UGA's Department of Biological Sciences is hiring a new biology educator to replace Paula Lemons, who accepted a job offer with Molecular / Cell Biology. Due to my interest in biology education, I was asked (along with Ermegersh Furgerson and several other graduate students) to get lunch with each candidate. Today, we had the pleasure of eating with Dr. Luanna Prevost, an alum of UGA's Department of Plant Biology. She is utilizing interesting technology (<---- this makes it relevant) and statistics to analyze written assessments in biology classes containing 300+ students. Multiple choice assessments are the norm in such a large class, however the shortcomings of these types of questions are evident. Utilizing technology may make it possible to assess a student's written work and get a more holistic view of how each student is learning. As lunch progressed, we learned about the various activities Luanna has engaged in as a postdoctoral researcher, and it got me very excited for the next step of my academic journey. I'm very excited to meet more candidates!
Second order of business: I'm strongly considering using a Wiki in my Introduction to Plant Biology laboratory section. A major project in the lab is for each student to produce a lab report detailing their exploration of enzyme activity. I though it could be interesting to create a Wiki where students could share pictures, data, methods, etc. My thought is that this may facilitate the lab report process, making it less painful and more productive for students.
Matthew Furgerson tried to give me lip in FFP today, and I was like:
Do your students already have access to an ELC page for the Plant Bio lab? If the answer is yes, then how will you motivate them to use a Wiki more/more productively than an ELC page? My thought is that ELC isn't very user friendly and Wikis are structured more like blogs and other social media they might be familiar with, so I'm not sure if this will be an issue or not. Just wondering if you'd thought about it.
ReplyDeleteMy other 2 questions for you about this are:
1) How will you make sure they don't cheat/plagiarize after looking at a Wiki like this? Lots of my lab students have trouble with accidental plagiarism when they work in groups or partners but then are asked to write individual lab reports.
2) Have you thought about contributing to lab report goodness through the Wiki yourself? Ex: post a poor graph and ask people to comment on what element they would change to improve it (it has no standard deviations, no legend, weird units, etc.)
Virginia! All really good points and questions. Yes, I think a Wiki could give the students a much cleaner web environment to work with.
DeleteI have a nice long chat about academic honesty at the beginning of each semester. Partially, because many students don't know what all consititues academic dishonesty (even though they sign an agreement). I cover incidents of accidental dishonesty because it is such a common occurance especially when students are collaborating on a laboratory report.
I LOVE the idea of posting poor examples of methods or graphs and having the students discuss them!
That is very exciting that you got to chat with the candidate and that she's been working with technology within large classrooms. Did she share any of here findings? Any tips for utilizing such things?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think that involving a Wiki into your lab section would be a great idea! Most students find that lab reports are very overwhelming and I think that by setting this site up, they could use it as a place to share information, discuss problems and findings or develop their ideas.
The candidate was a lot of fun! She did share some of her results and it appears that the system they are implementing can predict the correct (human grader assigned) grade something like 85% of the time. This number should only go up as the system gets trained on more student responses!
DeleteAny thoughts on addressing Virginia's questions? How could you demonstrate to students what would be inappropriate for the wiki?
ReplyDeleteNice owl.