This Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) project is based on the knowledge that students engaged in real biological research, either via experiences outside of the class, or open-inquiry activities in the class, learn more and are better motivated. The project team is generating learning materials that provide authentic research experiences for students in introductory biology classes. One of the challenges in biology curricula is the disinterest and discomfort many students have with mathematics and statistics. The learning materials being created, assessed, and disseminated allow meaningful hypothesis formation, data collection, and most importantly analyses, that capture student interest via image analysis of fascinating biological phenomena.
Photographic images can quickly capture people's interest, and can transmit a great deal of information. This project is capitalizing on these phenomena to create engaging educational materials to teach quantitative and analytical skills to biology students. Students are presented with inherently interesting sets of still images or videos from which they can observe and measure real biological phenomena, via image analysis. They are presented with a tangible research framework and given background information, asked to develop hypotheses, and then asked to collect data from a set of images/videos, firsthand. Through these images, students are engaged in the process of science, first superficially as they hear interesting research projects and examine absorbing photographic images; but then more deeply during data collection and subsequent analyses. The power of image analysis to aid instruction already has a foundation in the pedagogical literature for mathematics, geo-engineering, and computer science, but has been more rarely used in biology. The research projects being used as the foundation of the learning materials include ecology, behavioral science, neuroscience, evolution, and molecular and cellular processes.
Project evaluation includes pre- and post-instruction assessment to examine student learning gains, as well as direct queries concerning students' attitudes to the biological sciences. Learning modules tested at Radford University are then being tested at a broad range of partner institutions, including Virginia Tech, Vassar College, and Roanoke College. The knowledge being generated is a means for these cognitive skills to be integrated into traditional biology curricula nationwide.
