Active Learning in Environmental Science

Applying active learning strategies within the classroom has been shown to benefit students in many ways.  There are a lot of things future educators like about active learning, but my favorite thing is that students who don't usually get the opportunity to, or who don't usually speak up in class now have a setting in order to do so.  As an instructor, I always wonder about the quiet ones.  One of the main learning objectives I would like to target in my Environmental Science class is knowledge about how personal and societal actions affect our environment.  The outcomes I would like students to formulate are a basic understanding of and proposed actions for environmental issues facing our society.  As a result, I like the idea of implementing a group electronic portfolio as an active learning strategy for my class.

I would divide the class randomly into small groups consisting of 4-6 members depending upon class size.   I would then have each group brainstorm an area of Environmental Science that they feel is interesting and publicly controversial to learn more information about.  Upon approving each area and idea, I would then go through and assign the project for each group.  Specific detailed instructions on how healthy group interaction should occur, guidelines for content, and a rubric will be given to students the first day. In addition, the students will be informed how their participation will be graded.  Group feedback and collaboration is encouraged and each group member will be individually assessed by the other 5 group members, as a portion of his/her individual grade.  In addition, each group member will get the opportunity to grade each portion of the final portfolio, and the average overall grade for each section will be included into the final grade for the project, assessed by the instructor.  Each group member would be responsible as "project manager" for a particular portion of the project.  For example, a group decides they are interested in further exploring global warming.  This project can be broken up into sections such as: Greenhouse Effect, Carbon Cycle Interruption, Other Causes of Climate Change, Impacts of Change, and Future Courses of Action to Remedy.  Each of the six members would be "project manager" on one of the six sections of the portfolio.  During class time, and out of class, each component of the portfolio would be completed with all 6 group members.  The project manager's job is to micromanage their section, and make sure everyone is doing an equal weight of work.  Ultimately, the project manager is responsible for all the major decisions, as his or her vision for the section of the portfolio.  The completed group electronic portfolios will be presented to the rest of the class, with each section presented individually by the "project manager" who resided over it.  This means that all students need to remain accountable until the end of the project.  It is also an incentive for each project manager to make their section, and work hard on all other sections to make the project the best that it can be, as it will be shown to the entire class.

I feel that this is a particularly good assignment to evoke collaborative group work because not only will the "project managers" who are helping to clarify the information to others, but all group members will have an increased understanding of the material themselves.  Student usage of correct terminology could also increase as they are planning a professional presentation.  Having the groups small, creates a more comfortable environment for students to receive help from peers or give instruction.  There are enough students in each group so that misconceptions can be addressed and gaps of knowledge filled in, but without alienating group members in front of a large amount of people.  Again, the main reason I chose this assignment was to evoke more participation from quieter students and allow them to create personal connections among group members.  As discussed by Armstrong, Chang, and Brickman, there are many social benefits of being in a group, including more positive psychological energy, feedback, self-interest being modified into joint-interest, benefits to social and communication skills, friendships forming, and successful collaborative learning transferred into other portions of student life.  Promotive interaction skills including: mutual help and assistance, exchange of needed resources, mutual influence, trust, and constructive management of conflict are more of the many benefits to active learning (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 2007).  The portfolio project also leaves plenty of room for formative assessment to occur, while students work collaboratively within their groups.

Student's Role of Assessment

• Student's Role of Assessment:

  
  

    I would like you to briefly (paragraph or two) reflect on assessment from the perspective of the student.  What is the role of assessment for the student?  How should they use it or what do they stand to gain?  Please sumbit post your reflections by Thursday morning at 6 a.m. 

  Personally, I think the role of students in assessment is to be completely honest, both with themselves and the instructor.  This honesty is evident when the instructor asks if one understands something.  Sometimes just a simple "yes" or "no" response  is all it takes for formative assessment to be complete.  If the student is not completely honest, he or she may be missing out on an opportunity to gain feedback about what they think they know or clarification, prompting of metacognition, or even removal of misconceptions.  Another role of students in assessment is to take the feedback and do something with it- throw away the misconception, change study habits, realize they don't know as much as they think they did, or choose another mechanism to problem solve.

  
  

  Tanner and Allen put the importance of the student's role in assessment into perspective for me when they said that it bridges the divide between what is being taught and what is being learned.  It is the student's opportunity to gain insight into what they think they've learned by listening to formative assessment and challenging their ideas, constructs, or conceptions if they were wrong or had a superficial understanding.  Finally, toward the end of the unit or chapter, the students receive concrete evidence on what they actually do know via measures of summative assessment.  If both students and teachers work together on assessment, students at this point should fully know if they know something.

Deepened understanding of Formative Assessment

Formative Assessment Revisited

Today's exercise asked you to apply the Backward Design framework to create a unit on formative assessment.  How, if at all, did this activity change and/or deepen your understanding of formative assessment?  How would you describe to one of your science colleagues what the most salient features of formative assessment are? 

My group members, Alberto, Carrie, and I had a very easy time with this assignment.  While it is supposed to take approximately 3 hours, with three of us, 50 minutes was almost enough time to pour our ideas into one solid "backwards design" template.  We utilized the information that we read in the Wiggins and McTighe chapter about backwards design to create a thoughtful unit on assessment.  We first started filling out the learning goals.  We asked ourselves, "What do we want our students to know or be aware of as a result of our teaching this unit?"  After we had formalized four learning goals, we decided next to ask ourselves, "What evidence are we going to need in order to fully know that our students have grasped hold of the different types of assessment?"  We decided that we needed to figure out student outcomes, if we were going to have any evidence of their learning, and start thinking about the different ways we could assess this understanding of assessment.  Next, we asked ourselves, "How are we going to teach them?"  "What learning experiences are we going to incorporate within our curriculum in order to provide the students with an opportunity to get used to this material?"   We figured out 2 or 3 days worth of activities, discussions, and pre/post questions in order to identify misconceptions.  Lastly, we asked ourselves, "Based on what we have provided for them, will they acquire the desired learning outcomes?  How can we test this?"  We began talking about assessments, and ended up creating groups to do a short presentation on assessment, while receiving verbal feedback, written feedback, and a rubric describing how the presentation should be laid out from the instructor.  We also talked about the importance of elucidating anything erroneous that we, as the teachers, heard during the presentations.  Odds are, if one student was confused on a subject, other students would be as well.  Addressing the entire class immediately can prevent the spread of the false information, which is yet another example of formative assessment.  After this assignment, I do feel that I have a deeper understanding of assessment, but more so backwards design, and the process that goes into creating a lesson plan.  All of the assessment information was in the reading and we just had to pull it out where necessary.  Actually creating the lesson plan involved more thought.

For the second part of the question, I think I would start by educating my colleague about what the differences between formative and summative assessment tend to be.  I would begin by elucidating to my colleague that summative assessment is more thorough, detailed, analyzed, and extensively reproduced, much like the scientific research we produce within the department.  Summative assessment is in a somewhat standardized format and can make comparisons between schools and individual students.  However, formative assessment is much different.  It is exploratory, preliminary, and instructive for future experiments.  It is a key tool to connect learning and teaching and it can happen at any time within a classroom.  I would explain that formative assessment is responsive and ongoing.  I would emphasize that it is informal and interactive with the students.  It is a bit carefree in that it can be unplanned, and one on one or with the entire class.  Formative assessment can be "implied' and can be done by both students and teachers.  I would encourage this colleague to give it a try and see how his or her class responds.  

Reworking the Student Interview

Write a reflection on your practice interview and post it to your blog.  What did you learn?  What was difficult?  What went well?  How will this impact your interview protocol?  Did you learn any "tricks" that others might find useful in uncovering student understanding?


I found that a few things worked and a few things did not work with my student interview. I found that asking the student to draw a diagram of the heart was a good idea, because the student then has the ability to refer to the diagram in order to better articulate their answers.  I found that some of my questions were too simplistic, and some were more difficult than I had originally anticipated. It was brought to my attention that on two of the questions, I was essentially probing the same fundamental understanding twice.  My practice participant was extremely good at articulating his answers, and I realized that my interviewee could possibly be less so.  I have adjusted some of my questions to reflect this realization.  I want my interviewee to draw more while they explain their answers, so I have adjusted this in my line of questioning and have even implemented some usage of colored pencils to depict oxygen rich and oxygen poor blood.  I have also asked questions that involve the idea of transfer across disciplines, because most of the students who are in my class are going into the medical profession someday and will need to use the information they learn in this class to make informed decisions and diagnoses in their future professions.  By implementing questions about blood vessels and the pulse rate, this line of questioning is not just about the heart structure and function, and is making the student's lean on their new knowledge and implement it into real life situations.  Also, by asking the question about fetuses circulating blood, the student has to connect dots that have not been explicitly spelled out to them in class, and may result in elucidating some inconsistencies in their reasoning.  My in-class "mock interview" participant was a big help, and I couldn't have improved my question list without him.  

Interview Questions

The Heart and Associated Structures: Interview

The questions I have prepared are relatively specific, (as human anatomy usually is) and are designed to probe student understanding about heart structure and function.  In addition, some associated heart structures and concepts will be examined in order to give the interview some depth and a look at interviewee "systems thinking" abilities.  The student will be one of my current Anatomy 221 lab students.  We have recently been exploring the cardiovascular system, and some of these questions will be easy and others will be more difficult in order to induce student misconceptions.  I want to see how the student fits together information about the heart, blood, and blood vessels that were learned independently of one another.  I would appreciate any constructive feedback on my questions.

1. Can you please describe to me, using anatomical terms, where the heart lies within the thoracic cavity?

2.  Can you please draw a sketch of a heart with the internal chambers and accessory structures  (i.e: important blood vessels, ventricles, foramina, atria, valves, etc.) exposed?
           a.  How many valves does the heart have?  What are their names?
           b.  Please indicate a step by step process through which the heart fills with blood and expels it to        
                the rest of the body.

3.  When blood flows away from the heart, what prevents it from flowing backwards?  How does this
      occur?
           a. What is the function of the heart valve?  When does each open and when does each close during
                a cardiac cycle?

4.  When blood leaves the heart through the pulmonary artery, does it flow to the left lung, right lung or  
     both?

5.  Which of the 2 types of blood vessels contain more elastic fibers in their walls?  Please explain your
      reasoning.

6.  How does the heart muscle gain blood supply?

7.  How does cardiac muscle tissue differ from smooth muscle and skeletal muscle tissue?
          a.  What are the main implications for these differences?

8.  What controls the movement of blood through the heart?

9.  Approximately how long does 1 cardiac cycle last?  List what occurs during this time?

10.  What causes the sounds a doctor hears when listening to the heart with a stethoscope?

11.  What causes pulse rate?  What, if any, are the implications of exercise on pulse rate?
        Are "pulse rate" and "heart rate" the same thing?  Why or why not?


12.  What causes a heart contraction?

13.  How do fetuses circulate oxygenated blood?

What is Learning (redefined)?

What is learning? (Redefined)


If learning is transfer from previous experiences, as Chapter 3 of How People Learn, asserts, then I feel that my definition of learning is rather complete.  I like my definition because it is personal, abstract, and a little philosophical.  It is my idea and mine alone.  This definition that I came up with is a result of my past experiences, and is a combination of all the thoughts I have had about learning and the evolution of those thoughts.  It is a product of my critical thinking skills.  The inputs to creating my definition of learning are what others wrote as their answers for the definition.  During the in-class discussion about learning we talked about it being the result of individual and personal experiences, as did Chapter 9 of How Students Learn.  I feel that since everyone has his/her own experiences, then their definition of learning should all be different as well.  In my opinion, writing out a definition from a dictionary for the word "learning" might show laziness, or worse- that no deep understanding of the content of learning has been mastered.  Rather, to create a unique definition expressing one's opinion and produce examples to reiterate shows the ability to transfer (as written in Chapter 3 of How People Learn.)  Admittedly, I am no expert on learning, but the literature from Chapter 2 of How People Learn makes me feel better about this because experts, although they have a rich background in a subject, are still not guaranteed to be good teachers.  In order to be a good teacher, you must be able to reflect on someone else's ability to learn, not just your own.

Reflections on Teaching Philosophies:

All of the blogs that I read had important insights that were both similar and dissimilar to those I pointed out when composing my own teaching philosophy.  It seemed like everyone thought that learning was a lifelong personal experience and that it can be as individual as the learner.  Critical thinking and gaining a hold on a bigger picture outside the classroom setting were also some main points that I feel we all touched on quite extensively.  Some of my group members had fresh and interesting ideas, however, that I had not thought of in the same way.

For example, Alberto brought up the idea that learning comes in stages and the final stage is having a good sense of "the big WHY?"  He also brought up the interesting point that I think is sometimes forgotten when teachers create lesson plans.  Alberto reminded me that it is harder to learn when we have to, and easier when we want to.  In my future teaching philosophy, I am going to make mention of how big a role ambition and self-esteem play in learning.

Some interesting ideas that I had not originally pondered came from Carrie's post.  Carrie has been a teacher in the past and has modified her curriculum to suit her students after taking the time to get to know them.  She makes a good point about the importance of building teamwork skills in the classroom that can one day blossom into human relations skills that are so desperately needed in the workplace.  I want to give Carrie credit for bringing up probably the best point that each future teacher in this class can take home today, and that is: only hard working teachers produce hard working learners.  To me, this statement is profound and cerebral.  It floats around my head and lights a fire under me- making me want to put more time and effort into my own teaching as soon as possible.  I might borrow that line, or a paraphrased version for my future teaching philosophy, because it embodies what I think it means to work.

The final blog I read was Krista's.  She reminded me that students need real-life examples if they are ever to start thinking for themselves in any capacity or in a big picture way.  I have to admit I am not very good at creating real life examples off the cusp while teaching.  She also reiterated the importance of making learning fun, challenging, and exciting.  I think giving students real-life knowledge application opportunities could do just that.