DSCC | Focus on Workplace Skills Intensive | Coleman Ronald | Bio 162: Ichthyology -- Study of Fishes | Biological Sciences • Workplace skills • Alignment

Course number: Bio 162: Ichthyology -- Study of Fishes | Biological Sciences; Workplace skills; Alignment

Reflection on Instructional Change: 

Note: As you will see, I have deviated from the template, to match the work that I did.

The Challenge: We as faculty want to know which skills incoming students have and which skills we can try to get them to learn in a particular course. This is critical for developing a coherent, planned curriculum. Furthermore, when a student goes to apply for a job, or further education, they often need to list the relevant “skills” that they have. Many students are perplexed by this question and do not recognize or appreciate the number or diversity of skills which they have learned during their degree.

To address this challenge, I ultimately want to produce a catalog of skills that a student in our department could conceivably have or obtain during their degree by mapping skills to particular courses. My first cut at this was to produce a survey of skills and implement it on the students of my Fall 2022 class, namely Bio 162: Ichthyology – the Study of Fishes. The students represent a range of subdisciplines in Biological Sciences, including Ecology, Evolution and Conservation students as well as BioMedical, and Molecular Biology students, plus several Environmental Studies students.

I devised the skills survey in the late summer and gave it in the first two weeks of class, and then again in the last two weeks of class.  See below for a portion of the survey.

 

Results           

The survey was useful. In many cases, the results agreed with my classroom experience, but in other cases I discovered that the students were quite familiar with some things that I did not anticipate, but also that they were less comfortable with some things that I thought they should have mastered previous to this course. When I analyze the end-of-semester survey to compare to the start-of-semester survey, I hope to see that the students learned the skills laid out in the Syllabus under Learning Outcomes.

Reflection

Next time, I will likely change the possible responses from “Easy”, “Possible”, “Difficult” and “Never Tried” to other terms – we discussed this in our Observe and Analyze meeting and I need to think about it more.

Finally, an important conclusion from this methodology is that asking if a student thinks that they can do something is not the same as them actually being able to do it.  For example, as an extreme example, asking a student if they "know how to use Microsoft Excel" is largely meaningless because there is no objective assessment of what "know how to use" means. The most direct method of assessing skills would be to give the students an actual test, e.g., “Use Microsoft Excel to construct a bar graph” but this would be largely impractical and very time consuming. Instead, I tried to break the skills down into clearly identifiable tasks but even this is not perfect.  Finally, it is critical that the students and the surveyor agree on what certain words mean.  For example, I asked if the student had "Used any Data visualization software"?   However, in discussing the results with the students, I found out that none of the students were actually familiar with this term -- it is a very specific technical type of software -- so they just answered what they "thought it meant".

I need to think about this more.

Impact

Ultimately, work similar to this needs to be undertaken throughout the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics so we can align our curriculum to our instructional intentions and to our student's needs.  

Screen capture of part of the survey

Faculty Bio

	I am a Professor in Biological Sciences and Interim Director of the Student Research Center. My research focuses on Evolutionary Ecology, typically of fishes. I teach courses such as Animal Behavior, Ichthyology, Fisheries Biology, Biology of Dinosaurs, etc.,

 

Program Sponsors

	This work was supported by: National Science Foundation Hispanic Serving Institution Project STEM Zone DUE 1832335 US Department of Education Hispanic Serving Institution Project Degree with a Purpose P031S210061 US Department of Education Hispanic Serving Institution Project STEM4Equity P031C210012 *Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the US Department of Education.