Assessing undergraduate student learning of collaborative ecology practices in the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN)

In EREN, we spend a lot of time engaging our students in projects that involve coordinated data collection across multiple sites. But, are our students learning anything about doing collaborative ecological science, or just having fun playing in the woods? We collected assessment data in a wide range of college courses and the answer is…it’s complicated. Small, upper level courses are great learning spaces for EREN concepts, but large lecture courses don’t seem to be. We’re excited about EREN as a teaching tool, but there is more work to be done to reach our full potential.