Older Assessment Case Study Series

These studies all deal with educational uses of technology and all provide evidence that well designed studies can be quite valuable - more than justifying the time and money needed to do the study. Many, though not all, of the following studies are based on the kinds of ideas at the heart of the Flashlight Program (e.g., discovering what people actually do with technology; using data to improve outcomes) and some used Flashlight tools.

(last updated February 22, 2004)

Since 2002, we have published Flashlight case studies in F-LIGHT, our free e-newsletter on assessment; click here to go this list of case studies.  Studies of educational uses of technology that did not involve use of Flashlight tools (and some additional uses of Flashlight) can be found in the articles section of this Web site. What follows is a listing of older case studies that were not published in F-LIGHT.

David Starrett and Michael Rodgers of SE Missouri State studied who was being served by their institution's online courses. The University's investment in helping faculty use technology had been justified in large part by the hope that the resulting courses would serve students across the University's service area, students not close to campus. Their data indicated that online courses were serving precisely these students. 

Patti Derbyshire (Mount Royal College) and Steve Ehrmann of the Flashlight Program teamed up to do an external evaluation of Project JSTOR. This program's goal was to foster increases in use of online journals (JSTOR) and information literacy. This external evaluation looked at the program's strategy and found that the effort to help faculty and librarians team up to improve or redesign courses had been especially successful in fostering increased use of online journals institution-wide, even though these small grants had focused on only a few people in each institution and even though Project JSTOR had also offered successful workshops and effective small grants to support institution-wide dissemination. For more detail, click here.

Ann Haffer and Linda Downing report on a workshop series at California State University, Sacramento, designed to help faculty members learn how to do studies of technology use in their courses: studies that focus on the faculty member's own hopes for the course. Haffer and Downing report that the workshops went well. Perhaps the greatest benefit was that faculty members were immediately guided by Flashlight's activity-centered approach to rethink elements of course structure and content. The authors also found that faculty were more likely to succeed if the workshops were supplemented by one-to-one follow-up. Click here to read the full article. 

Inge Schmidt of Notre Dame College of Ohio reports on their initial studies of a laptop leasing program. She and her colleagues found interesting differences between courses in high tech fields versus low tech fields but, in general, students in the pilot program were virtually unanimous about the ways computer use helped them learn better.

Kevin Oliver of Virginia Tech reported on their study of instructional uses of CourseInfo, a Web Course Management System, in a recent issue of F-LIGHT.

In this article published in THE Journal, Robin Zuniga and Patti Derbyshire summarized what Flashlight is about and then discuss the use of Flashlight ideas and tools in a sustained program of inquiry and evaluation at Mount Royal College in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.  Patti Derbyshire, one of the leading Flashlight consultants, has been doing a nice series of studies with colleagues at Mount Royal. Not only have their findings been useful; the way the studies are described is, I think, exceptionally clear. Check out their Web site for some of their surveys and findings.

Brown, Gary (1998) "Flashlight at Washington State University: Multimedia Presentation, Distance Learning, and At-Risk Students at Washington State University," in Stephen C. Ehrmann and Robin Etter Zuniga, The Flashlight Evaluation Handbook (1.0), Washington, DC: The TLT Group. Gary Brown reports on studies of the use of multimedia for presentation (versus slides) and, much better, multimedia used as a tool by at-risk students in a seminar program that seems to have really helped them improve their freshman grades.

Harrington, Susanmarie (1998) "The Flashlight Project and an Introductory Writing Course Sequence: Investigation as a Basis for Change," in Stephen C. Ehrmann and Robin Etter Zuniga, The Flashlight Evaluation Handbook (1.0), Washington, DC: The TLT Group. Harrington reports on an extensive comparison of composition courses taught at IUPUI in computer classrooms and in traditional facilities, looking both at their costs and at the teaching-learning methods employed.

David Anderson, a chemistry professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, studied the use of the Web and other technologies in two of his courses. A summary of his findings can be found in a recent issue of F-LIGHT, our free electronic newsletter. From there, if you're interested, you can go to his Web site to see the course surveys he created with the aid of the Flashlight Current Student Inventory.