Faculty excellence in teaching is required by tenure and promotion standards at all colleges and universities, and excellent science teaching increases public, scientific literacy. Yet, time constraints lead many ecology instructors to teach through passive lectures, and rely entirely on field and laboratory experiences to serve as the hands-on, active-learning components of their courses. Here we report on experiences and responses of faculty from a wide range of institutions to an NSF-funded program designed to help faculty implement diagnostic assessments and active teaching to transform their courses. Pre-instruction, faculty participants used diagnostic question clusters (DQCs) to assess student understanding of a key biological concept followed by active teaching exercises targeting known misconceptions and poor reasoning associated with that concept. Post-instruction use of the DQCs allowed the faculty to assess students’ progress in learning.
Results/Conclusions
We surveyed 15 faculty participants and found they appreciated how the methods “helped [them] realize where students are going wrong” and showed “how poor a job one does trying to just cover all the material.” Another response added “That [targeted assessment] in itself is going to help me become a better instructor and it will help my students be better prepared for whatever the next step is for them.” Given the positive opinions of these motivated faculty who adopted informed teaching methods, we encourage more to use these methods, and for both faculty and administrators to realize that the transition from passive to active teaching is a multi-year process that requires institutional support. Colleagues are encouraged to explore the activities and diagnostic tools available to them on the Internet, especially for large-scale concepts (carbon cycling) that require hierarchical organization of smaller-scale details (photosynthesis, biomass, and primary productivity). Faculty can begin by transitioning lectures related to their area(s) of research, followed by those where students traditionally struggle. In approximately three offerings of a course, and little increase in individual lesson preparation time, the majority of teaching can be transitioned to active methods, and student understanding and reasoning will be improved.