Teaching Development Activities for the 1195/96 School Year

Scott Cooper October 24, 2005

Course Portfolio for BIO 103 and 105:

Introductory Biology and General Biology

Cooperative Teaching

Introductory Biology (BIO 103) and General Biology (BIO 105) are both four-credit General Education courses with three hours of lecture and two hours of lab per week. The BIO 103 and 105 courses each have 3-7 sections of 100-140 students in a typical semester. The courses were developed and are taught in a fairly unique way, in that all of the instructors work together to develop the lecture materials, and use the same PowerPoint lectures in their classroom. This allows us to draw from the broad expertise of the entire faculty in choosing content, stories and assignments for students. While we make use of our colleague’s expertise, we each give all of the lectures in our section of the course. We call this cooperative teaching, as opposed to team teaching where an “expert” only talks about their area of specialty. To date, 10 instructors in our department have been involved in the cooperative development of these courses, meeting weekly during the semester (Appendix A). We have also been involved in two Lesson Study projects, which are similar to our cooperative teaching approach, but goes a step further and critically assesses student learning in a single lesson (Appendix B). In addition to improving student learning, side benefits of this arrangement include; increased collegiality among the faculty, a package of tested teaching materials for new lecturers and continuity in an important prerequisite course for our majors. We have also worked cooperatively to rewrite our lab manual, with eight co-authors. A typical syllabus for the lecture and lab is in Appendix C.

Teaching and Learning Philosophy

Traditional introductory biology courses are very content heavy, with an emphasis on memorizing terms and definitions. We were concerned that students would quickly forget what they had learned, and would not be able to use what they had learned in later classes. We made the decision to focus less on memorization of facts, and more on application of concepts learned in class to solving problems. To decide what content to keep, we asked instructors in our core courses to identify what concepts they would like to see stressed. In some of the problem solving exercises we ask students to apply basic concepts to understand and solve problems related to key concepts covered in class. This helps to reinforce these key concepts, and lets the students see the importance of these concepts in understanding many biological processes. Other problems are related to current issues in the news. These are designed to allow students to see that the concepts being learned in class have relevance in their daily lives.

The BIO 103/105 labs were traditional "cookbook" exercises in which students worked alone, conducting experiments that required little more than filling in blanks in their lab manual. We revised our Introductory Biology labs in 2000 to include a "student active pedagogy" in which groups of students design and perform some of their own experiments. The format of the lab portion of the course has also changed from 12 individual labs to a format of three units each lasting four weeks (Appendix C). In the new format, the students work in teams to solve problems, design experiments, analyze data and prepare reports. This allows students to get a more realistic experience of how science is practiced.

Teaching Strategies and Methods

Our teaching philosophy centers on replacing some of the content in our introductory biology courses with problem solving activities. These activities occur in lecture, through out-of-class assignments, and on exams. During lectures students are often asked to interpret data and solve problems. In-class problem solving allows students to immediately apply what they have learned, and allows instructors to identify and clarify any misconceptions. We use several methods to integrate problem-solving activities into large lecture sections. The most common are in-class multiple-choice questions directly in the PowerPoint presentation (Appendix D). In 2005 we adopted a textbook that came with personal response systems, essentially remote control “clickers”, that students use to answer questions in class. Although we have had some technical glitches, these have proven useful in allowing instructors to rapidly gauge where students are having difficulty in lecture. This system has also been shown to be more inclusive of students, such as women and minorities, who are less likely to yell out an answer in a large classroom.

While immediate application of concepts learned in class to solve problems helps to cement these key concepts, these questions do not allow students time for reflection, or to solve more complex problems. We have developed both in-class (formative) and out-of-class (summative) exercises for this purpose. In-class we use a method we have termed “collect and project”. Students are given a worksheet or a half sheet of scrap paper, and given a more complex problem to solve in lecture. The students then work with their neighbors in groups and write down their solution to the problem. The instructor then collects the student work, and projects a few representative examples for discussion. They can either point out which examples would be correct, or ask the class to indicate which they think is most accurate. An advantage of these formative assessment tools is that they allow the instructor to identify misconceptions or misunderstandings while everyone is still in class and there is an opportunity to make corrections (Appendix E).

We use a couple of out-of-class problem solving exercises. Some involve reading assignments or web exercises followed by a set of questions for the students to answer. They then take an on-line quiz on D2L to assess their understanding of the materials (Appendix F). A novel adaptation of the “collect and project” model we have used the past two years involves assigning different groups of students a question to answer, and then asking them to prepare a single PowerPoint slide with their results. These are put in a D2L drop box, and the instructor collects these and puts them into the next lecture (Appendix G). In this way the students analyze part of the data presented in class, and the instructor has an opportunity to add to or clarify key concepts. This work was funded by two grants, one from UWL and one from UW-System (Appendix H).

In the new labs, students are given the opportunity to design and perform some of their own experiments. We moved from a course with 12 independent, unconnected labs to a course with three units that each last four weeks. Each unit consists of four interconnected labs, and in some cases, experiments that span several weeks. At the end of the unit, groups of students collaboratively write a lab report in which they explain the rationale for their experiment, the methods used, the analysis of their results, and a discussion of the significance of these results. This is a much more realistic scientific experience, and reinforces the problem solving skills stressed in lecture. We were also successful in obtaining a NSF-CCLI grant to purchase digital cameras attached to microscopes so that students could put pictures of what they were seeing under the microscope into their lab reports. This also allows them to view and discuss their results more easily, as compared to one student at a time looking through a microscope (Appendix H).

Evidence of Student Learning

In these large introductory courses we are forced to rely more heavily on multiple-choice questions. We typically use a GRE/MCAT format in the exam in which students read a short passage and have to use some problem solving skills to answer a series of multiple-choice questions related to the passage. Some instructors also give one to two short answer questions on each exam; however, with 100-140 students in a typical class, this is about the limit to what can be graded in a reasonable amount of time. We have also demonstrated that in-class problem solving by students followed by feedback and formative assessment improves student learning as measured with both free response and multiple-choice questions (Appendix E). These improvements persist for several semesters but eventually fade, stressing the importance of making strong connections between introductory and second tier courses (Appendix I). While recollection of specific content does appear to wane over the semesters, instructors have reported that students in upper level courses do seem better at problem solving, especially in lecture settings (Appendix J). A survey of the students indicates that 90% like in-class problem solving, and rate it as the most effective factor in preparing them for exams, above the lecture, textbook, and notes placed on D2L (AppendixK).

In the labs, students learn the basics of writing a scientific lab report, which they will use repeatedly throughout their major. Student performance on lab quizzes and exams improved slightly in the laboratory as compared with the traditional lab.

Future Goals

Continue assessing student misconceptions and improving the in-class problem-solving exercises.
Explore new methods to make large classes more interactive.
Improve laboratories to make them contain more student-active exercises.

Appendices
Quotes on Cooperative Teaching
Teaching Improvement Profile for Lesson Study Project
Lecture and Lab Syllabus
Stone Soup presentation on in-class problem-solving exercises
Formative Assessment Article
NYT articles on modification of starch and cell division
Student “posters” for population exercise
Grants
Long term retention of material learned in Introductory Biology
Quotes on impact on second tier courses
Student Assessment of Learning Gains