UMBC is proud to announce the projects selected to receive grants in the 2022 - 2023 rounds of the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation competition. The Fund supports initiatives to enhance teaching and learning at UMBC, with specific emphasis on innovative approaches to increase student success.

Autism Peer Mentorship Program (AUTISM PEERS): A team led by Michael Canale (Student Disability Services) will create a sustainable peer mentoring program for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by recruiting neurotypical mentors to work with ASD students on social learning. Many ASD students lack the social and interpersonal communication skills to participate in campus events and activities fully. Peer-mediated intervention strategies are most commonly based on social learning theory and focus on the direct experience of observation, modeling, and imitation to foster new learning. Students in the program will be interviewed to establish goals and will meet with their mentors weekly to address the established social learning objective. Upon completion of the semester, participants and peer mentors will evaluate the program.

Boning Up on Forensic Anthropology--Enhancing Student Learning and DEI Competencies in ANTH 322: A team led by Sarah Chard (sociology, anthropology, and public health) will draw on existing scholarship of teaching and learning literature to redesign ANTH 322: Forensic Anthropology as an active learning course involving hands-on exercises with skeleton models to support UMBC's social justice vision. By handling and drawing bones of the human body, and labeling their features, students will gain deeper insights to and greater retention of human osteology, principles of human variation, and pathology--the cornerstones of forensic anthropology. In addition, this redesign will allow students to explore questions of justice and bias that accompany work with human remains. The team will assess the impact of this project by comparing assessment scores to those of prior classes, pre- and post-tests within the course, and obtaining students' qualitative assessment of the learning process.

Assessing Sense of Belonging and Dialogue Skills in a FYS Course: A team now led by Ciara Christian (Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion, and Belonging) will utilize data collected from a first-year seminar course that employs dialogue pedagogy to learn which practices contribute to first-year and transfer students' sense of belonging in the classroom. As a Minority Serving Institution, UMBC's students bring rich experiences from all corners of the globe. While the benefits of diversity are evident, students are not always well-equipped to engage meaningfully across differences. Additionally, stakeholders across campus have anecdotally noted several casualties of COVID in relationships--the ability to practice empathy and the inclination to dialogue across differences of identity, worldview, and lived experience. These casualties contribute to a lack of connection, making it imperative for UMBC to explore the ways in which students find, create, and experience a sense of belonging on campus.

Development of an Inquiry-Based Bonus Module with Short Video to Enhance Conceptual Learning in Undergraduate Heat Transfer Course: A multidisciplinary team led by Liang Zhu (mechanical engineering) will develop and implement bonus modules to approximately 120 students per year in a heat transfer course in hopes of improving students' retention and graduation rates and creating a strategy that can be adopted by other engineering courses. Unfortunately, most students do not spend enough time on course content to master the conceptual information. Based on the team's experience of assigning bonus problems, they hypothesize that integrating a three-minute focused video in an inquiry-based bonus module would effectively engage students in the delivery of these engineering concepts. The team will evaluate effectiveness of the modules based on a survey of conceptual questions of heat transfer given at the beginning and end of the semester.

LOTUS Mentoring Program--Leading Others to Thriving and Universal Success: Angelina Jenkins (Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion, and Belonging) will develop, pilot, and assess an identity-based mentoring program targeted at supporting undergraduate Asian, Pacific Islander, and Desi American (APIDA) students at UMBC. UMBC's current student population boasts broad diversity, but as a Minority Serving Institution, students of color make up about 52 percent of the student population. More specifically, 19 percent of UMBC's student population is made up of APIDA communities. In 2021, Michelle Obama celebrated UMBC as an Asian Serving Institution, yet UMBC has no initiatives or interventions that center these populations. With a primary goal of building cultural confidence through peer-to-peer connections, APIDA students will increase their sense of belonging, build community connections, and have a deeper understanding of their racial and ethnic identity.

Team-Taught Course Development--Experimental Archaeology of the Global Medieval and Renaissance Eras: A multidisciplinary team led by Molly Jones-Lewis (ancient studies) and Lindsay Johnson (music) will build a materials library to support a new course in experimental archaeology, the study of the past using systematic reproduction and use of objects, activities, and arts to answer questions about the past. The course will focus on basic skills of doing (e.g., fiber craft, foraging, dance, music, farming, cooking, writing) used by pre-modern societies in daily life alongside readings of scholarly works using experimental methodology. Students will learn from invited speakers, develop foundational craft skills learning from the instructors and local artisans, reproduce existing experimental projects, and design an experiment of their own to execute. A successful student will be able to articulate a research question about pre-modern history, locate it in existing scholarly discussions, create a physical project that will produce valid data, and present their results clearly and accessibly to others.

Multidisciplinary Internship Experiences at the Imaging Research Center: A multidisciplinary team led by Anita Komlodi (information systems) will extend the longstanding internship experiences for visual arts students with the UMBC Imaging Research Center (IRC) to students from other departments and programs. Initially, the team will recruit students from computer science and electrical engineering and information systems to contribute to interdisciplinary projects. Interns may receive academic credit for the internship as well as a research practicum course offered by the UMBC Career Center. The team ultimately plans to extend the internship beyond the proposed departments, disseminate findings, and seek sustained funding and external support.

Course Planning with Machine Learning: Ergun Simsek (computer science and electrical engineering) will develop machine learning and statistical models to accurately estimate the number of new students entering in the professional programs, and then determine the demand for the necessary sections of the required classes and electives. Course scheduling with an objective function of high classroom (section) fill rates is a challenging task for large and/or rapidly growing programs. Due to their unique structure, professional programs typically learn of the number of new students only a few days before the semester begins, which makes course planning more challenging. The models will be developed and tested using the MPS data science program data, which grew from seven to 550 students in five years, and validated with the MPS health IT program data, which had a similar growth pattern. The PI will share these models with the local community and provide training on how to use them for any master's program at UMBC.

Full STEAM Ahead--Breaking Down Silos to Prepare Students for a Global Society: A team led by Jonathan Singer (education) will develop a course in the master of arts in education program which incorporates experienced teachers working in primary and secondary schools in Maryland in collaboration with pre-service teachers in a STEM-Hub program at the University of Kassel in Germany to develop integrative projects in STEAM to implement in the K-12 classroom. Today, students must be prepared to enter a global workplace that is increasingly interconnected both internationally and across disciplines. Working with colleagues in another country will help in-service teachers gain valuable skills and knowledge that they can pass on to their students. The project breaks down silos that exist in education today and embraces that learning is interconnected and that students can excel in all disciplines.

Quantum Immersion for Information Systems Undergraduates--An Experiential Learning Approach: A team led by Lei Zhang (information systems) will incorporate introductory quantum computing modules into existing curricula to bring the knowledge of this growing field to a broader audience and prepare students with cutting-edge technologies for the job market. Quantum computing has attracted billions in investments as of 2022, and companies are eager to hire individuals with interdisciplinary expertise. The pilot project will incorporate a one-week quantum module into IS 300 and another one-week quantum module into IS 471, with future extensions to other courses. The team will employ experiential learning best practices, and will assess effectiveness using in-class games, pre- and post-tests, and end-of-class surveys. The team will disseminate their findings and anticipate this project will contribute to the exploration of quantum education across the campus and outside UMBC.

Proposals for the next round of Hrabowski Fund for Innovation grants are due by October 27, 2023. 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.