|
|
|
|
Clarke Garry, Department of Biology Inquiry-based education experience and interest: Two years ago I completely restructured the lectures and labs for my Intro. to Biology sections. I specifically set out to make the labs more inquiry based by giving students the opportunity to design and set up experiments in several labs, given unassembled equipment and the directive to formulate hypotheses and test them through data generation. The students in these sections gather quantitative data in the majority of the labs and base hypothesis acceptance or rejection on these data. The engagement level of these students has increased dramatically and I continue to seek new approaches and refinements. In entomology I have recently had success with a three-week lab sequence of river insect sampling and data analysis project. Using Family-Level Biotic Indexing (FBI) students can select specific riffle areas to sample, carry out the proper timing and counting required, identify specimens in the lab at their own pace, and calculate an overall biotic index value representing their sample. We also do an open collecting approach with an emphasis on understanding the diversity of insects in the context of differences in habitats. Kerry L. Keen, Dept. of Geology Inquiry-based education experience and interest: I would describe myself as a novice in the implementation of active learning and inquiry-based education; and I also would describe myself as being very enthusiastic about integrating these methods where appropriate into my classes. I believe I have a natural tendency toward incorporating some of these techniques, hand have always enjoyed providing "hands-on" realistic activities, that incorporate more than one learning style. I have developed field activities that attempt to simulate real problems that students may be called upon to do on their own after college and believe that learning by doing is important. I was fortunate to be one of a handful of UWRF faculty who attended this spring’s UW-system Faculty College in Marinette, WI. There I participated in two valuable short courses, one on active learning methodologies and the other on interactive teaching in large classes….In summary, I am committed to providing a solid education for my students, and perhaps challenging them in ways beyond the traditional lecture/laboratory format; but the degree of implementation of these methods will depend on their success in terms of student performance. Charles P. Rader, Department of Geography Inquiry-based education experience and interest: The courses I teach in GIS and cartography are in a lecture/lab format. Within these courses the lab exercises, particularly in the two advanced courses, are inquiry-based where I set up a set of problems and work with the students to find solutions using GIS and mapping technologies. These exercises are designed to help students apply GIS theory and method toward problem solving rather than as a series of operations to be learned in abstract. However, one of the challenges we face in geography as we move more and more toward digital representations of our environment is to illustrate and realize that we are dealing with a real world. Inquiry-based education and field experiences are critical to gaining this perspective. In the introductory and regional geography courses, I tend to set up a number of situations where students have to work with one another to answer a question often starting with incomplete knowledge. These activities are designed to help them reason from what they know and develop new understanding through the application of principles and techniques. Finally, I have been coordinating our department’s internship program and through this program have placed our majors and minors in geography, cartography and GIS in work situations where they need to adapt and learn on-the-fly to new problems and demands. |
|
Send mail to first@oimb.uoregon.edu with questions or comments about this web site.
|