Measuring a student’s perception of active learning activities may provide valuable insight into their engagement and subsequent performance outcomes. A recently published measure, the Assessing Student Engagement in Class Tool (ASPECT), was developed to assess student perceptions of various active learning environments.
Instructors want students to be prepared for class. There are several different resources and activities available to help students prepare for class, but very little is known about how students choose to prepare for class in the context of undergraduate biology.
A call for the integration of research experiences into all biology curricula has been a major goal for educational reform efforts nationally. Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have been the predominant method of accomplishing this, but their associated costs and complex design can limit their wide adoption.
In classroom studies of mammalian embryology, students must fully grasp the cellular and tissue remodeling needed to initiate gastrulation to ensure comprehension of forthcoming developmental processes such as tissue specification and organogenesis. However, quickly and completely communicating three-dimensional concepts such as gastrulation, neurulation, and embryonic folding through common two-dimensional tools such as PowerPoint is challenging for students because this method lacks the spatial orientation needed to fully understand development.
We present a resource for instructors that contains results and data sets from the Ames test. Our aim is to share the results we have collected in previous semesters with other instructors, so they will be able to “conduct” the Ames test without the need to set foot in a laboratory classroom.
We used quantitative methods to better understand the perceptions of students in an introductory biology course (Biology 101) at a small, liberal arts college (SLAC) that is also a primarily white institution (PWI). In pre/post surveys, we asked students questions related to their attitudes and beliefs about their professor, classmates, and Biology 101.
The emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria represents a growing threat in aquatic ecosystems. In this combined field and laboratory activity, students will determine whether
Escherichia coli
, an indicator bacteria species commonly found in aquatic ecosystems, shows signs of resistance to common antibiotics.
Specifications (specs) grading is a grading system in which mastery of specific educational outcomes is the basis for the final grade a student earns in the course. Implementation of the types of assessments used for specs grading has shown to be beneficial for student learning and motivation compared to traditional grading systems. We designed a specs grading strategy in an undergraduate Cell Biology course, creating 20 individual learning outcomes (LOs).
Scientific education provides a set of tools to make sense of a complex world by teasing out complicated cause-and-effect relationships, such as the elimination of effects of confounding factors in controlled experiments. There is evidence that depth of understanding of controlled experiments is lacking among undergraduate science students despite exposure to controlled experiments in courses.
Conceptual teaching relies on concepts in conjunction with a bigger conceptual category (or categories). Revealing and using conceptual conjunctions in the science classroom means teaching conceptually.
Modifying the ASPECT Survey to Support the Validity of Student Perception Data from Different Active Learning Environments