Questions or Goals

Can initiatives based on team work, article reading, question posing, class discussions, and presentation projects improve students' abilities to read, discuss and critique articles? Experience and ad-hoc evidence suggests the answer is yes, but how can such learning gains actually be measured? This project is experimenting with assessment options to demonstrate improvement in these skills.

Implementation

In eosc212, team work, article reading, question posing, class discussions, and presentation projects have been a part of the course for several years. In fall 2008 we improved the team work activities related to question posing and article reading, but did not succeed in implementing assessments which demonstrated improvements.

In fall 2009 we are introducing assessment of question posing, increasing support of science thinking skills by refering to a Model Based Reasoning framework, reducing the number of topics covered, and introducing a capstone exercise to both explicitly re-visit skill development and enable pre-post assessemnt of science thinking skills.

For fall 2010 teaching term, M. Jellinek implemented a number of adjustments to focus both the question posing task and the ability to think and work with models and data.

People (contacts)

• Francis Jones is STLF for project
• M. Jellinek is co-instructor in this course.
• M. Bostock is co-instructor in this course.

Products (papers, presentations, etc)

• July 2011: All presentations at WCSE. Ours from EOS in UBC: Teaching, learning and assessing scientific skills early in an undergraduate degree
• June 2011: List of 42 references organized into categories.
• May 2011: Abstract of our contribution at The Western Conference on Science Education (London Ontario), July 6,7,8 2011.
  Teaching, learning and assessing generic scientific skills early in an undergraduate degree:
     Learning goals related to generic scientific skills often appear in courses ranging from basic nature-of-science courses to specialized graduate courses. This presentation focuses upon impacts on second year students of a course designed expressly to promote skills associated with critical scientific thinking, synthesis and presentation, and framing of scientific arguments or questions. Based on "best practices" from the literature, specific aspects of scientific expertise were first identified and corresponding learning goals were articulated. Then, learning activities and assessments were developed based on an active, team-based approach to learning and instruction. Examples include workshops on reading, writing and question posing; regular journal readings with synthesis and questioning assignments; team-based quizzing and data analysis exercises;  discursive rather than didactic instruction; oral and poster-based presentation projects with peer assessment; and pre-post assessments of model-based reasoning skills. Success was measured based on student improvements at these tasks and several types of student feedback.
      First we will present our experiences designing, developing and assessing this course.  Results include demonstrable improvements in model-based reasoning, abstract writing, questioning abilities and student attitudes towards scientific communication. Particular attention will be paid to the challenging task of teaching and measuring question posing abilities. If time permits, a short activity will be included aimed at identifying opportunities for transferring lessons we have learned into courses taught by others.  We anticipate that discussions with colleagues will contribute towards understanding and refinement of learning goals and pedagogies that increase scientific expertise among undergraduate science students.
   
  
• December 2010: Poster and handout (with references) presented at AGU, December 2010.
• April 2010: Poster, presented at the CWSEI end of year event, April 2010, and CWSEI-ACPEEP meeting June 2010.

Intentions and anticipated benefits to undergraduate learning

Development of scientific thinking skills is a common "teaching goal" but it is recognized as difficult to both actively foster and usefully measure. Results of our experiments in this course will hopefully shed light on ways of improving and measuring scientific thinking for students in their 2nd year of a University Science program.

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