Marine Mystery Organisms: Learning Marine Ecology with Whales, Not Flashcards

My college introductory oceanography students—mostly non-science majors—think scientists sit around making up new terms. Despite my teasing warnings that I want to ban flashcards (and online versions such as Quizlet) from my classroom, my students enthusiastically embrace the cards as a study method for learning all those new words. And indeed, we must learn the definitions of words before we can use them. But memorizing definitions is a lowest-level activity in Bloom’s influential taxonomy of learning (Bloom et al., 1956), updated by Anderson et al. (2001). My students don’t aspire to be scientists, but I aspire for them to learn at a higher level. I don’t just want “remembering,” I want “comprehending,” “applying,” and maybe even a touch of “analyzing.” I want them to practice as they learn, a point emphasized over and over again in my class.