Yesterday, an article was published by the Globe and Mail, “For a new kind of professor, teaching comes first“* by James Bradshaw. The story raised some positive points (e.g., qualified academics may prefer to focus on teaching; educational research is carried out by some teaching-focussed professors). Unfortunately, there were some inaccuracies about teaching-focussed faculty positions at York University, and some disheartening statements from James Turk, Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT/ACPPU). The CAUT/ACPPU is supposed to represent all sorts of university/college staff members, not only research faculty. (It may not be common knowledge that there are teaching-stream faculty positions at many Ontario universities already, although we are in the minority compared to research stream faculty.)
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!
We had our first #microhangout today! I really enjoyed getting to chat with other microbiologists (all of whom were hundreds or thousands of kilometers away from me, geographically). A huge thanks to the folks who participated!
I’ll likely post on some of the stuff we discussed (and topics for possible future discussions) soon. More generally, I just found myself reflecting on all the technologies we used in setting up and having our chat … Some early musings posted on Twitter to see who might be interested in a virtual meeting, a Doodle poll to find a suitable day/time, and Google+ Hangouts for the actual conversation (with some documents shared on Google Drive relating to our topic). It wasn’t all seamless – I’ve now learned that I must check and double-check time zones in Doodle, and there were some hurdles using Google+ Hangouts. Still, within a few minutes of our start time, we had folks interested in microbiology education from Canada, the U.S.A., and the U.K. all having a conversation in real time.
When the technology works, and allows us to make these kinds of connections, communicate, and collaborate, it’s awesome.
Tomorrow will be the first Microbiology Educator Google+ Hangout. I’m a little nervous about using a new technology (especially given that I recently made a silly mistake with a technology I’ve used a lot over the past few years!!!), but am also keen to see if this works better than other online collaboration/conferencing systems, like BlackBoard Collaborate. (The maximum of 10 participants is one limitation that I can see with the G+ Hangouts – not an issue right now, though.)
To prepare, I’ve been trying to verify the email addresses of the folks who participated in the Doodle poll – I’ll need the email addresses to send invites. For anyone who’s interested, I’d be happy to do a “mini-hangout” later today or tomorrow morning, so we can test the system.
Apologies for my confusion – my Doodle time zone settings were off
Thanks to all the folks who participated in the Doodle poll (now closed) for our first #microbiologyhangout! Wednesday, July 31 from noon-1 PM (EDT)* was the only time slot chosen by all who weighed in.
I’ll post info about Google+ Hangouts once I’ve had a chance to learn (and play!) more …!
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*Update – here are the times in various zones – let me know if I missed anyone!:
Windsor (Canada - Ontario) Wednesday, July 31, 2013 at 12:00:00 Noon EDT UTC-4 hours
Newcastle upon Tyne (United Kingdom - England) Wednesday, July 31, 2013 at 5:00:00 PM BST UTC+1 hour
Edinburgh (United Kingdom - Scotland) Wednesday, July 31, 2013 at 5:00:00 PM BST UTC+1 hour
Montreal (Canada - Quebec) Wednesday, July 31, 2013 at 12:00:00 Noon EDT UTC-4 hours
Raleigh (U.S.A. - North Carolina) Wednesday, July 31, 2013 at 12:00:00 Noon EDT UTC-4 hours
Hamilton (Canada - Ontario) Wednesday, July 31, 2013 at 12:00:00 Noon EDT UTC-4 hours
Glasgow (United Kingdom - Scotland) Wednesday, July 31, 2013 at 5:00:00 PM BST UTC+1 hour
Corresponding UTC (GMT) Wednesday, July 31, 2013 at 16:00:00
If you’re interested in chatting (online) about introductory microbiology concepts (including common misconceptions, troublesome knowledge, threshold concepts), please participate in the Doodle poll to decide on a day/time next week (July 31, Aug. 1 or Aug. 2):
As mentioned in the previous post, I’m hoping to start some online conversations with other microbiology educators soon. As I work on materials for my fall intro micro courses, I’d really appreciate the chance to talk about threshold concepts and misconceptions in microbiology. Here I’ve included some information about what these are, and what I’ve pulled together so far about introductory microbiology concepts.
A threshold, if not a threshold concept.
I’ve been seeing more published evidence and increasing attention to the need for addressing student prior knowledge/misconceptions for effective learning, and the idea that there are key threshold concepts that must be mastered in order to proceed past the “threshold” to subsequent concepts in a discipline. Threshold concepts have a number of characteristics, including that such concepts are considered troublesome, transformative, irreversible, integrative, and bounded. (Check out the references below, especially those from Meyer and Land, if you’d like to know more about threshold concepts.)
Some work has been done in a number of domains to identify threshold concepts and common misconceptions (TC/MC henceforth). (An interesting workshop “Troublesome concepts ACROSS the sciences” was offered earlier in the month at the Western Conference on Science Education by researchers at Dalhousie: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/wcse/WCSEThirteen/july09/14 ) A number of people are working to identify TC/MC in biology – see Modell et al 2005, Taylor 2006, Ross et al. 2010, Smith 2012 for just a few examples. However, there is not a lot available (at least, that I have found) in microbiology, with the exception of interesting work by Marbach-Ad et al on host-pathogen interactions (e.g., see 2009 paper and others from this group).
The ASM has published a curriculum guidelines for introductory microbiology (http://www.asm.org/index.php/guidelines/curriculum-guidelines ; see Merkel 2012) which I found incredibly helpful in identifying what students should be learning. Identification of TC/MC could help us (as instructors) develop effective learning activities so that we can better help students progress through the curriculum.
So far, I’ve been collecting some TC/MC that I think are worth focusing on in course development. I’d really appreciate the input of other microbiology educators to expand/clarify this list … and, ultimately, share ideas of how to best address these items in our classes. Below are my notes, such as they are (i.e., probably with many gaps/omissions).
I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to other science/biology educators (as I recently was reminded, at WCSE2013 and the annual oCUBE UnConference). At the moment, I’m working on revamping my microbiology courses for next year, developing online versions of them, along with online resources. I’d like to do more with threshold concepts and addressing common microbiology misconceptions in my teaching, and I am sure that I’m not alone.
Twitter has allowed some interesting/useful conversations on microbiology education, but I’m thinking I’d like to chat with microbio educators beyond 140 character chunks. I don’t know how much interest there will be, but I plan to set up some Google Hangouts (or some other collaborative communication system) where we can discuss some of the educational issues/tips/questions that we might share. I would also like to find ways of sharing some of what we come up with – being as open as possible.
I’ve mentioned this Twitter, and will likely email some folks who come to mind. If you’re interested in this, please drop me a line!
Nucleoid 