps teachers make connections with colleagues and friends who are dedicated to teaching chemistry. Chemistry teachers are invited to share what works in their classrooms with their students by visiting the 20th BCCE web site at http://bcce2008.indiana.edu and submitting a workshop proposal or abstract for a presentation. You do not have to be a member of the American Chemical Society or the ACS Division of Chemical Education to attend or present at the BCCE.

Joint Meeting of the Michigan Section of the Mathematical Association of America and The Michigan Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges
Holt High School, Holt MI
Kim Rescorla, Spring 2008.

Eastern Michigan University students enrolled in Calculus II and/or Physics I participated in an interdisciplinary course. The course is part of an NSF-funded project at EMU entitled Creative Scientific Inquiry Experience: Developing an Integrated Science Curriculum. Each week students used video analysis software to investigate the mathematics and physics underlying a moving object. Mathematical concepts including limit, derivative, and integral are related to the physical principles of position, velocity, acceleration, work, energy, and momentum. The course concluded with students presenting their own research projects. An overview of the software and weekly projects will be given.

STEM Community In Conversation
The University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago IL
Ellene Tratras Contis, Joanne Caniglia, Kathleen Stacey, and Anne Seaman, September 2007.
Recruitment and Retention Efforts of the Creative Scientific Inquiry Experience (CSIE) Program
The CSIE Program at Eastern Michigan University is involved in retaining and increasing the number of STEM graduates. Our focus has been to develop an approach that includes faculty professional development, student connectedness to the sciences and mathematics through academic service-learning, and curricular reform. To this effort, the CSIE program has invested much effort in the recruitment and retention of our STEM students.

234th American Chemical Society National Meeting
Boston MA
Timothy R. Brewer, August 2007
Creative scientific inquiry experience in first year chemistry
The CSIE (creative scientific inquiry experience) program is dedicated to helping students with an interest in a STEM degree and provides students with career exploration and mentorship opportunities, academic service-research projects, customized academic support and theme-based courses. The chemistry and biology courses involved an academic service learning component involving a community project with the Huron River Watershed. The first semester project was the study of cyanobacteria. The purpose of this study was to test the potential toxicity of cyanobacteria and water quality of the Huron River watershed. Spectrophotometry was used to determine concentrations of chlorophyll and phosphorus. In addition, DNA analysis was performed (polymerase chain reaction with gel electrophoresis) to search for the toxin-producing mcyD gene. The second semester project involved student participating in searching for stoneflies and analyzing the water quality of the Huron River. Students analyzed their data to search for correlations in order to predict the health of the watershed.
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Working Towards Social Justice
5th Annual Disparities in Health Workshop
MD Anderson Cancer Research Center, Houston TX
Ellene Tratras Contis, June 2007
The Training and Retention of STEM Majors: the CSIE Project – invited lecture
The Creative Scientific Inquiry Experience (CSIE) project is an innovative approach to improving
the retention of undergraduate students who express interest in and are academically prepared for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) majors. Expected outcomes for CSIE student scholars are: 1) Progression to upper-level courses with a deeper understanding of course content and 2) Participation in community-based problem solving. This past year the CSIE
Program focused on developing and implementing five CSIE course clusters; training Faculty
Fellows about the CSIE philosophy and academic service-learning pedagogy; and evaluating the
courses through focus groups with both faculty and students.

National Science Foundation (Division of Undergraduate Education, STEP Grantees Meeting)
Arlington, Virginia.
Ellene Tratras Contis, Joanne Caniglia, Kathleen Stacey. March 2008

The CSIE (Creative Scientific Inquiry Experience) Program is involved in retaining and increasing the number of STEM graduates. Our focus is an innovative approach that includes faculty professional development, student connectedness to the sciences and mathematics through academic service-learning, and curricular reform. CSIE faculty fellows are energizing their teaching through creative development of multi-course and stand-alone interdisciplinary CSIE experiences, a cluster of two or three science and/or mathematics courses anchored by a one-credit CSIE seminar. CSIEs help students make connections between core courses and with faculty, peers, and community partners.

International Conference on Interdisciplinarity in Education
Athens, Greece.
Ellene Tratras Contis, March 2007

The Creative Scientific Inquiry Experience (CSIE) project is an innovative approach to improve the retention of students who have expressed interest in and are academically prepared for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. Expected outcomes for CSIE student scholars are progress to upper-level courses with a deeper understanding of course content and participation in community-based problem solving. This past year focused on developing and implementing several CSIE course clusters, training Faculty Fellows about the CSIE program, its philosophy, and academic service-learning, and evaluating the courses through focus groups with both faculty and students. Progress to date includes the following activities: development of CSIE course clusters, and reflecting and acting upon what works and what does not work in the program. This paper presents the lessons learned by the project team in the first two years of the project.

National Science Foundation
Washington D.C., USA
Ellene Tratras Contis, Anne Seaman, Nelson Maylone, Steve Pernecky, March 2007

The Creative Scientific Inquiry Experience (CSIE) project is an innovative approach to improving the retention of students who have expressed interest in and are academically prepared for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) majors. Expected outcomes for CSIE student scholars are:

Progression to upper-level courses with a deeper understanding of course content and
Participation in community-based problem solving.

This past year the CSIE Program focused on developing and implementing five CSIE course clusters: training Faculty Fellows about the CSIE philosophy and academic service-learning pedagogy: and evaluating the courses through focus groups with both faculty and students. Thus far, two clusters have completed CSIE experiences with three new clusters being taught this semester. Future classes are being developed through the Faculty Fellows Workshops. Theme-linked courses include: Chemistry/Biology ( two course clusters for the full year introductory courses). Algebra/Computer Science, Differential Equations/Mechanics, and STEM Educational Media and Technology. In addition, progress to date on support activities include the following: expanding faculty and student recruitment into the program, implementing a direct student registration system, refining the scheduling of the CSIE course clusters, and reflecting and acting upon strengths and weaknesses of the program. This presentation/poster presents the lessons learned and challenges faced by the project team in the first two years of the project.

International Conference on Interdisciplinarity in Education
Athens, Greece.
Ellene Tratras Contis March 2006

The Creative Scientific Inquiry Experience (CSIE) model is an innovative approach to improve the retention of students who have expressed interest in and are academically prepared for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. Expected outcomes for CSIE include students’ progress to upper-level courses with deeper understanding of course content and participation in community-based problem solving. The CSIE model illustrates the convergence of three key project components reflecting the full range of strategies needed to provide for a university-wide support system. It includes

Course Development: ten theme-based CSIEs (two STEM courses integrated with a CSIE seminar);
Faculty Development: released-time faculty to develop CSIE themes and strategies for integrating content, to apply the pedagogy of academic service-learning and experiential and collaborative methods, and to share techniques to support persistence in STEM fields;
Student Development: small classes, academic service-learning through community-based research, career exploration, coordinated and supplemental academic enrichment support.

Progress to date includes the following activities: comprehensive collection strategy for baseline data of current STEM undergraduates, data management protocols, survey development and project team self-assessment; research on bibliographic information on STEM and underrepresented populations, academic service-learning and cross-disciplinary experiences; successful recruitment and assignment of four faculty to develop two CSIEs for the fall term in Computer Science/ College Algebra and Chemistry/Biology; marketing and recruitment, including a comprehensive website, printed brochures, academic advisor training, and outreach for peer mentor/tutors; establishment of the infrastructure necessary to offer the CSIE program.

Mathematics Association of America
Joanne C. Caniglia and Krish Narayanan, January 2006.

Joanne C. Caniglia, Mathematics, and Krish Narayanan, Computer Science, Room 515 Pray Harrold, The Traveling Salesman Solves a Meals on Wheels Problem: Utilizing Academic Service-Learning in an Integrated Algebra and Computer Science Course.

The purpose of this session is to describe a college algebra and computer science interdisciplinary seminar utilizing academic-service learning. This seminar developed for mathematics or computer science majors exposes students to a real-world problem: making the process of providing meals to the elderly more efficient.

Through a National Science Foundation Talent Expansion Program (STEP) grant (DUE-0525514), Eastern Michigan University is developing a series of interdisciplinary seminars consisting of mathematics and computer science courses that not only provide data acquisition, design of experiments, use of theory, and computer programming, but also serve a non-profit community agency in the process.

The algebra and computer science classes set out to design a method to help the manager of the Meals on Wheels organization quickly generate efficient routes for a volatile list. The routing system implemented is based on a Traveling Salesman Problem heuristic that is extremely simple and yet provides good tours on the average. The idea behind this algorithm is a Sierpinski space-filling curve.

Students gain an appreciation for how they can apply college algebra and computer programming.

232nd National Meeting of the American Chemical Society
Division of Chemical Education
San Francisco CA
Ellene Tratras Contis, Joanne Caniglia and Kathy Stacey, September 2006

Creative Scientific Experience: Developing an integrated science curriculum