Ithaca College

Stephen Sweet (Dana Professor of Sociology) and Susan Ferguson (Professor of Sociology at Grinnell College) have been awarded a $258,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for their project “Curriculum Mapping Tool for Sociology: Implementation, Assessment and Dissemination.”

Sweet and Ferguson served on the American Sociological Association’s Task Force on the Undergraduate Major and developed the Curriculum Mapping Tool for Sociology (CMTS) to help departments evaluate program strengths and weaknesses with respect to the task force’s recommendations. NSF funding will enable the investigators to further develop and disseminate the CMTS, engage 150 sociology departments in program assessment, benchmark prevailing curriculum designs that exist across programs, and determine the impact of curriculum mapping on program revision efforts. If successful, the project has potential to serve as a model for curriculum advancement in other STEM disciplines.