Several updates to note covering progress over the last few months:

• Pointers in menus and posts were recently added to identify current research and development in EOAS’s Science Education Initiative group. See in particular the new “Initiatives” menu.
• There is also a new “Times” 2-pager on Grading Exams. See the EOAS-SEI Times menu.
• If you have questions or thoughts about this blog or EOAS science education projects let us know. An email to fjones@eoas.ubc.ca will get sent to who ever is most qualified to address it.
• One more education initiative not yet reported upon in this blog is the UCA-UBC Curriculum Development partnership. This is an exciting new project to develop a complete, new, 22 course B.Sc. degree program in Earth and Environmental Sciences, for the University of Central Asia. The work is being coordinated out of EOAS in collaboration with Dep’t Geography. Details with links to descriptions, objectives and collaborators are provided in a separate blog at https://blogs.ubc.ca/eescourses/.

The second of two CWSEI Impact assessment papers has now been published. This pair of articles summarizes results of using several instruments to independently assess the impact of CWSEI-funded improvements on 54 courses in our Department (Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences). The two papers are cited here:

• Part 1 is Jones, F. “Impact Assessment of a Department-Wide Science Education Initiative Using Students’ Perceptions of Teaching and Learning Experiences.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 42, no. 5 (July 4, 2017): 772–87. doi:10.1080/02602938.2016.1188057.
• Part 2 is Jones, F. “Comparing student, instructor, classroom and institutional data to evaluate a seven-year department-wide science education initiative“, also published in Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, and available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/egSy5EEYZZxPtTRYbeyI/full . The PDF there is fine but they screwed up Table 4 in the HTML version. It will end up on paper in Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Ed. like Part 1, probably in late spring 2018.