Members: James Swartz (Chair), Gerald Adams, Gail Bonath, Pablo Silva, Bob Grey, Jerry Lalonde, Gabe Rosenberg, Kenneth Yeung, Kendra Young, and Kimberly Smith. Guests: Paula Smith and Carol Trosset

1. The minutes from October 9, 2001 were approved as corrected.

2. ART 253: The proposal to add to the course description "may be repeated once for credit" was approved.

3. The proposal from the Anthropology Department to require one year of a foreign language AND one semester of statistics was approved.

4. Assessment of MAPs. Carol Trosset reviewed with the committee reports by faculty directors on approximately 160 MAPs done from the summer of 1999 through the summer of 2001. The committee was interested in the relationship between faculty time and faculty scholarship. Below is a table that Carol has assembled showing that relationship.

In general, MAPs that require more faculty time are more likely to contribute to faculty scholarship.

The following themes emerged from her study:

(1) The need for the MAP experience to extend over more than one unit of time (semester or summer). One common activity that students perform is the learning of background skills and information. The most common obstacle to success is student inexperience and the slowness of student learning curves. The next most frequent is that the project scope was too large for the time available. The most frequently mentioned change desired was for students to do more preparatory work prior to the MAP research experience. Half the students continue working with their MAP director on some aspect of the same project after the official MAP ends.

(2) As a subset of the above, the need for students to do more intensive literature research in support of their own projects. Literature searches are already a common part of MAP projects. Reading the literature is one common version of the "learning of background information" that takes time away from the doing of research. One of the few changes suggested was that some faculty intend in the future to devote more time to teaching students how to do effective literature research, and/or to having students research the relevant literature more widely to provide a good context for their own research.

(3) Faculty scholarship, time, and compensation remain issues. About two thirds of MAPs so far have contributed to faculty scholarship. This is most common in the sciences and least so in the humanities. Compensation of faculty directors, either with release time or money, was mentioned as an important component of the program, but many of those who mentioned it thought that the compensation offered did not adequately reflect the time required by MAP supervision. Time spent by MAP directors varies enormously, partly by discipline, so not every director is performing the same kind of work.

5. The Dean submitted an alternative approach to changes in courses, majors etc. that the committee will discuss at our next meeting.

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