Recent evidence-based pedagogical studies suggest that biology instruction should shift away from a strict focus on content delivery, for example by de-emphasizing textbooks and their in-class analog, the presentation-style lecture (e.g., Vision and Change). For the past six years I’ve approached this shift by applying the CREATE teaching method to an upper-level undergraduate course in biodiversity and conservation biology, a course which includes a substantial emphasis on ecological concepts. The CREATE method focuses on replicating the scientific process in the classroom via the structured analysis of peer-reviewed scientific papers and their data. Classroom sessions include small-group active learning exercises, the development of hypothetical results, figure annotation, design of follow-up studies or experiments, and students drawing their own conclusions from published results before reading the authors’ interpretations. Student preparation for class includes paper annotation, methods diagrams, and concept mapping. This presentation will focus on a description of how a CREATE course works, lessons learned from teaching using this method, student impressions and affective responses to the teaching method, and results from assessments of student learning from several iterations of the course.
Results/Conclusions
A CREATE classroom runs like a graduate lab group or seminar, with classroom time focusing on depth of analysis and understanding rather than breadth of content coverage. In a typical semester of 16 weeks, the class worked through 18 peer-reviewed journal articles in the ecological and conservation literature. From the instructor’s perspective, preparation time focuses on deep reading of papers and developing short prompts for group work and a limited number of visuals to focus on particular figures or results. Real-time electronic annotation using a tablet was an important component of the classroom sessions. Student feedback from the most recent iteration of the course was positive based on Likert-scale questions of self-assessed engagement and learning. At the end of the semester students were able to more effectively identify the connections among ecological concepts in a concept map assessment on biodiversity. An affective survey taken early and late in the semester assessed student gains in some measures of self-efficacy, understanding of the scientific process, and growth mindset. Collectively, my experience suggests that the CREATE method is effective for teaching courses in the ecological sciences and is concordant with several goals of Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education.