Announcing the 2020-2021 Hrabowski Innovation Fund

UMBC is proud to announce the projects selected to receive grants in the 2020-2021 rounds of the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation competition.
 
IMPLEMENTATION & RESEARCH AWARDS (Spring 2021)

The Educational Journey of Immigrant Children: An Interdisciplinary Course Using Gamification and Role-Play (Implementation and Research Grant) — A multidisciplinary team led by Kerri Evans (Social Work) will create, implement, and evaluate an interdisciplinary classroom activity (board game) which will be used in a new course (using gamification and role-play) that will help advanced level UMBC students to prepare for their careers in educational settings after graduation. The content of the game and course focuses on the immigrant experience in the U.S. from pre-Kindergarten to college, and ways that UMBC students who will become service providers across multiple disciplines can advocate for inclusion, and welcome and dismantle racism in our schools. The team aims to actively engage UMBC students in the game development process, beta testing, and in the course itself. They will evaluate the project using pre-post tests and focus groups.

Preventing Gender-Based Harm at UMBC: Designing and Teaching a Multidisciplinary Course (Implementation and Research Grant) — A multidisciplinary team led by Jodi Kelber-Kaye (Honors College) will create a 3-credit first-year seminar (FYS) course centered on educating undergraduate students about gender-based harm at all levels of society and empowering them to create change. In addition to traditional academic content consisting of lessons rooted in contemporary scholarship on gender-based harm and its impact, students will learn healthy relationship practices and skills through evidence-based prevention models and will exercise the knowledge they glean over the course of the semester through hands-on projects encouraging civic engagement and community activism. Evaluation of this project will entail short- and long-term studies on the impact of this course on campus sexual misconduct outcomes as well as a comparative study on the retention and well-being of students throughout their college careers. This project will create a context for further research on classroom-based prevention strategies, allowing UMBC to expand the field of gender-based harm prevention in higher education settings through evaluation and dissemination of this novel educational intervention model.
 

Retrieving Energy: UMBC Green Labs Collaboration (Seed Grant) — A multidisciplinary team led by Ryan Kmetz (Facilities Management Sustainability Office) will establish a collaboration between the Sustainability Office and the Mechanical Engineering Senior Capstone (ENME 444) course to design, prototype, and deploy motion height sensing sash alarms. Laboratories are the most energy-intensive space on a campus, and laboratory fume hoods are often the predominant contributors to laboratory energy use. A single fume hood typically consumes about the same amount of energy as four U.S. households – and UMBC has over 300 fume hoods! Reducing energy consumption of UMBC’s laboratories is an important milestone towards reaching our carbon neutrality goals. Shutting the sash of fume hoods reduces the volume of exhausted conditioned air, thus, reducing energy. However, it is easy to forget to shut the sash, and research has shown that sensors with auditory reminders to shut the sash can reduce energy use of a fume hood significantly. This project-based learning experience will immerse students in the complex world of sustainability challenges and expose them to real-world applications for sustainable solutions. Efficacy will be determined by the energy reduction and the overall applicability and scalability of the project.
 
Assessing and Reversing Students’ Unpreparedness in Upper Level Biology Courses (Seed Grant) — Michelle Starz-Gaiano and Fernando Vonhoff (Biological Sciences) will collect data about why students do not prepare thoroughly before coming to class. The team will collect data to confirm their hypothesis that students do not have effective strategies for reading primary literature papers and thus find the content overwhelming, which decreases their motivation to carefully read the assigned learning materials. If this hypothesis proves to be correct, they will help students develop efficient strategies to bridge the gap between learning from textbooks and learning from primary, data-based literature by testing the method of annotating papers following strategies described on the AAAS Science In The Classroom website. By presenting the scientific content in a more digestible manner, the team will help students develop efficient strategies to read and understand scientific papers over time. The team will collect preliminary data on the efficacy of this method from the student’s perspective, from analysis on student performance using historical data from 2018-2020, and between course modules with and without annotated papers. The team will also collect preliminary data examining whether the application of this method can be used to stimulate students to be engaged in more complex assignments, which may lead to a deeper understanding of the class material and prepare them for future advanced challenges.
 

Identifying an Interdisciplinary Path to Social Responsibility Education across the COEIT Curriculum (Implementation and Research Grant) — A multidisciplinary team led by Helena Mentis (Engineering and Information Technology) will gather insights to develop a more comprehensive framework for incorporating Socially Responsible Thinking (SRT) throughout the College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT) curriculum. Universities are being called upon to incorporate greater attention to social responsibility, specifically for students expected to participate in technology development and innovation. At UMBC, several recent initiatives have aimed to incorporate SRT into engineering and computing education, yet they have been fairly disconnected from each other and from the social sciences. The team will collect and analyze surveys and interviews from students, faculty, and employers and ultimately form a Faculty Learning Community, host a campus-wide speakers event, and produce a final report for stakeholders. Multiple metrics will be used to assess the project’s impact vis-a-vis two main aims: to identify pathways to integrate SRT concepts into the engineering/computing curriculum, and to increase cross-college collaboration around SRT. Results from the project will speak to opportunities to improve academic persistence, engagement, and workforce participation for COEIT students, and greater interfacing across COEIT and the social sciences/College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.
 

Digitizing the Funny Papers: A Student-Led Digital Humanities Collaboration with UMBC Special Collections (Adaptation Grant) — A multidisciplinary team led by Lindsay DiCuirci, Beth Saunders, and Susan Graham (English and Special Collections Library) will collaborate on an advanced undergraduate English seminar focused on digitizing UMBC’s Merkle Collection of English Graphic Satire and creating a public digital exhibition. In this semester-long, project-based course, students will learn theories and methods in the digital preservation of rare books and manuscripts; metadata creation and bibliographic description; exhibition writing and design; principles of curation; public outreach and promotion; and historical research and cultural critique. Students will not only build the exhibition, but will also develop pedagogical tools, guides, and best practices for digital exhibition building and will document their process through reflective writing and self-assessments. This course will serve as an innovative model for future student-led digital humanities initiatives that make use of the unique but largely undigitized materials held in Special Collections at UMBC.
 

Access to Online and In-Person Interventions: Comparing the Impact on Student Success of Providing SI PASS in All MATH 151 Lectures (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Grant) — A multidisciplinary team led by Delana Gregg (Academic Success Center) will extend supplemental instruction (SI PASS) support for MATH 151, while collecting and analyzing data on its effects on student success during online and in-person learning. SI PASS (peer-led study sessions), a nationally recognized and widely researched student success intervention, targets historically difficult courses with high DFW rates. UMBC regularly offers SI PASS support for a number of such courses, typically in STEM. UMBC-based assessment and national research indicate that participation in SI PASS correlates with many positive student outcomes, including higher grades, higher retention, and student-reported gains in course learning and study skills. MATH 151 is a key gateway course for many majors and has high DFW rates (>25%). There are multiple large lecture sections for this course every semester, but only two SI PASS leaders. The team will extend the program so that there is one SI PASS leader for each lecture section, allowing for research on the effectiveness of this learning intervention. The team will also analyze the effects on SI PASS participation and student success of offering online course instruction and online SI PASS compared to in-person instruction and in-person SI PASS and continuing to offer online SI PASS after UMBC returns to in-person instruction compared to in-person SI PASS.
 

Keys to Inclusion: An Initiative to Imagine a More Inclusive Piano Canon (Seed Grant) — Daniel Pesca (Music) will co-lead a multi-institutional effort to bring music departments and piano studios from five institutions around the country together to research, perform, record, and teach the piano music of Black American composers. The program includes a range of online activities, including lectures by eminent scholars of the repertoire, a series of masterclass exchanges between institutions, and a final recording project. The lectures address many aspects of music-making, from considerations of social context to pedagogy, from historical inquiry to the creation of brand new work. Students will be empowered to grow as musicians as they enjoy the benefits of working with professionals from across the country, learning the process of making a high-level recording, and discovering unfamiliar repertoire. The fruits of this year-long effort will be shared via an online database. After the pilot year, the team intends to expand their reach by encouraging other institutions to join the initiative as a small but vital part of a larger conversation in classical music institutions of all sorts about inequities in representation.
 

Proposals for the next round of Innovation Fund grants are due by October 29, 2021. For more information and to apply, visit UMBC's Faculty Development Center website.
 
The Hrabowski Fund for Innovation exemplifies UMBC's commitment to investing in faculty initiatives that fuel creativity and enterprise and also create opportunities for student engagement.