Code no. _________

Indiana University Bloomington
INFORMED CONSENT STATEMENT

Course Portfolio Study, Study #______

E538 Students: You are invited to participate in a study that has two simultaneous aims:

• It is part of a multi-university Peer Review Project designed to find ways to document teaching effectiveness, so that teaching quality can be used more readily as a criterion in university decisions on promotion and tenure of faculty in the nation’s universities. Specifically, Prof. Parkhurst plans to produce an example “Course Portfolio,” to aid in a test of whether such documents can provide information useful for promotion and tenure committees.

• To provide information that may help your instructor to improve learning in this course, both this semester and in the future, and to help instructors of similar courses elsewhere in the future.

This is not an “experimental” study in the sense that some participants will be treated differently from others. Rather, its purpose is to allow Prof. Parkhurst to gather data on the effectiveness his instructional methods, methods that have been found generally successful in the past. Although incremental changes are made each year with the hope of improving your learning, those changes would be made, in both sections of this course, regardless of the existence of this study, and regardless of your participation in it.

The study will be conducted within the context of your regularly scheduled class sessions, and your participation is not expected to require any added out-of-class time. The study will be based on three types of information, and you may choose individually whether or not to allow use of each of these kinds of data as they pertain to you. Professor Parkhurst will have no information about your consent or non-consent to provide these data until after course grades have been submitted to the registrar. The three types of data are:

• A pre-test and post-test that will ask you the same or similar questions both today and on the last day of class. Neither of these will affect your grade, and no identifying information will be available to the instructor until after course grades have been submitted to the registrar. The professor will view the pre-test answers to provide information about where to concentrate teaching efforts in the course, but a coding system will prevent individual names from being associated with individual papers until after course grades have been assigned.

• Grades on individual exams that you take during the semester will be used by the instructor in the usual ways to determine your course grade, regardless of your participation in the study. In addition, with your consent, the instructor may wish to correlate those grades with other data collected, and to choose example answers to illustrate his judgments of answer quality and to illustrate what students have learned from the course.

• With your additional consent, the instructor will obtain from university records—again after grades have been turned in—data on your GRE scores, undergraduate GPA, and prior grades in particular courses like math and statistics. The intent will be to search for correlations with other data obtained in the study.

In any reports or publications that result from this study, all identifiers will be removed and no reference will be made to individual students in any way that could allow you to be identified. In planning the study, Prof. Parkhurst has not noted any way in which your making these forms of information available to him would be detrimental to you. However, federal regulations and Indiana University policy require, quite legitimately, that all human subjects including students be informed about studies involving them, and be allowed to choose whether or not to participate.

Thus, your participation in this study is voluntary. There will be no penalty for not participating. If you decide now to participate, you may withdraw from the study at any time. After completion of the study, Prof. Parkhurst will be happy to discuss the results with you. Should you have any questions while the study is in progress, or should you decide any time to withdraw, please contact the person who is collecting this consent form _[colleague to be determined]_ by email
(@indiana.edu) or by calling ____________. After the study is over and your grade had been posted, Prof. Parkhurst  will be willing to answer any questions, or to withdraw your data if you so request in writing.

If you are willing to participate in the study, please sign one of the two copies of this form and return it to the person administering the pre-test today. The second copy is for you to keep for reference. If you feel you have not been treated according to the descriptions in this form, or that your rights as a participant have not been honored during the course of this project, you may contact the Human Subjects Committee, Bryan Hall 110, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, (812) 855-3067, or by email at iub_hsc@indiana.edu

We appreciate your considering participation, and for aiding in the goals outlined at the beginning of this document.

Thank you—Prof. David F. Parkhurst, SPEA 355, parkhurs@indiana.edu, 812-855-4556

CONSENT
I have read and understand the above information and have received a copy of this form. I agree to allow the instructor to obtain and use the types of information marked below in this study, and in reports that may follow from it. (Please initial appropriate boxes to indicate your choices, and then sign the form.)

Subject’s signature ______________________________ Date _______________

Consent form date:  November 11, 2000