Education Commons^™

Exposing Problems Teaching Students Morphological Species Identification, Trevor Stamper, Lauren Weidner, Gregory Nigoghosian, Ludmila D. Nunes

IMPACT Presentations

When dealing with physical remains, morphological assessment for species is a traditional approach to entomological specimen identification. A dichotomous key guides the user through taxa determination for a specimen by providing a series of dual-choice nodes that center around morphological differences. Each nodal choice leads to either a new set of dichotomous choices or a taxa decision. We evaluated student’s ability to utilize a dichotomous key down to species for a limited set of taxa, by reviewing their nodal decisions along with their confidence level using a Likert scale (1-5).

Along with individual decision recording, students conducted a post-decision group …

Gamifying A First Year Biology Lab Library Session, Lisa Rose-Wiles, Veronica Amour

Praxis Presentations

Three years of work with a Biology lab course suggests that an embedded librarian has a positive impact on some student research skills. However, student feedback indicated that students want more interactive library sessions. The science librarian worked with an instructional designer to introduce elements of “gamification” into a library presentation and other library materials. In fall 2016 the science librarian integrated Top Hat, a teaching platform designed to help professors engage students, into library sessions for 16 biology labs. She also introduced Bernard Lonergan's Generalized Empirical Method (GEM) as a research framework. In this session we report on the …