Amongst the major science research journals, Science magazine has consistently been the most prominent in flying the flag for science education. I was very interested, therefore, in an Editorial by Carl Wieman in the September 4th 2009 issue of the magazine. In his piece Galvanising Science Departments, Wieman describes some fairly radical innovations in Science Education [...]
Educational Research: Reflections of Biopractitioners
The Higher Education Academy Centre for Bioscience Pedagogic Research in the Biosciences day conference brought together about thirty academics, for the most part Bioscience specialists, who have been involved to educational research. The day turned out to be highly informative and thought provoking. Some on the hoof reflections were collated via Twitter – click this [...]
Helping students improve their referencing practice
Appropriate citation of source documents is a key element in all academic writing. As anyone involved in the teaching of undergraduates will know, however, suitable ways of organising reference lists, and conventions for highlighting within the new text the points at which the sources have been used, are not always intuitive.
Colleagues and students may therefore be interested [...]
Marking, remarking and meaningful learning
“Marking, remarking and meaningful learning: an assessment and feedback seminar” was held at the University of Leicester on April 4th 2008. The event was organised by the Assessment and Feedback Working party of the University’s Student Experience Enhancement Committee and was attended by about 60 members of the academic community. The following are personal reflections and things [...]
Getting to grips with Information Literacy
From time to time I find myself ruminating on exactly how and where I acquired a variety of study skills. I have no recollection, for example, of any formalised training in finding and selecting source materials and yet even as an undergraduate I seemed to be reasonably adept at choosing relevant information.
Back in those days, [...]
Assessment and Learning – getting to know ELLI?
In preparation for a recent meeting of our School of Biological Sciences Pedagogic Research group, I’ve been reading a number of articles in the Assessment for Learning genre. My attention was particularly drawn to accounts of ELLI – the Evaluating Lifelong Learning Inventory – project. ELLI has been developed by Ruth Deakin Crick and colleagues at [...]
Learning and Teaching in the Sciences (conference report, part 3)
The fact that you are reading this blog entry at all means that you are already engaging with Web 2.0, which has been defined on Wikipedia as “a perceived second-generation of Web-based services such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users”. In the third talk at the [...]
Learning and Teaching in the Sciences (conference report, part 2)
Professor Melanie Cooper from Clemson University, South Carolina came to Leicester’s Learning and Teaching in the Sciences conference as part of a UK tour sponsored by the Physical Sciences Centre of the Higher Education Academy. In her talk, Using technology to investigate and improve student problem-solving strategies, Prof Cooper began by drawing an important distinction between problems and exercises. Often when [...]
What advice would you give to students starting your course?
Each academic year since 2005, the Higher Education Academy in the UK has run an essay competition for current students to express their views on an aspect of teaching and learning. In 2007, the theme was “What advice would you give to students starting your course?“ The top entries submitted by Bioscience students have recently [...]
Learning and Teaching in the Sciences (conference report, part 1)
The annual Learning and Teaching in the Sciences event at the University of Leicester was held on May 23rd 2007. Three invited speakers brought very different insights into the effective communication of science. This entry focuses specifically on the first of the presentations. Other talks, by Melanie Cooper (Clemson University, USA) and Alan Cann (University [...]
