OOS 3-4
Building educational partnerships in the San Diego, CA, region to assess and improve environmental and scientific literacy
The challenge of improving academic success and exposing opportunities for alternative degree and career options for diverse student populations is formidable. We have been addressing this by helping students at our university and local community colleges by empowering them academically and by helping them build personal learning agendas. Conceptual assessments are often used to determine common sense ideas (aka misconceptions) that are not based upon scientifically appropriate reasoning. For several years faculty at our large urban university have been partnering with local community colleges, which contribute approximately half of our students, to identify the depth and breadth of these “misconceptions” – and to develop ways in which we might improve understanding. By addressing these challenging areas using conceptual assessments, and improving learners’ academic capacities we aim to engage students in areas of biology, like ecology, that they might not otherwise consider pursuing. In addition, we are sharing our PLURIS (Purposeful Learning in Undergraduate Research and Independent Studies) process with community college students to help them identify personal learning agendas and explore alternate careers in biology, like ecology, sustainability, and environmental science, that they had not considered.
Results/Conclusions
Performance of students on conceptual assessments about topics central to ecology, like natural selection, photosynthesis, and broad scientific literacy do not appear to differ among community college, university biology majors, or university non-biology majors. However, their understanding of these fundamental and essential concepts that are exceedingly difficult to teach and learn do appear to improve when the curriculum is designed to address the “common sense ideas” that are not based on scientific reasoning. Students do report becoming more interested in those topics when their academic capabilities in those domains improve. Unfortunately, we are also finding complex relationships among responses to particular question items and demographic factors, like gender and family college experience, that may be confounding our conclusions about student knowledge gains (and shortcomings) drawn from examining “total scores.” Furthermore, using our PLURIS process, students are able to identify learning goals they had not previously been able to do and in areas they had not considered before. In addition it appears they do explore alternative careers as exciting directions to pursue, which can increase their academic engagement and success.