The Office of Assessment would like to extend congratulations to Dr. Luciane Maimone of the Modern and Classical Languages department. Dr. Maimone won an assessment grant intended to evaluate student learning in online introductory Spanish courses as compared to seated courses.

Dr. Maimone’s research team plans to assess student proficiency in both spoken and written Spanish. Additionally, Dr. Maimone’s project encourages and enables students to perform self-evaluations. Students’ increased self-awareness of their own learning will enhance their confidence and academic performance.

Dr. Maimone says of her assessment grant, “The Modern and Classical Language Department engages in different forms of program evaluation to validate course assessments and curriculum design. During the next two semesters we hope to extend these efforts and collect data to compare student achievement on seated versus online Spanish courses. The information gathered through program valuation of our online courses will be used to inform best practices and create guidelines for the teaching of languages online at MSU. The grant will be used to compensate graduate students in the Master of Applied Second Language Acquisition Program who wish to participate in the program evaluation process, providing them with additional experience in testing procedures, language assessment, and data collection.”

It is estimated that Dr. Maimone’s project will impact around 450 students. Thanks to Dr. Maimone’s initiative, faculty members will discover how to improve online teaching methods.