Can We Engage Students in Large‐Lecture, Nonmajors Environmental Science Courses

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Note: William Bromer is the editor of Ecology 101. Anyone wishing to contribute articles or reviews to this section should contact him at the Department of Natural Sciences, University of St. Francis, 500 N. Wilcox, Joliet, IL 60435, (815) 740-3467, E-mail: wbromer@stfrancis.edu. Large lectures reduce the opportunity for contact with senior faculty members, for testing students or assigning other kinds of work that engage them in analytic and critical thinking, or for discussing ideas. Grades in such courses are often determined by students' ability to give factually correct answers rather than getting them to exercise their thought processes. In the harshest terms, the ways in which large lecture courses are conducted often infantilize students intellectually, allowing them to persist in the notion that learning consists of absorbing what authorities tell them is true. —Schoenberg 2005 In a world that increasingly depends on science literacy and critical thinking, large introductory science courses are failing to engage students. We know that students of science need more than strict information and rules-based logic to solve contemporary problems. These students will also need to learn creativity, cognitive flexibility, and adaptability. Rigorous examination of how we teach (Fox and Hackerman 2003, Handelsman et al. 2004) and how students learn (Bransford et al. 2000, Donovan and Bransford 2005) suggest that students need to actively participate in lectures and discovery-centered laboratories to develop the intellectual habits that drive engagement. The National Research Council has identified active learning as a priority for improving science literacy, while most introductory science courses tend to be taught as large lecture courses that often reinforce students' passive attitudes toward learning (Fox and Hackerman 2003). The traditional approach to teaching science often fails students who are increasingly asked to connect their academic learning to professional practice in addressing important societal problems. It has been shown that active learning is preferable to traditional lectures in challenging student misconceptions and improving science literacy (Ebert-May et al. 1997, Waterman 1998), but it is unclear how prior knowledge can be leveraged to help students understand science in the context of modern problems. Bransford et al. (2000), in their foundational book How People Learn, identify the importance of initial learning in developing the skills required to transfer and apply knowledge to new settings and contexts. They assert that initial learning is enhanced when students have a framework to contextualize initial understanding, have a motivation to learn, and opportunities to transfer initial understanding to broader problems. In efforts to help students meet our learning outcomes, establishing a context for learning as a way to enhance engagement is critical (Leskes and Miller 2006). In 2005, the American Association of Colleges and Universities published a special issue of Peer Review on “Science and student engagement.” In this issue, Bowen (2005) identified four varied, but related, modes of student engagement. Bowen's areas of engagement are (1) engagement in learning process, (2) engagement with the object of study, (3) engagement with the contexts of subject of study, and (4) engagement with the human condition (Bowen 2005). The challenge for ecology and environmental science instructors, then, is to draw students into the process of learning, make the environment interesting, help students recognize the context of contemporary environmental issues, and show how it relates to the broad human conditions. 1) Ask questions/contribute to discussions 2) Come to class having completed readings/assignments 3) Prepare multiple drafts of a paper or assignment 4) Integrate ideas from different sources 5) Work with others inside or outside of class 6) Work harder than you anticipated 7) Discuss ideas from class with others outside of class While there is certainly more to engagement than these behaviors, the NSSE provides an instrument to measure our effectiveness in promoting engagement. In 2007, I redesigned the large-lecture introductory environmental science course that I was teaching at Washington State University. The hypothesis that I wanted to test was that through structuring a course to enhance engagement, student science literacy would improve, and students would be better critical thinkers. I made the choice to balance techniques that I was using in the course (Bransford et al. 2000) to improve student engagement. This involved reducing lecture and increasing inquiry (case studies, design), group work, and the use of enhanced technology (clickers, simulations), and was done to achieve Bowen's first measure of engagement—in the learning process. In addition, I made a shift away from a content-oriented approach of environmental science to a thematic structure focusing on topics that were directly relevant to my students. In this new structure we began the course by examining human health and environmental risks, and then the benefits that we derive from environmental systems. This accomplishes Bowen's second and third areas of engagement—interest in the area of study and its context. The class finished with global and local case studies, including climate change and issues of human population and development. This final one-third of the course engaged students in Bowen's fourth area—engagement in the human condition. The National Research Council identifies the importance of pre-existing knowledge in providing a framework for new learning (Bransford et al. 2000). One way to leverage pre-existing knowledge is to use popular media to illustrate key concepts. One way that I employed this approach was in using Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy to teach and assess understanding of biogeography. Using the map that was included in the publication of the book, one can place individual scenes from the movies into a geographical context. With that context, students can begin to describe the ecological conditions at various locations and understand the biogeography of Middle Earth. They can then be evaluated on their understanding of biogeographical concepts, such as the effects of latitude, altitude, and rain shadows. The benefits of this activity were that it was entertaining for the students, it forced them to think about familiar ideas in an unfamiliar environment, and it was easily employed in a large lecture setting. A second powerful tool that we used was small-group work. The following example is a modified activity that was developed by Ingrid Burke for a natural resource class at Colorado State University (I. Burke, personal communication). An important but challenging concept in environmental science is the tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968). For years I have tried to teach this in a lecture format, often with mixed results. In my redesigned course we illustrated the concept by having groups of five students manage a commonly held resource—a population of M&Ms. Each five-person group was given a container that included 18 M&Ms, a bag of additional M&Ms, and a set of rules. One student in the group acted as the overseer. The rules were that the four remaining students would harvest M&Ms to sustain themselves and improve their lives. To keep themselves and their family alive they had to harvest two candies. They could harvest up to three additional candies as profit. For the first experiment, they could not coordinate their harvesting. After each of the four students harvested their candies, the overseer doubled the number of remaining M&Ms. Nearly all groups drove their population of M&Ms to extinction within two generations, and no groups lasted beyond four generations. We then reset the populations to 18 M&Ms and let them develop a comprehensive management plan for their population. The students were remarkably creative in their approaches, including concepts of maintaining breeding populations, selective harvest (no green candies could be harvested), and measuring population sizes prior to harvest. There was a substantial improvement in student recall of the fundamental principles of the tragedy of the commons both initially and at the end of the semester. We used student response systems (clickers) almost daily in the class. While they were effective in collecting quiz results, I found them most useful in increasing engagement when they were employed to survey students on topics related to class or to illustrate population-level data. For example, we discussed shifting population dynamics that accompany development. To illustrate this, students were asked the number of siblings in their mother's family (mean = 4.2). Then I quizzed them on the number of children in their family (mean = 2.7). Finally I asked them to forecast how many children they anticipated having (mean=1.8). From this exercise they could see how within two generations family size had declined substantially, which laid the foundation for additional discussions of social and biological factors associated with shifting human populations. I assessed the effectiveness of the changes in approach and themes using both short-term assessments and summative assessments. The results illustrate both the opportunities and challenges of engaging students. To measure engagement during the course of a lecture period I used a modified Chain Note assessment (Angelo and Cross 1993). To measure the overall effectiveness of the course in promoting engagement, students completed a portion of the National Survey of Student Engagement. These results were compared to peers at Washington State University and at Carnegie I institutions. The Chain Note assessment is a simple way of surveying student behavior through a class period. Several large envelopes with the question “What were you doing the moment before this envelope reached you?” were passed through the lecture hall. Inside the envelope was a lined paper where they wrote the time and what they were doing. Simultaneously, a teaching assistant kept a log of what was happening in the class, including topics being discussed, multimedia use, etc. We did this twice during the semester. Data were composited and I evaluated the level of engagement of the students based on their responses. Less than 25% of students were actively taking notes, 32% of students responded that they were “listening.” During videos, all students responded that they were watching the movie. What surprised and disappointed me was that nearly 15% of students responded that they were multitasking— listening while doing something else. An additional 15% were disengaged. Of those that were disengaged, 23% were texting or using the Internet, 12% were playing Sudoku in the campus paper, 6% were talking/flirting with a neighbor, and 6% were working on other class work. Our end-of-semester assessment using the NSSE was illuminating. Perhaps the most disappointing was the question concerning how often students asked questions or contributed to discussions in class. Nearly 50% of students said that they never contributed to discussions, as compared to 10% of all WSU students and 3% of Carnegie peer students. This is a result that we would anticipate in a large lecture— except that I specifically designed the course to promote discussion in small-group settings. It is clear that in spite of students' frequent involvement in peer discussion groups, they perceived “contributing” to the class as involvement in the whole-class discussions. This differentiation between what happens in small groups and large lecture settings suggests a hierarchy of learning, with lower value placed on peer discussions. To promote engagement in these small groups we will need to increase their importance and value to students. Two aspects of the NSSE results that were positive were their willingness to work with classmates outside of class, with our students doing this often or very often at a rate 1.75 times greater than the WSU and Carnegie peer students, and their completion of assignments and readings prior to class, where our students did this 50% more often than the comparison groups. The engagement attribute measured by the NSSE that I found most encouraging concerned how often students discussed ideas from readings or class with others outside of the class. I assert that this is a measure of how the ideas and concepts we are teaching students influence them beyond the academic realm. For our 101 students, 50% of students said that they were talking about the class with others often or very often. This contrasts strongly with the comparison groups, of whom only 12–15% talked about ideas with others often or very often. This reflects that students were making connections between the concepts that we discussed in class and their personal lives, and were making the transfer that Bransford et al. (2000) say is so critical for long-term learning. Ultimately there are ways to structure environmental science and ecology courses that will engage students. They will be able to contextualize their learning. However, large lecture settings do create substantial impediments to involvement. Until there is a shift in student perceptions of the importance of their involvement in small-group discussions, they will perceive themselves as making little contribution to the class. Through focusing on student engagement, we can begin to transform the large lecture hall from a space where students try to simply absorb what is true, to one where true learning is fostered and students learn to apply foundational principles of science.