Interdisciplinary Student Teams Research Articles

“The Greenhouse of the Future”: Using a Sponsored Competition in a Capstone Course

Horticulture students often lack practical experience integrating information from diverse sources to solve complex real-life problems. Capstone courses seek to remedy this by giving students an opportunity to demonstrate a range of workplace skills such as teamwork, effective communication, and critical thinking. Sponsored competitions provide educators with an active-learning framework into which the goals of a capstone course can be developed. In 1996 the U.S. Dept. of Energy and the Epcot Center announced the “Greenhouse of the Future” competition. The competition sprang from an interest by sponsoring agencies to promote the development of new environmentally sound technologies for greenhouse food production and was open to all U.S. undergraduate students. The competition encouraged the formation of interdisciplinary student teams under the direction of a faculty advisor and offered the winning entry a $10,000 research grant and the opportunity to display the new technology at the Epcot Center in Florida. The M.S.U. entry focused on the development of season-extending energy retention systems designed for small greenhouses, production testing of cool-season, stress-tolerant crops such as Mesclun salad greens, and the use of an environmentally neutral growing system. Sponsored competitions present an important tool for achieving certain educational objectives and may be one way to help students think on a higher level. Encouragement and development of similar competitions within the green industry is needed. Competition guidelines, components of the M.S.U. winning entry, and integration of the competition into the capstone course “Greenhouse Management” will be discussed.

Teams in a community setting: the AUHS experience.

The Pennsylvania Local Interdisciplinary Team was created to develop and implement an innovative model for the education of students from multiple disciplines and institutions in the theory and practice of quality improvement. The lead poisoning prevention project is presented as an example of the work of an interdisciplinary student team in a community setting in Philadelphia.

User-centered design and usability testing of a web site: An illustrative case study

Administrators at a large midwestern university recognized that their World Wide Web site was rapidly becoming an important factor in recruiting new students. They also expected this Web site to serve many different types of information needs for existing students, faculty, staff, and alumni. an interdisciplinary team of faculty, graduate students, and staff was formed to evaluate the existing Web site. A group from this team first conducted a needs analysis to determine the kinds of information the target population was seeking. This analysis led to the creation of a new information structure for the Web site. Usability tests of the both the new and old designs were conducted on paper. Users were able to find answers to frequently asked questions much more rapidly and successfully with the new information structure. This structure was further refined through additional usability tests conducted on the Web itself. This descriptive case study illustrates the value of user-centered design and usability testing of World Wide Web sites.

Interdisciplinary student health teams: combining medical education and service in a rural community-based experience.

Several initiatives have been introduced over the years to address the maldistribution of health care professionals and to improve access to care for underserved rural populations. One of these is the sponsorship of community-based, service-oriented teams comprised of students from various health disciplines. This study investigated extramural training as a complement to traditional hospital-based experiences. The specific objective of the study was to determine the extent to which the nation's medical schools combine training with a rural community-based experience in the form of an interdisciplinary student health team program. In the fall of 1994, a 32-item questionnaire was mailed to the chief academic or clinical affairs administrators of the nation's 126 allopathic medical schools. A total of 104 (82.5%) medical schools responded to the survey. Eighty-six of the respondents (82.7%) reported some type of rural training or public service activity; 22 (21.2%) acknowledged the sponsorship of an interdisciplinary student health team program. Small rural communities, those with populations of 5,000 or fewer, were the focus of 76 percent of the reporting programs. Nearly two-thirds of the reporting programs were located in the South, the region with the nation's lowest physician-to-population ratio. The nursing and medical professions were most frequently represented, although a wide range of disciplines were identified as participating on the student health teams. Activities of the teams included both ambulatory care and community outreach services. The majority of the programs used team-building exercises to enhance team effectiveness. Extramural training programs offer students a realistic examination of the social, cultural, economic, and political forces that influence both individual and community health. Rural community-based programs, such as interdisciplinary student health teams, should be valued because they can strengthen the link between the sponsoring institution's educational mission and its public service obligation.

How can sociology contribute to integrating service learning into Academic curricula?

This article argues that sociology can make a unique contribution to the integration of service experiences into the academic content of courses across the curriculum. By virtue of its theoretical, conceptual, methodological and pedagogical legacies, sociology contributes to an understanding of the potential and promise of community service for academic inquiry. The article describes a unique venture in which an interdisciplinary team of faculty and students designed a major and minor in Public and Community Service Studies using service learning pedagogy. [E]ducation is a dialectic of life and mind, of body and spirit, in which the two are inextricably bound together. Neither acknowledges how awkward this makes it for a liberal arts university at once to serve and challenge society, to simultaneously “transmit” fundamental values such as tolerance, responsibility, and love of learning and to create a climate in which students are not merely conditioned by what is transmitted (transmission tends toward indoctrination). Such a university must stand apart from society in order to give students room to breathe and grow free from a too-insistent reality. At the same time, it must stand within the real world and its limits in order to prepare students for real lives in a society that, it they do not mold it to their aspirations, will mold them to its conventions. Benjamin R. Barber, An Aristocracy of Everyone1992: pp. 208–9

Behavioral Team-Building in a Third-World Steelworks: Efficiency and Ethics

The following article is a progress report and behavioral analysis of progress. The progress reported and analyzed is the collective achievement of an interdisciplinary team of professors and students of the Universidad Simon Bolivar and teams of workers, technicians and engineers employed by the SIDOR Steelworks. If credit is to be given for this progress, it belongs to all of the individuals involved. The authors' task here is primarily to report and interpret the project and its results using the proper behavioral vocabulary.