Title: Taking ownership through consensus: studying the impact of collaborative class design using an exam reflections assignment

Mentor: Shahnaz Masani, Katie Hinko, & Kirtimaan Mohan

Fellow: Sunyoung Park (Mathematics Education) & Rupita Tahsin (Urban Planning)

Description: Several factors, from mindset to attributions of the cause of failure, can shape student responses to failure, which in turn affects their performance in formal coursework. In our introductory Briggs biology and physics courses, we seek to create an inclusive classroom space where students develop adaptive coping responses that help them decrease stress associated with failure and envision a path to success. A common tool used to reduce stress associated with high stakes test situations is exam corrections. Often, post assessment “wrapper” assignments ask students to correct mistakes as well as to reflect on their mistakes, with the intent to build conceptual understanding as well as metacognitive skills. Although several different types of wrapper assignments have been described (reflection only, reflections & corrections, group versus individual corrections, 2-stage feedback etc.), in each case the design & implementation of these assignments was instructor-led, or prescriptive.

For this study, we have designed an exam correction activity that aims to increase student agency, build classroom community, and empower students to reflect on the nature of knowledge by asking them to be a part of the design process itself. We will provide a recommended structure for exam corrections that will include corrections & reflection on missed questions, as well as an essay reflecting on what they learned from the assignment. Students will be asked to work as a class to build consensus and (a) suggest modifications to the assignment (b) suggest how many points the assignment will be worth (c) provide a compelling, evidence-based argument to support their suggestions.
We will investigate the process by which students come to a consensus, as well as the content of arguments formed through this process, and students’ reflections on the process. We are further interested in how this process affects student content learning outcomes. Data collected will be individual student reflective essays, observations and artifacts from class activities, interviews with students, and exams/correction assignments. Analysis for emergent themes will be conducted. Based on initial attempts this past semester, we anticipate documenting themes around students’ perceptions of agency, the nature of knowledge and learning, the role of assessments and grades, what it means to “succeed” in class, and effective response to failure.

Title: Exploring long‐term impacts of learning about 3DL on test writing

Mentor: Ryan Sweeder

Fellow: Iqbal Hossain (chemistry)

Description: Several cohorts of science faculty from a range of disciplines have participated in the STEM Gateway Fellows Program, which introduces 3-Dimensional Learning (3DL) in the STEM classroom. One of the goals of the program is to help participants understand each of the three dimensions: Scientific Practices, Disciplinary Core Ideas, and Crosscutting Concepts. The program helps faculty explore how these dimensions can be included in their assessments and why it leads to better student learning. The goal of the project is to explore if there is a lasting impact of the program. The SUTL fellow will code exams as part of a team using the 3D-Learning Assessment Protocol from program participants to see if there was a change in their assessment practices and how long those changes remain in place. Exams will come from the disciplines of biology, chemistry, and physics.

Title: Do students find computational modeling relevant in an IPLS course?

Mentor: Kirtimaan Mohan, Katie Hinko, Vashti Sawtelle

Fellow: Jacob Watkins (Physics and Astronomy) & Nick Ivanov (Computer Science and Engineering)

Description: Computational modeling is an important part of modern research, yet many students are not introduced to computation. At Lyman Briggs College we want to rectify this by introducing students to computational modeling early on introductory physics courses. Currently, this is done with the help of glowscript and we would like to transition to the more modern environment of Jupyter Notebooks, which is more interactive, accessible and widely used in academia and industry.

The introductory physics course at Lyman Briggs is designed with Life Science majors in mind. This presents itself as a challenge, as students tend not to see coding as a relevant and important skill to learn. The goal of this project is twofold:

1. Enhance the coding experience for students in the course by transitioning to Jupyter Notebooks.
2. Measuring the impact of this transition by monitoring
   • Changes in attitudes towards computational modeling.
   • Whether life science students find coding relevant.

Title: Finding your True North: Developing skills for career exploration, self-discovery, and parallel planning in an introductory biology course

Mentors: Shahnaz Masani & Krysta Coleman

Fellow: Haiden Perkins (Human Development and Family Studies)

Description: For students in the sciences, there often seems to be only one pathway that combines their love of science and passion for helping people: medicine. In an effort to prepare students for multiple careers under the STEM umbrella, our team will be working to incorporate career education into a core curriculum course here in the college: LB 144. As a course already designed to be an active learning space, this collaboration presents an opportunity for students to learn more about themselves through deeper exploration of the course material. While there are many career exploration courses across higher education, and certainly across MSU’s campus, few, if any, are fully enmeshed within the core curriculum of a student’s undergraduate experience. By infusing career exploration activities into the college’s introductory biology class, we offer a more equitable opportunity for access to career education, allowing students to simultaneously grow professionally, personally, and academically.

Title: How does being a Learning Assistant influence Undergraduate Students’ STEM identity?

Mentor: Rachel Barnard

Fellow:  Guanglong Pang (Educational Administration)

Description: Undergraduate learning assistants (ULAs) are important contributors to how the Lyman Briggs College lives into its value of integrating and improving upon evidence-based instructional practice. We have had ULAs in the College since our founding in the 1960s, and we aim to continue improving  our program. This project has two facets. First, the Fellow will work with Rachel Barnard, the current Coordinator of the LA Program in Briggs, to collaborate with stakeholders in the College and at MSU to develop goals for our LA program. Second,  we will explore if being a LA in Briggs helps undergraduate students develop their STEM identity. We will examine STEM identity in relation to DEI, because Briggs places a high value on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. There is a gap in the literature about how LA experiences contribute to a sense of belonging to a teaching team, the College as an institution, as well as the larger disciplines in science and /or STEM. We will explore the interplay of LA experience and STEM identity using a survey and interviews.

Title: BRAIDing "lab" and "lecture" into one Life Science Studio for Biology: Impacts on the student experience and learning outcomes

Mentor: Cassie Dresser-Briggs & Doug Luckie

Fellow: Brady Tyburski, Program in Mathematics Education (PRIME)

Description: Traditionally, undergraduate STEM labs and lectures have been taught: (1) as entirely separate courses, (2) as part of the same course, but taught by different instructors, or (3) by the same instructor, but rarely woven together in an effort to replicate what scientists experience during authentic professional practice. We are interested in assessing how deviation from these paradigms may impact the student experience and learning outcomes. Specifically, we have set up two concurrent introductory biology classes, each with 24 students, taught by different instructors with the same approach; blending lab and lecture content and activities together within a class period. We also plan to compare these data with data collected from one or more classes implementing the traditional paradigm; unblended lab and lecture, taught by separate instructors, and differ in regards to desired learning outcomes. Furthermore, given that class size differs between the “experimental treatment” and the “control treatment” (24 vs. 48 / 96 students) we are interested in exploring how much class size impacts the student experience and learning outcomes. Results from this study will be immediately useful in determining future course offerings and course structures in the biology curriculum at Lyman Briggs College, but more broadly, our research will expand the current knowledge within the scientific community regarding best pedagogical practices for other curricula that include a lab component.

Title: Making Biology Classes More Gender Inclusive

Mentor: Stef Shuster, Shahnaz Masani, Jenifer Saldanha, & Pete White

Fellow: Nicole Wonderlin, Entomology Department

Description: In the typical biology classroom, the stories often told about plant reproduction frame plants as sexed. The “male” plant produces pollen grains, which are depicted as active, strong, and tough. They travel far distances, against all odds, and are narrated as driving the process of fertilization. Meanwhile, the “female” plant produces an egg and waits passively for the pollen grain. These kinds of portrayals of how fertilization happens rely on gendered norms and stereotypes. Our project begins by asking how might we bridge insights from biology and feminist science studies to think and teach about fertilization that abandon the use of gender stereotypes? And, how might we revamp curriculum to be more inclusive; intervening in the continued use of gender norms and stereotypes to depict fertilization? Our aims for this proposed project include: 1) Assess existing scholarship on the gendering of biological processes and matter; 2) Evaluate the extent to which existing introductory biology classes address these topics; 3) Build a new curriculum unit; and 4) Design a study to assess the impact of these interventions.

Title: Evo‐Med‐Ed: An integrative approach for teaching and learning human evolution in undergraduate biology

Mentor: Pete White

Fellow: Jospeh Riedy, Integrative Biology Department

Description: Two difficulties in teaching biology to undergraduate students using an evolutionary conceptual framework are: (1) the lack of clear connections between evolutionary patterns and processes; and (2) students’ apathy in evolutionary examples that don’t relate to humans. The field of evolutionary medicine provides an avenue through which (human) evolution can be taught and learned by using medically relevant examples to teach evolutionary concepts to students who might not otherwise encounter them in their coursework. In this project, we are designing, implementing, and testing a set of interdisciplinary and integrated teaching materials based on human health conditions as a vehicle for students to learn introductory biology and human evolution.

Title: Developing Responsible Scientific Identity Through a First-Year-Writing Course for STEM Undergraduates

Mentor: Marisa Brandt

Fellow: June Oh, English Department & Yukyung Bae, Department of Educational Administration

Description: Beginning in the fall of 2019, the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of STEM group at Lyman Briggs College began a pilot program to unify the learning goals and outcomes of the first year writing and intro to HPS course, LB 133, with the goal of creating a cohesive, “group-building” experience for all incoming students, as well as shared teaching resources for instructors. This SUTL project aims to evaluate the success and sustainability of the curricular redesign effort for students and faculty. Over the past two years of the project, we have gathered both quantitative and qualitative data on student learning outcomes and community building. Our goals for this year are (1) collect and analyze one more semester of (non-pandemic) data, (2) conduct interviews with former students and participating instructors, and (3) share our findings with the college and broader HPS teaching communities.

Title: Drawing Comics as a Way of Knowing about Science and Society

Mentor: Megan Halpern

Fellow: Justin Wigard, English Department

Description:This project explores the intersection of art and science studies in the classroom by studying pedagogical approaches to drawing comics as a way of learning about the relationship between science and society. Assistant Professor Megan K. Halpern and PhD Candidate Justin Wigard will develop two courses that focus on both analyzing comics as discourse about science in society and on creating comics as exercises in critical making. Prior work on introducing the arts into social science and humanities courses about science has two benefits. The first is that these forms of creative expression provide new ways of knowing about a topic. The second is that creative activities are often seen as unique and positive experiences, providing benefits for both mental health and intellectual growth. This project will study the specific value of courses that draw on graphic narratives and sequential art to understand the role of science and medicine in society.

Title: Analysis of the INQUIRE Program

Mentor: Ryan Sweeder and Sam Cass, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: Merve Kursav, Programs in Mathematics Education

Description: The INQUIRE program has been a 10-year effort in Lyman Briggs College to support matriculating students who do not have math placement scores which allow them to begin in general chemistry in their first term. The intended outcomes of the program include helping student successfully transition to college, gain preparation for introductory science courses, build connections to the LBC community such that they graduate at improved rates from MSU and in STEM fields. This project is seeking to comprehensively understand if the project is achieving these goals for the participating students. The SUTL fellow will work to update previous quantitative data analyses that focused on grades earned in subsequent chemistry and biology courses, GPA, retention in STEM and MSU, and graduation rates. They also will help undertake surveys with both current and past INQUIRE students to understand the perceived impacts of the program and how that perception may change over time. Through triangulation using both qualitative and quantitative data, we anticipate having a strong understanding of the impact of this program.

Title: Effective implementation of assessment corrections for meaningful learning and reflection

Mentor: Cassie Dresser-Briggs and Shahnaz Masani, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: Sunghwan Byun, Programs in Mathematics Education

Description: In this study, we will assess the effectiveness of assessment corrections on student learning, both in terms of mastering concepts and progression as a learner. Furthermore, we will test whether corrections completed individually or in a group are most beneficial. To minimize instructor effect and avoid pseudoreplication in our experimental design, our initial study will be conducted in a single introductory biology course at Lyman Briggs College, a residential college within a large research I university in the midwest. In this course there are three unit exams and a cumulative final exam; thus we will compare three treatments in the following order, (1) control, no exam corrections, (2) individual, individual exam corrections, (3) group, group exam corrections. Concept learning gains will be inferred based on differences in percentage scores for particular concepts between the unit exam and the relevant questions on the final exam. Progression as a learner will be inferred based on pre and post survey responses provided by each student. Previous research has suggested that assessment corrections improve learning; our study will not only indicate if this outcome is more broadly applicable, but will expand on this idea by explicitly comparing different implementation methods for assessment corrections.

Title: Exploring undergraduate learning assistants’ perceived roles

Mentor: Rachel Barnard, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: Corbin Livingston, Department of Chemistry

Description: This project seeks to contribute to the body of knowledge about undergraduate learning assistants’ (ULAs) motivation to work in this role. Specifically, we are surveying the balance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation factors among these members of the LBC chemistry lab and lecture teaching teams. We are also exploring how ULAs perceive their role within their teaching space as reflected in how they spend their contact time with students. Prior experiences in these classes as a student and their beliefs about teaching and learning may influence how they choose to spend their time. Time usage information self-reported by the ULAs will be compared with desired time usage from both students and supervising faculty.

Title: Investigating the impact of an explicitly feminist curriculum for undergraduate students in an introductory physics sequence

Mentor: Kathleen Hinko, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: Lydia Wassink, Department of Integrative Biology

Description: We are developing a version of the introductory physics sequence explicitly focuses on exploring the beauty of physics through feminist and anti-racist physics content and practices. Students will develop an understanding of their role in societal systems including the production of science, articulate the value of physics for themselves and their communities, and be empowered to critique systems of which they are a part. We will be investigating the potential impacts for students taking this course. We want to understand the impact of this course on students’ attitudes and beliefs about physics, science, and society. We will also look at how the structures and format of the class affects how students work together in groups and in class discussions. We also plan to measure how students learn traditional and nontraditional physics content in this environment.

Title: Board games in the classroom

Mentor: Melissa Charenko, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: Nazmy Hebatalla, School of Planning, Design, and Construction

Description: This project investigates how the use of cooperative board games impact student learning in history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPS). It also aims to determine how board games can be used to foster problem-solving, interpersonal, or communication skills. Pandemic Legacy is unique game: it is a cooperative board game played in small groups. Students try to avert global disaster by treating deadly diseases. They play the game multiple times, but actions in one game have consequences for the next one, and the rules change and develop as students play. The games’ development introduces students to new concepts at a manageable pace and gives students new problems to solve.

Title: Flipped learning in introductory general chemistry

Mentor: Rebecca Lahr, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: Monica Setien, Engineering and Computer Science

Description: Flipped classrooms are geared at increasing student engagement with harder concepts during lecture by assigning pre-class activities, readings, or videos to be complete before class on the least complex learning objectives. This format decreases the amount of content that is delivered as an instructor speaks to the class, leaving more class time for students to ask questions and engage in activities to address the harder concepts. Flipped learning allows students to engage with the material before class, to level the pre-‐existing knowledge before students walk into class for the day. This project will examine the impact of a flipped-course format in intro chemistry courses at Lyman Briggs College.

Title: Assessing an Experimental Pilot of a First-Year Writing Course for STEM Undergraduates

Mentor: Marisa Brandt, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: June Oh, English Department

Description: Beginning in the fall of 2019, the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of STEM group at Lyman Briggs College will begin a pilot program to unify the learning goals and outcomes of the first year writing and intro to HPS course, LB 133, with the goal of creating a cohesive, “group-building” experience for all incoming students. This experimental structure will also entail a weekly colloquium series featuring guest speakers from the college, MSU, and visitors. The first cohort of pilot sections will be offered in Fall 2019; these will be followed in Spring 2020 with additional cohorts. These sections will share common learning goals/assignments and will meet weekly for the colloquia as one large group. Our SUTL proposal has two major goals: (1) to create an assessment tool to measure learning goals, learning outcomes, and evaluate community building using a combination of qualitative and quantitative questions; (2) to assess the learning gains specifically associated with the colloquium speaker series component of the course.

Title: Assessing the impact of a mentored graduate student fellows’ program on graduate student and faculty participants

Mentor: Peter White and Kendra Cheruvelil, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: Aesha Mustafa, Education Administration Department

Description: The LBC Scholarship of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning (SUTL) program began in 2016. Since then, more than a dozen faculty and two dozen graduate fellows have engaged with the program to conduct SoTL and DBER research. The goal of this project is to assess the impact of the SUTL program on graduate student outcomes and faculty outcomes. Graduate student and faculty outcomes include professional skills development, research skills development, research products and career advancement. We propose to use a mixed-methods approach, incorporating interview data, survey data and research metrics. Early feedback suggests that both faculty and graduate fellows benefit from the program. This project seeks to conduct a thorough analysis of project outcomes and publish our findings describing the overview and merit of the program.

Title: The effect of authentic learning experiences on attitudes towards the physical sciences, diversity in science, and community belonging Mentor

Mentor: Georgina Montgomery, Lyman Briggs College and the Department of History

Fellow: Alison Singer, Community Sustainability

Description: This project will seek to assess the impact of a freshman course that tasks learning teams with creating exhibits focused on themes of diversity and inclusion in science for a real client, specifically for the director of Abrams Planetarium. Working in collaboration with a SUTL fellow, we will seek to assess how a hands-on, authentic learning experience impacts students’ attitudes towards the physical sciences, issues of diversity in science, and their sense of belonging to the LBC and MSU community.

Title: Processes of learning ethnography in student-led fieldwork

Mentor: Dan Menchik, Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Sociology

Fellow: Nicole Lehpamer, Department of Sociology

Description: Ethnographic fieldwork has been long understood as a lone-wolf effort. However, based on some initial published collective efforts, there may exist educational and scholarly benefits to conducting ethnography by class participants or other kind of student group. This project is conceived of as an effort to develop some principles for conducting such student-organized collective ethnographic fieldwork, by means of an effort to put those principles into practice. The payoff of analyzing and theorizing the social organization of this research would be scholarship describing some best practices for this model of research, a model being increasingly used but rarely studied by social scientists.

Title: Evolution education research with digital organisms (Avida-ED)

Mentor: Rob Pennock and Jim Smith, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: Reid Blanchett, Department of Genetics

Description: The NSF funded Avida-ED Active LENS project has been training instructors and administering surveys to participating students for the past three years. As a result, we have accumulated a large source of student survey data which can be used to address a variety of questions related to student learning of evolutionary processes and concepts. Our initial research objective was to assess broader student learning gains as a result of using Avida-ED. We have administered a series of surveys to assess these constructs. However, it is very clear that additional detail pertaining to student learning can be gleaned from the data we have collected. For example, how does student understanding, particularly the occurrence of misconceptions, vary across populations? What specific elements of evolution by natural selection are most impacted by student interaction with Avida-ED? Does active-learning using experimental evolution with digital organisms improve students’ understanding of scientific practices and the nature of science? A graduate student interested in investigating undergraduate teaching and learning will identify, with PI guidance, an interesting question that can be examined based on the data we have collected.

Title: Developing an assessment plan for an undergraduate bioethics minor

Mentor: Robyn Bluhm, Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Philosophy

Fellow: Ted Van Alst, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics

Description: In Fall, 2017, MSU’s bioethics minor moved from the College of Human Medicine to Lyman Briggs College, where it is being administered in partnership with the College of Arts and Letters. In conjunction with this move, the minor’s curriculum has been changed to add two required courses: LB 240 (Theories and Methods in Bioethics), which serves as an introduction to bioethics and a “gateway” to the minor, and a Bioethics Capstone course, LB 440. After an initial consultation with MSU’s Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology, Dr. Bluhm is developing an assessment plan for the minor that centers on these two courses (as they are the only ones that all students in the minor will take). The project’s goals for the 2018-2019 academic year will be (1) to use students’ final assessments in these two courses to begin to develop a rubric that can be used to assess whether future students are meeting the objectives for the minor and (2) to review the academic literature on curriculum assessment to identify additional options for assessment. This latter goal will be particularly important in helping to address challenges arising from the structure of the minor; for example, aside from these two required courses, students select from a wide range of classes to complete the minor, so that there are numerous “pathways” through the minor and, relatedly, students come from many Colleges and majors across campus. The goal of this project is to find a way to make this diversity a strength of the minor, rather than a limitation.

Title: Analysis of the INQUIRE Program

Mentor: Ryan Sweeder and Sam Cass, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: Merve Kursav, Programs in Mathematics Education

Description: The INQUIRE program has been a 10-year effort in Lyman Briggs College to support matriculating students who do not have math placement scores which allow them to begin in general chemistry in their first term. The intended outcomes of the program include helping student successfully transition to college, gain preparation for introductory science courses, build connections to the LBC community such that they graduate at improved rates from MSU and in STEM fields. This project is seeking to comprehensively understand if the project is achieving these goals for the participating students. The SUTL fellow will work to update previous quantitative data analyses that focused on grades earned in subsequent chemistry and biology courses, GPA, retention in STEM and MSU, and graduation rates. They also will help undertake surveys with both current and past INQUIRE students to understand the perceived impacts of the program and how that perception may change over time. Through triangulation using both qualitative and quantitative data, we anticipate having a strong understanding of the impact of this program.

Title: Effective implementation of assessment corrections for meaningful learning and reflection

Mentor: Cassie Dresser-Briggs and Shahnaz Masani, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: Sunghwan Byun, Programs in Mathematics Education

Description: In this study, we will assess the effectiveness of assessment corrections on student learning, both in terms of mastering concepts and progression as a learner. Furthermore, we will test whether corrections completed individually or in a group are most beneficial. To minimize instructor effect and avoid pseudoreplication in our experimental design, our initial study will be conducted in a single introductory biology course at Lyman Briggs College, a residential college within a large research I university in the midwest. In this course there are three unit exams and a cumulative final exam; thus we will compare three treatments in the following order, (1) control, no exam corrections, (2) individual, individual exam corrections, (3) group, group exam corrections. Concept learning gains will be inferred based on differences in percentage scores for particular concepts between the unit exam and the relevant questions on the final exam. Progression as a learner will be inferred based on pre and post survey responses provided by each student. Previous research has suggested that assessment corrections improve learning; our study will not only indicate if this outcome is more broadly applicable, but will expand on this idea by explicitly comparing different implementation methods for assessment corrections.

Title: Integrating collaborative experiential learning laboratory into Lyman Briggs’ teaching and learning culture

Mentor: Isaac Record, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: Stephen Vrla, Department of Sociology

Description: Lyman Briggs College has recently created a new learning space, the Collaborative Experiential Learning Laboratory (CELL), to support creative group projects, especially those combining aspects of HPS and STEM education. It is not trivial to adopt new technologies and methods into a class, and it is easy to misstep. The hope is that clear and adaptable examples and modules will help interested faculty to think through their learning objectives, assignments, and assessments involving creative collaborative group work. This SUTL project seeks to develop best practices for designing and assessing coursework that makes use of the space through a literature review, pilot course (LB 492, Fall 2018), pilot course module (LB 322A, Fall 2018), and expert-led “Building a CELL Curriculum” workshop to develop a CELL Course and Assignment Planning Guide (Fall 2018). It seeks to disseminate these insights through an additional “Assigning Creative Group Projects in the CELL” workshop for faculty to put the Planning Guide from the previous workshop into practice.

Title: The figure of the day - an activity for improving scientific literacy skills among biology students

Mentor: Pete White, Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Entomology

Fellow: Caitlin Kirby, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Description: Quantitative and scientific literacy skills are important outcomes of undergraduate biology education, yet instructors often struggle to integrate the necessary opportunities for this kind of student learning. Biology is sometimes characterized as a “soft science”, and introductory course offerings are typically focused on concept- or (biological) system-based learning outcomes rather than on outcomes related to data visualization, data presentation, or statistics. In this SUTL project, we aim to implement and test the impact of a graph-reading activity called “Figure of the Day (FotD)” where students are presented with various types of graphs and are given practice interpreting them and hypothesizing about their meaning. The key feature of the FotD activity is that graph legends (and sometimes axis labels) are removed before the graphs are given to the class. In the absence of this key information, students are forced to carefully analyze and evaluate what is presented, and to apply their understanding of data visualization to create a narrative of what the graph may be representing. After student narratives are discussed, the full graph (with legends and labels) is then shown to the class for further discussion. We hypothesize that students who are given graphs with missing information will show a greater improvement in their scientific literacy skills when compared to students who are given graphs without missing information.

Title: Assessment to Improve Quantitative Literacy Courses

Mentor: Becky Matz, Lyman Briggs College and Learning HUB

Fellow: YoungGon Bae, Program in Mathematics Education

Description: MSU’s quantitative literacy courses (MTH101 and MTH102) represent a relatively new route by which undergraduate students can complete their university mathematics requirement for graduation. The courses were piloted in 2015-2016, expanded in 2016-2017, and are being further expanded in 2017-2018. In any course, it is important that attention be given to assessment of what students are learning relative to the course goals as well as curriculum and pedagogy. In these quantitative literacy courses, such assessment is especially important at this time given 1) the nascency of the courses, 2) the importance of mathematics in a university-level education, and 3) the impending addition of even more course sections. The addition of more course sections is complicated by the necessary addition of more instructional staff, some reshuffling of instructional staff roles (e.g., TAs and LAs will run recitation sections, though previously only TAs had this role), and other issues. In this particular project, we will use primarily quantitative and administrative data to investigate outcomes for students who have taken these quantitative literacy courses, and to make recommendations for future course iterations.

Title: The Figure of the Day - an Activity for Improving Scientific Literacy Skills among Biology Students

Mentor: Pete White, Lyman Briggs College and Dept of Entomology

Fellow: Caitlin Kirby, Geological Sciences

Description: Quantitative and scientific literacy skills are important outcomes of undergraduate biology education, yet instructors often struggle to integrate the necessary opportunities for this kind of student learning. Biology is sometimes characterized as a “soft science”, and introductory course offerings are typically focused on concept- or (biological) system-based learning outcomes rather than on outcomes related to data visualization, data presentation, or statistics. In this SUTL project, we aim to implement and test the impact of a graph-reading activity called “Figure of the Day (FotD)” where students are presented with various types of graphs and are given practice interpreting them and hypothesizing about their meaning. The key feature of the FotD activity is that graph legends (and sometimes axis labels) are removed before the graphs are given to the class. In the absence of this key information, students are forced to carefully analyze and evaluate what is presented, and to apply their understanding of data visualization to create a narrative of what the graph may be representing. After student narratives are discussed, the full graph (with legends and labels) is then shown to the class for further discussion. We hypothesize that students who are given graphs with missing information will show a greater improvement in their scientific literacy skills when compared to students who are given graphs without missing information.

Title: The Social Organization of Student-led Fieldwork

Mentor: Dan Menchik, Lyman Briggs College and Dept of Sociology

Fellow: Nicole Lehpamer, Sociology

Description: Ethnographic fieldwork has been long understood as a lone-wolf effort. However, based on some initial published collective efforts, there may exist educational and scholarly benefits to conducting ethnography by class participants or other kind of student group. This project is conceived of as an effort develop some principles for conducting such student-organized collective ethnographic fieldwork, by means of an effort to put those principles into practice. The payoff of analyzing and theorizing the social organization of this research would be scholarship describing some best practices for this model of research, a model being increasingly used but rarely studied by social scientists.

Title: The Educational Impact of Altering Students’ Stances Toward Their Textbooks

Mentor: Kevin Elliott, Lyman Briggs College and Dept of Fisheries and Wildlife

Fellow: Corrine Higley, Dept of Fisheries and Wildlife

Description: This research project is designed to test the effects on student learning of two different approaches to having students read class materials. One approach involves a relatively conventional strategy of having students answer questions at the end of each chapter of their textbook. The other approach involves asking the students to act as “editors” who critique their readings by evaluating features such as their thesis statements and the evidence that they provide. These approaches were compared in three classes (two freshman level courses and a senior level capstone course. In each class, half of the students were assigned to employ each approach, and after reading half of the textbook, the students switched approaches. The students were given surveys to assess their perceived learning gains and their attitudes towards their learning experience after using each approach. A subset of students in each class were also interviewed to gain more detailed information about their learning experiences in each role. We are currently analyzing our data and preparing a conference presentation and a journal article.

Title: Developing the Concept of Diffusion through Introductory Physics

Mentors: Vashti Sawtelle & Katie Hinko, Lyman Briggs College and Dept of Physics and Astronomy

Fellow: Dan Weller, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

Description: In the Lyman Briggs College, we are transitioning the large lecture introductory physics class to a studio-style environment that incorporates more connections to the life sciences. Studio physics are transformations that integrate lab and lecture, engage students in more group work, and increase the faculty to student ratio. In other settings, studio physics environments have been well documented to have a positive impact on students’ conceptual knowledge, problem solving ability, retention rates, and attitudes toward learning physics. In LBC we have transitioned our classroom to incorporate topics and ideas from the life sciences – specifically highlighting the concept of diffusion. Our curricular materials use a combination of lab investigations, computational modeling, and analytic problem-solving.

Title: Using Commonplace Books to Improve Student Thesis Statements

Mentor: Arthur Ward, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: Ryan Huey, History

Description: For years, Dr. Ward has been fine-tuning an assessment in his HPS classes called a “commonplace book.” This is a kind of intellectual journal that has its historical roots in the European renaissance. He uses it as a central place for students to turn in their many assignments, but the central activity they do in the commonplace book is writing thesis-driven analytical essays. In a semester, a student will write between 12-15 of these essays, each about 500 words. By writing so many short essays in the same format, they gain practice forming an argument in response to a text, as well as other valuable critical thinking and writing techniques. This SUTL project will focus on one skill in particular: the formation of a sharp thesis with a focused supporting argument. We will take a full semester’s worth of student essays (approx 80 students, approx 12 essays each - close to 1,000 essays) and assess the improvement of thesis statements over a semester. The primary labor involved will be anonymizing, randomizing, and coding the thesis statements. We plan to code for several features, including how opinionated/original the thesis is, whether it is the right scope for a 500 word essay, and whether it is “positive” or “negative” (that is, whether it agrees or disagrees with source material).

2016-2017 SUTL Fellows and Mentors at their year-end event May 2017. From left to right across the back: Luke Tunstall, So-Jung Youn, Kevin Elliot, Mark Largent, Pete White; across the front: Corrine Higley, Vashti Sawtelle, Younggon Bae.

Title: Using learning analytics to help close undergraduate achievement gaps

Mentor: Mark Largent, Lyman Briggs College and James Madison College

Fellow: YoungGon Bae, Program in Mathematics Education

Description: MSU has recently embarked on a campus-wide series of initiatives to make better use of its data to improve various aspects of the institution.  Much of the work that has been accomplished thus far has involved inventorying, assembling, and providing secure access to data, and efforts are now underway to analyze it using sophisticated Big Data techniques to address fundamental questions about the institution’s policies, practices, curricula, and students.  Early results suggest that this policy-relevant research will be valuable in improving student performance and retention to graduation.  The Higher Education Analytics Research (HEAR) Lab at MSU is one of the leaders in the collection of data and the building of analytics tools.  Its researchers use coarsened exact matching to compare the outcomes of similar students who have taken different pathways or had different experiences at MSU.  Thus far, the lab has examined the impact of undergraduate research experiences on student retention and the effects of different curricular pathways on student success.  It is now beginning a systematic analysis of the many efforts on campus to increase the retention and graduation rates of underprepared students in STEM.

Title: The impact on students’ learning of altering their stances toward their textbooks

Mentor: Kevin Elliott, Lyman Briggs College and Dept of Fisheries and Wildlife

Fellow: Corinne Higley, Dept of Fisheries and Wildlife

Description: This research project is designed to assess how students interact with and value textbooks depending on the approaches they take toward reading them. Students in two classes (a freshman-level course and a senior-level seminar) were each split into two groups. Half took a traditional approach of answering questions at the end of the chapters. The other half were asked to approach the text as an “editor,” evaluating the text’s argument and reasoning. Students were surveyed periodically throughout the semester to assess their learning gains and attitudes toward their learning experiences. A subset of students were also interviewed to gain more detailed information about their learning experiences in each role. We anticipate that the data from these two courses will shed light on whether and how approaching a textbook in different ways could affect various aspects of student learning differentially across levels (e.g., freshman vs. senior), including their understanding of the book’s content, their understanding of good writing practices, and their enjoyment of what they read. Our preliminary analysis suggests that the freshmen struggled to take an editorial role, so we are investigating strategies that might better prepare them to evaluate texts.

Title: Evaluating the transformation of an introductory physics class

Mentor: Vashti Sawtelle, Lyman Briggs College and Dept of Physics and Astronomy

Fellow: Luke Tunstall, Program in Mathematics Education

Description: In the Lyman Briggs College, we are transitioning the large lecture introductory physics class to a studio-style environment that incorporates more connections to the life sciences. Studio physics are transformations that integrate lab and lecture, engage students in more group work, and increase the faculty to student ratio. In other settings, studio physics environments have been well documented to have a positive impact on students’ conceptual knowledge, problem solving ability, retention rates, and attitudes toward learning physics.  In LBC we plan to replicate some of these results, better understand how these changes support a diverse set of students, and explore the additional impacts of strong connections to the life sciences.

Title: Getting the greatest learning from online simulations – testing student directed interactions vs. screencasts

Mentor: Ryan Sweeder, Lyman Briggs College

Fellow: Sarah Coburn, Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Description: The use of online learning materials, both in and out of the classroom, to support students’ conceptual learning has become more prevalent, particularly with the increasing popularity of online, blended, and flipped instruction. In chemistry there has been significant production of quality simulations and animations that allow students to visualize phenomena at the particulate level (something we cannot see) and make connections between this and the macroscopic level (what we can see with our eyes). While research supports the benefits of these materials for student learning, these simulations and animations have largely been used as instructor demonstrations or in laboratory situations. Little is known about how students use these materials on their own, outside of a classroom environment, to understand key chemistry concepts. This project is evaluating student use of simulations compared to their use of analogous screencasts in which experts highlight salient features of the simulation. For pre-existing chemistry simulations, we have developed scaffolded assignments that focus students on attaining key learning goals common to many general chemistry courses. These assignments are used as the basis for expert- led screencasts. Student learning gains on key objectives are assessed via follow-up questions to compare students who either manipulated the simulation or watched the matched screencast. Student learning is assessed through pre-/post-test gains, answers to open-ended questions, and near transfer tasks that involve drawing molecular-level representations. Eye tracking studies are simultaneously under way to better understand how students interact with the simulation/screencast and allocate their attention to these resources. These data will address our research questions focusing on student use of these electronic resources outside of class and the differences in student outcomes through the use of simulations versus screencasts.

Title: Changes in student understanding of biology concepts over time

Mentor: Peter White, Lyman Briggs College and Dept of Entomology

Fellow: So-Jung Youn, Dept of Fisheries and Wildlife

Description: I am interested to explore the temporal nature of learning in intro biology. I conducted a single- course investigation of this during this past semester in LB145, to examine how student knowledge of DNA structure changed over time. To measure this, I asked students to draw a detailed diagram of DNA at four time points in the semester: (1) pre-instruction, (2) post- instruction during a midterm, (3) two-weeks after the post-instruction midterm and (4) seven weeks after the post-instruction midterm. Students scored an average of 0.5 out of 11 at the first time point, 8.7 out of 11 at the second time point, 8.7 out of 11 at the third time point, and 7.4 out of 11 at the fourth time point. Although there was no drop in average student score at the time point two weeks after the midterm (i.e., identical scores of 8.7 out of 11), student score dropped 12% at the time point seven weeks after the midterm (i.e., 8.7 to 7.4 out of 11; t-test p = 0.0003). I would like funding from the SUTL program to measure this phenomenon across six intro biology courses at Lyman Briggs College (three intro organismal courses and three intro cell and molecular biology courses), across two semesters (FS16 and SS17). I have two core research questions: (1) How does learning of biological systems change as the temporal distance to that learning event increases?, and (2) How might different course formats impact the relationship between learning and time? The data I have collected to date is not publishable; it is not comprehensive enough. The early results however indicate that the biological systems learned early in a semester may need to be re-learned (in part) at the end of the semester. If this pattern holds across multiple courses and across multiple biological systems, it may suggest we should re-think how we structure content in our courses.