Ecology students require broad preparation for diverse careers and employers are seeking applicants who have skills that allow them to solve problems related to locally relevant economic systems. To support these efforts, biology faculty from six different campuses in the University of Maine System gave over 700 students the Ecology and Evolution Measuring Achievement and Progress in Science (EcoEvo-MAPS) assessment, which is designed to measure student conceptual understanding in ecology and evolution. The EcoEvo-MAPS data identified student conceptual difficulties including the roles of nutrients, carbon dioxide, and light in photosynthetic organism growth. To help students overcome these conceptual difficulties, faculty joined with the Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership to develop an active-learning activity that uses economically relevant systems local to Maine. The activity addresses the relationship between photosynthesis, plant growth and global carbon dioxide cycles, as well as the potential impacts on economic industries that rely on these processes. Assessment data were collected to gauge student learning, including a pre-activity assessment, in-class clicker question responses, post-activity assessment, and final exam questions. The faculty then collaboratively published the activity in the peer-reviewed, open-access online journal, CourseSource.
Results/Conclusions
This teaching collaboration connected faculty working across multiple institutions within the same university system and helped them use data from their classrooms to iteratively design an activity that positively affected student learning. The impact of the activity on student learning was assessed using multiple assessment questions. On the pre-assessment questions, students often incorrectly thought that both terrestrial and aquatic photosynthetic organisms use nutrients as the primary source of energy, and that sunlight is the major contributor of biomass. Furthermore when students were asked open-response questions about the gain in biomass from seed to tree, most students incorrectly answered a combination of CO2, nutrients, and water. After participating in the activity, there were learning gains on all of these concepts, with the majority of students correctly sorting out the roles of CO2, sunlight, and nutrients. Notably, this teaching collaboration provides a model that other geographically separated educators (faculty and informal educators, such as Hurricane Island) can use to improve student learning. Our steps included: forming a group of faculty with similar instructional interests, giving students common assessment questions, working primarily via video conferencing to develop an activity, collecting student performance data, revising the activity, and publishing the findings.