I recently finished teaching an intersession introductory microbiology course. It was a relatively small class (at least, for me) – just over 50 students – and it was a blended, flipped class. (I may post more about the flipping/blending later.) For the in-person classes, I used a couple of Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) web-based classroom interaction systems: Lecture Tools and Learning Catalytics. (In previous offerings of the course, I used clickers.) In this post, I’ll refer to these types of systems as WRS (Web Response Systems). We had access to both systems (at no cost to the students*), and used Lecture Tools regularly.
I just finished my intersession course (yay!), and am trying to catch up on some reading. Schinske and Tanner’s “Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently)” paper, recently published in CBE-Life Sciences Education includes lots of good stuff: a brief history of grading in higher ed, purposes of grading (feedback and motivation to students; comparing students; measuring student knowledge/mastery) and ending with “strategies for change” to help instructors who want to maximize benefits of grading while reducing the pitfalls. There are many interesting points and suggestions in this paper, and hopefully it will be one of the ones we discuss in an upcoming oCUBE journal club meeting.
In the meantime … anyone else want to chat about some of the stuff discussed in the paper? <:-)
Is it time for me to move away from clickers? Can I use an online system that will do the job, and make use of devices that students already own (and can use for other purposes, unlike clickers)?
In most of my larger classes, I’ve found clickers (classroom response systems) very helpful in providing feedback to both students and me, encouraging discussion … and waking up students in 8:30 classes! Classroom response systems, as educational technologies, can be helpful tools but also have potential pitfalls; how they are used makes a huge difference in terms of outcomes. (Want to know more about clickers? Here’s a plug for an essay I wrote back in 2008 – and the references within).
[Note – I find clickers useful in LARGE classes. In my dream-teaching-world, I’d have class sizes that would allow me to do a lot more interaction with all my students that wouldn’t require technology!]
As tools, they may not be the only (nor the best) option available. I didn’t expect clickers to actually be around all that long – I’d figured technology would emerge that allowed students to use their own devices to do the same thing (and, hopefully, more). Indeed, we now have both free (e.g., Four Good Alternatives to Clicker Systems) and commercial systems that provide this functionality (e.g., LectureTools, Learning Catalytics, Top Hat). Until recently, some things discouraged me from using these alternatives – technical barriers, and financial concerns – so I’ve continued to use clickers.
There are reasons to avoid using “prokaryote” in biology teaching. So, why are so many biologists resistant to the idea?
Why not use “prokaryote”? Norman Pace published a one-page piece in Nature, “Time for a change” that raised concern about use of “prokaryote” (in education), and the common biology textbook paradigm of splitting organisms up into prokaryotes vs. eukaryotes. Pace highlighted many of the differences between archaea and bacteria, discussed evolutionary relationships/history, and made a case for avoiding use of the term prokaryote with students. (Check out the 2005 article by Jan Sapp discussing the history behind the prokaryote-eukaryote dichotomy, too.) Pace expanded on this with a lengthier educational piece in 2008.
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!
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 recently finished teaching an intersession introductory microbiology course. It was a relatively small class (at least, for me) – just over 50 students – and it was a blended, flipped class. (I may post more about the flipping/blending later.) For the in-person classes, I used a couple of Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) web-based classroom interaction systems: Lecture Tools and Learning Catalytics. (In previous offerings of the course, I used clickers.) In this post, I’ll refer to these types of systems as WRS (Web Response Systems). We had access to both systems (at no cost to the students*), and used Lecture Tools regularly.
Nucleoid 