I’m working on some information to share with my students about studying/learning strategies. (Note – in my current position, I’m teaching classes to students who have at least one year of university under their belts.) I keep wanting to expand it, but I fear that the chances of students actually reading it are inversely proportional to its length! I am posting it here so that I can get constructive feedback, and hopefully other folks might be able to use some of it (as students or instructors). (Some aspects are specific to the University of Windsor/microbiology, but most of this is pretty general.)
Some studying/learning tips/resources:
I am often asked how to best study (for my classes, and others). Certainly, many students in microbiology have already developed effective studying/learning strategies for university classes, but here are some points about learning that might be helpful:
Figure 4. from Stanger-Hall (2012). “Student evaluations at the end of the semester. The average student evaluation scores from the MC + SA class are shown relative to the MC class (baseline).” Maybe reports of student evaluations of teaching should also include a breakdown of assessments used in each class?
Stanger-Hall conducted a study with two large sections of an introductory biology course, taught in the same term by the same instructor (herself), with differences in the types of questions used on tests for each section. One section was tested on midterms by multiple-choice (MC) questions only, while midterms in the other section included a mixture of both MC questions and constructed-response (CR) questions (e.g., short answer, essay, fill-in-the blank), referred to as MC+SA in the article. She had a nice sample size: 282 students in the MC section, 231 in the MC+SA section. All students were introduced to Bloom’s Taxonomy of thinking skills, informed that 25-30% of exam questions would test higher-level thinking*, and provided guidance regarding study strategies and time. Although (self-reported) study time was similar across sections, students in the MC+SA section performed better on the portion of the final exam common to both groups, and reported use of more active study strategies vs. passive ones. Despite higher performance, the MC+SA students did not like the CR questions, and rated “fairness in grading” lower than those in the MC-only section. (I was particularly struck by Figure 4, illustrating this finding.)
After returning from a week away, and (almost) catching up on emails, I wanted to just share a few of the things that came up in our first #microhangout. There are a number of topics that (at least some) microbiology educators appear to be interested in discussing, including: best practises for teaching certain microbiology topics/concepts/techniques; how to foster integration of concepts (within microbiology, but also across other areas); teaching evolution when students come from a variety of educational backgrounds/exposure to biology; aspects surrounding lecture capture (including privacy); effective use of class time; student attendance in classes (& posting of lecture slides in advance); use of clickers (personal or student response systems); case studies (e.g., see the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science website); the idea of a microbiology education (virtual) journal club; and sharing educational resources. When I get a bit more organized, I’ll see about setting up a poll for choosing a topic for the next #microhangout to be held in the near future. (Let me know if there are other topics that might be of interest!)
I would also appreciate a chance to chat with some microbiology undergrads and grad students about microbiology (concepts, learning), from the undergrad/grad student point of view. Again, I need to sort through some things, but if you are (or know) an undergraduate or graduate student in microbiology who might be interested in this type of discussion, I’d love to hear from you!
I’m working on some information to share with my students about studying/learning strategies. (Note – in my current position, I’m teaching classes to students who have at least one year of university under their belts.) I keep wanting to expand it, but I fear that the chances of students actually reading it are inversely proportional to its length! I am posting it here so that I can get constructive feedback, and hopefully other folks might be able to use some of it (as students or instructors). (Some aspects are specific to the University of Windsor/microbiology, but most of this is pretty general.)
Nucleoid 