Connecting you to what's happening in the UBC Biology Program
How can we get students to have more productive discussions during group work experiences? In this month’s “interesting read”, researchers explored this question by analyzing student discussions in response to lower-level versus higher-level questions, as measured according to Bloom’s taxonomy. They found that higher-level questions stimulated more meaningful group discussions than lower-level questions. Based on …
Continue reading “Factors Influencing Quality of Team Discussion”
What teaching practices promote student well-being? This question was answered in a TLEF-funded study conducted at UBC that used a mixed methods approach to identify teaching strategies that support student well-being. Strategies are grouped into three main themes: 1) Connection and Social Belonging, 2) Learning and Motivation to Learn, and 3) Holistic support The authors …
Continue reading “Understanding the Role of Teaching Practices in Student Well-being”
In this month’s interesting read study, an interdisciplinary team at UBC took a different approach to teaching cell-biology topics. Students first struggled to solve complex problems, which primed them to learn the expert solution via a series of interactive activities – activating prior knowledge, then sifting through the available information, to arrive at a solution. …
Two-stage collaborative exams have been shown to improve student test grade performance, but do they improve retention of course material? This month’s interesting read features a study conducted in an introductory biology course at UBC in which researchers measured student retention of course content at different time points following a two-stage collaborative exam. They found …
What teaching practices most effectively promote student learning in UBC undergraduate biology courses? This month’s interesting read describes a large-scale study conducted at UBC in which researchers observed classroom practices and assessed student learning in 31 biology courses (involving more than 3,700 students!). They found that group work was “the most significant positive predictor of learning gains”, particularly when it included …