Engaging undergraduate student learning in ecology through outdoor teaching

Background/Question/Methods

Outdoor teaching meets several criteria of a good teaching practice in the undergraduate education. Studies have shown outdoor teaching provides hands-on experience and promotes active learning for students. It helps incorporate the fun and enjoyment into a content-dominated curriculum and provides excellent opportunity for students to work as a team. It also motivates students who may otherwise be sidelined by a more formal classroom situation, thereby engaging most students in the learning process.  To encourage active learning in Ecology, I dramatically revised the laboratory experiments in the Ecology course and changed half of the laboratories to contain outdoor field work components, aiming to help students understand concepts and theories taught in the classroom by linking the observations in nature. To assess the impacts of the laboratory modification, I conducted an online survey for students who took the Ecology course last year.

Results/Conclusions

Preliminary results showed that students enjoyed the Ecology course in general. When they were asked to use three words to describe the course, the top three words were interesting (32.3%), engaging (22.6%), and inspiring (22.6%) or the words with similar meanings.  The students particularly liked the laboratories. Many students (64.3%) listed the laboratories or one specific laboratory as their most favorite experience in the Ecology course. Two of the outdoor experiments were ranked as their top two favorite laboratories and their selection criteria were being fun (57.1%) and interactive (35.7%). Among all the responses, 85.7% strongly agreed “the outdoor experiments made the lab more interesting in the Ecology course”, 78.6% strongly agreed “the outdoor experiments helped me learn more actively in the Ecology course”, and 53.9% strongly agreed “the laboratory components helped me learn better in the Ecology course”. The results indicate the course curriculum modification did engage student learning. However, due to a small sample size, the results might be biased. The future work is to encourage more survey responses and to modify the survey questions in order to minimize the bias.