A new fourth year Life Sciences course at McMaster University taught students about deeper learning while giving them the opportunity to experience deep learning itself. Students were encouraged to enhance their knowledge of science education research and issues, and reflect upon teaching and learning methods, effective for their own learning. As a culminating course project, students created a learning module about a scientific topic of their choice, which aimed to teach audiences from the elementary level to the university level to the general public level. By the end of the course, a diverse array of learning modules were created with topics ranging from the neuroscience of dance improvisation to astrophysics, each of which incorporated different techniques to encourage deeper learning amongst their intended audiences.

Our presentation will showcase student presenters who will share their experiences in the course. They will discuss how the development of their learning modules promoted their own experience of deep learning and how it encouraged them to pursue deep learning techniques in other courses. Ideas that are significant to enhancing the educational experience of students, engaging students in deeper, active learning, and inspiring students to pursue long-term understanding will be presented.

References:

Biggs, J and Tang, C (2007). Teaching for Quality Learning at University (3rd edn) Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press

Wieman, C. (2007). Why not try a scientific approach to science education?.Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 39(5), 9-15.

This presentation will describe a solution developed for a first-year chemistry course to address the issue of timely and individual student feedback for written midterm questions in a large-enrollment class. Scantron® sheets were customized to provide space where open-ended questions could be printed onto both sides of the sheets, along with areas for graders to "bubble-in" individual grades for questions. After questions were hand-graded and scores "bubbled-in", the sheets were scanned to read student identification and their scores on individual questions. At the same time, jpeg images were capture from both sides of the sheets. An application was developed to upload the student data and images to the course management system, where it was electronically returned to students. This solution provides instructors with a mechanism to provide more convenient feedback to students with less administrative headaches.

When it comes to improving academic skills, another approach that is commonly used is to intentionally integrate these skills into the first-year curriculum. However, these efforts still occur during the period when students are struggling to adapt to their new social and physical environments, and to cope with the psychological and cognitive demands of higher education. A third approach to easing the first-year academic transition is to allow for more practice time between the introduction and the use of a particular academic skill. Since there is limited time available in the university semester, the authors propose an approach to facilitate the development of academic skills within the high school curriculum that is aligned with the skills required during the first year of higher education curriculum.

In this session, participants will explore mechanisms through which university faculty and staff can work together with high school instructors to communicate the post-secondary academic skill expectations of students prior to their entering university. We will also discuss “Who is responsible?” and “How can we introduce university-level academic skills into the high school setting?”

1.D.R. Sokoloff, R.K.Thornton (2006). Interactive Lecture Demonstrations, Active Learning in Introductory Physics, Wiley.

¹ Smith, M., Knight, J, and Wood, W. 2008. The Genetics Concept Assessment: A New Concept Inventory for Gauging Student Understanding of Genetics. CBE-Life Sciences Education 7(4): 422-430.

² Kalas, P., O’Neill, A., Pollock, C., and Birol, G. 2012. Development and Application of a Meiosis Concept Inventory. Submitted for review to Cell Biology Education, Oct 2012.

• A large number of high quality student submissions;
• Enhanced student engagement with course material outside class hours and;
• Enhanced performance on the end of course examination for the majority of students.

This online workshop will be delivered through Blackboard Collaborate and will present an introduction to PeerWise, together with a significant hands-on activity where attendees will play the role of students creating assessment content, and answering and rating submissions from their colleagues. Attendees will gain a good understanding of the capabilities of the system and the potential it can offer for use in a wide range of sciences courses.

I'll present a project that is attempting to find a middle ground by taking open-ended assessments and adding constraints that make it possible to automatically categorize student answers. I'll focus on two forms of constrained essay question, which we are calling "LabLibs" and "WordBytes", and show preliminary data that students' answers in these constrained essays capture some of the confusions evident in free response or interview answers. I'll also discuss ways in which we are attempting to constrain other portions of the full experimental cycle within open-ended simulations (focusing on a virtual lab on natural selection) to enable immediate feedback to students. Please bring your computer to play with the tools and simulations yourself.

¹ Justan Lougheed, James Kirkland & Genevieve Newton (2012). Using Breakout Groups as an Active Learning Technique in a Large Undergraduate Nutrition Classroom at the University of Guelph, The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Volume 3, Issue 2.

1. Hamlin, K. Unconference.net, Like a conference only better, http://www.unconference.net

2. Follett, J. 2006. Understanding the Unconference, http://www.digital-web.com/articles/understanding_the_unconference/

Our conversations around teaching and learning in different scientific disciplines have led us to consider the possible existence of threshold concepts that transcend the sciences rather than residing within a single discipline. In this session we will examine a number of these underlying concepts that, until mastered, can present significant hurdles for students’ learning within the sciences. Participants are invited to evaluate some possible threshold concepts for student learning in the sciences from the perspective of their own areas of scientific work, including, but not limited to: identifying contextual constraints; visualizing data and interpreting a variety of visual representations, including diagrams, photos, 3-D representations, maps, and graphs; the notion of randomness; the nature and significance of scale; transitional boundaries; and identifying and making use of evidence. In the process, we hope that additional key concepts will emerge from our discussion. We will then explore what these concepts, and the notion of threshold concepts more generally, might mean for our teaching and for how and what we evaluate.

Flipping the classroom so that the bulk of the class time is spent discussing and analyzing the content that is presented in a variety of ways either prior to, or in a condensed form at the beginning of class, is a powerful way in which our classrooms can come more alive and more relevant to students. This presentation will examine our evolving classroom role, as we move from “the sage on the stage” to orchestrating and moving forward collaborative discussions so that they encourage critical and reflective thinking across the sustainability-science-society nexus

We will present the development process, involving iteration between survey data and statement validation stages with students and experts, as well as findings from the different disciplines in (primarily early) university courses. These include common trends, such as a tendency to see a decrease in overall expert orientation in the first year and alignment of expert attitudes with course performance, as well as some unique disciplinary outcomes. We hope to further discuss the implications for instruction with those who attend.

This discussion will offer an examination, based on reflective practice, of certain current best practices for creating and supporting both a positive teaching culture and a positive learning culture in a large Year 1 lecture-based chemistry course. Aspects will include teaching and learning in the full-class session, the online environment, and in opportunities such as tutorials, laboratories, and smaller group or 1-on-1 interactions within the course.

This will include reflecting on the success of creating an instructional team model for steering the course, and working with a central philosophy of “do more of what works and less of what doesn’t”. Some challenges to be faced as the course moves away from traditional “lecture” sessions to a blended learning format include determining how this team model will evolve, and how learning and teaching may best be supported in a flipped classroom model with less face-to-face time.

These challenges, and strategies for supporting learning in the new blended learning format, will be discussed and participant feedback or sharing of experience on any of the above topics will be welcomed!

I tried the flipped classroom strategy in a third-year Biochemistry course with an enrolment of 180 students. In this presentation I will describe how I implemented the strategy using recorded lectures and online assignments coupled with in-class exercises done by students in small groups. Most in-class activities were problems based on experiments published in the scientific literature, although some featured tactile manipulation of objects to illustrate biochemical concepts. Those attending the session will participate in an example of the latter type of exercise, relating to DNA structure. The main lessons I learned from my first attempt to flip the classroom are that running some types of exercises with 150+ students is logistically demanding, and that it is easy to make in-class problems too difficult. I will place my experiences into the context of published work about classroom flipping. Time will be allotted for attendees to share their insights and ideas about strategies for flipping the classroom.

Undergraduate research has historically been an integral component of the educational experience in the Faculty of Science at the University of Manitoba, but rapidly changing science-related disciplines pose unique challenges to identify, evaluate, acquire, and use information. Students are required to demonstrate competency in research papers and conduct laboratory research. Information is scrutinized by anonymous reviewers and is exposed to ethical and legal ramifications. A model was developed to implement information literacy (IL) into existing programs that already have a strong research foundation using the ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) standards for Science and Engineering. The model aligns both sets of learning outcomes (information literacy and discipline-specific), and provides sample exercises with rubrics for evaluation. The integration of IL learning outcomes within the context of a discipline in which the student has an interest, enables a more powerful learning environment than if the outcomes were separated. The program ensures the five IL competency standards are met at each level of a four-year degree, and that students take responsibility for their own success resulting in greater retention throughout their programs and into their future careers. The implications are that the IL integration will provide the tools necessary to help students remain within and successfully complete their academic programs; and gain added value to their knowledge and skills that can be extended into society or to a graduate degree and beyond.

Fellows determine much of the content of the unit’s projects and present workshops themselves, allowing for peer-to-peer interactions. They also have a large amount of freedom in more personalized projects that they wish to initiate and carry out. This leads to projects being developed due to needs perceived by those on the ground and also creates a group of science graduate students with a great deal of experience in the field of science education by the time they graduate: the program is as much an investment in these students as it is in the projects that they work on during their time at T-PULSE. It allows them to transcend discipline-specific limits and obtain a much greater knowledge of science education than is typical for science graduate students.

The turnover of graduate students as they finish their degrees requires a semi-regular hiring process in which group cohesion is a key factor. T-PULSE's Fellows have a large amount of freedom and responsibility for graduate students, allowing T-PULSE the advantage of different perspectives and approaches as a science education initiative. This flatter setup is scale- and mandate-limited but can be extremely useful.

The common response to this question has been to transfer current face-to face course materials into a Learning Management System (LMS). This is generally being done by the uploading of class resources such as PDFs of course readings or PowerPoint presentations used with lectures. Unfortunately, that is not an effective way to teach online. As well, this mere transference is also ignoring the opportunity to finally improve the way we teach.

I think when Dr. Bates asks "is there major room for improvement in how we teach?” he is encouraging us to consider improving our teaching through including more active learning techniques, more student engagement, more visual content, etc. The online learning environment is very conducive to these improvements. Rather than passively transferring current face-to-face course material to the online LMS, my presentation will offer faculty practical ideas and examples of how to actively transform their current course material so that it is effective in an online learning environment.

Nanoscience and nanotechnology are emerging as new ways to examine complex phenomena that require a perspective view simultaneously from the more traditional disciplines of Chemistry, Physics and Biology. The research first grew out of the subfields of condensed matter physics, surface science, macromolecular chemistry, and cellular physiology.

Nutraceutical science is an emergent branch of food, nutritional, pharmacologic and health sciences that recognizes that food has an impact on human health that is greater than providing essential nutrients and energy. Bioactive chemicals in foods and food supplements have the capacity to provide a medicine-like function, altering the risk of a variety of chronic degenerative diseases.

The explosive growth of the new fields caused us to reflect upon the appropriateness of studying these interdisciplinary fields directly at the undergraduate level. We will compare and contrast the very different approaches to the subsequent development of these two undergraduate majors, with an emphasis on key decisions that shaped curriculum design.

Under 140 character conclusion:

Collaborative testing exercise promotes integration, deep learning and student satisfaction

¹Erica J. Sainsbury & Richard A. Walker (2008): Assessment as a vehicle for learning: extending collaboration into testing, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 33:2,103-117

Student surveys showed somewhat surprisingly that the use of laptops in class increased their engagement and attentiveness. The students’ engagement was similar regardless whether the student physically came to class or participated synchronously from remote location. The conclusion reached was that if we can provide tools that empower students to actively participate in class they will, and they will feel more engaged regardless where they participate.

Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop or mobile devices to class to participate in this presentation.

This paper is based on preliminary results from an international survey in Canada, China, and Spain. The survey aims to better understand the knowledge and attitudes of student teachers towards biotechnology which could potentially reflect on their teaching in the future; in other words their level of biotechnology literacy. The validated survey was administered to intermediate/senior and primary/junior pre-service students in the Faculty of Education. Canadian survey results for the primary/junior pre-service students are compared with those in the intermediate/senior program. These results will be compared to those obtained in other countries.

Since biotechnology is having an ever increasing impact on society, this research will provide insight into the extent pre-service education programs need to be expanded and re-developed in order to incorporate and address the growing need for such knowledge.

Over the course of the past two decades, Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky have come to be known as a coterie of ecological writers and ethicists. All five poets have inhabited the Canadian university at various points throughout their careers, and by discussing their ecopoetics in light of their commentary on academic epistemologies and contemporary education in the humanities, this dissertation observes how the poets’ respective approaches to aesthetics, philosophy, and pedagogy are intimately intertwined. By contextualizing the group’s ecopoetics in light of their academic interventions, I argue that their public reputations as ecological artists and educators have been established as they have worked to define the borders of their own poetics within and against the territories of the broader academic and literary traditions they inhabit. In this regard, I explore two of the major epistemological traditions that the poets set in contrast to the reading practices of postmodernism – phenomenology, and the via negativa (negative way) – and argue that engaging with their works means continuously renegotiating the age-old question of poetry’s capacity to teach and delight.

Bruno Schulz’s A Street of Crocodiles (1934) and Guy Davenport’s A Table of Green Fields (1993) feature a collection of short stories and events that occur within the realm of dream and nightmare. Their stories transgress the boundaries of fiction and reality, and do not adhere to traditional literary forms of narrative. They present worlds where all inhibitions are let loose, and allow for the expression and pursuit of desires that would normally be hindered by societal hierarchies and moral codes. A carnival reading of the texts, based on Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival as literary genre, allows for an active engagement between reader and text, and provides a better understanding of the dreams, fears, and desires expressed within each respective work.

This dissertation reconceptualizes generic distinctions between fiction and testimony in accounts of childhood trauma. Scholars such as Leigh Gilmore have argued that while writers of trauma stories are burdened by legalistic definitions of evidence and anxieties about truth-telling, they nonetheless push at the limits of autobiography, often scuffing the border between fact and fiction, in their effort to bring their traumatic stories into language. There has not, however, been a sustained effort to understand and legitimize the place of fiction in testimony, particularly in cases of adult narrations of recovered memories of childhood traumas. My research addresses this lacuna by querying the dynamic relationship between fiction and testimony in both autobiographical and fictional accounts of childhood trauma. This work is motivated by my desire to open up a scripto-therapeutic space for trauma survivors to incorporate stories and use their imaginations to narrate traumatic truths rather than strictly evidentiary truths.

In Chapter One of my dissertation, I explore Sylvia Fraser’s My Father’s House (1987), a pioneering memoir of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. I consider this controversial work as a case history of testimony caught between fact and fiction. Chapter Two extends my discussion of the controversy over the truth-status of Fraser’s traumatic memoir to an analysis of the ways in which three Canadian novels similarly challenge conventional boundaries of genre and representation in their fictional articulation of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse: Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees (1996), Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), and Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning (1996). In Chapter Three, I argue that Indigenous writers specifically employ fiction and storytelling as forms of testimony outside of sanctioned Western discursive arenas such as courtrooms and the media. This chapter explores three residential school narratives: Vera Manuel’s play, Strength of Indian Women (1998), and two novels, James Bartleman’s As Long as the Rivers Flow (2011) and Robert Arthur Alexie’s Porcupines and China Dolls (2002).

Oxygen and carbon isotopic measurements of coevally formed bone and tooth enamel bioapatite from a modern equid show that these tissues record drinking water and diet isotopic signals in an identical fashion. Hence, data for both tissues can be combined to track movement, dietary changes, and seasonal variability over the animal’s lifetime, and climatic variability over longer time periods. This tool was tested for horses using ten paired tooth and bone samples to reconstruct conditions in Alberta during the Late Pleistocene. While post-mortem isotopic alteration confounded interpretation of the results, two key findings emerged: (i) pre- and post-Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) time periods based on radiocarbon dates correspond with high and low δ¹⁵N collagen values, respectively; and (ii) pre- and post-LGM horses have similar drinking water δ¹⁸O and diet δ¹³C values, suggesting that environmental conditions, including seasonality, were similar across the time periods represented by these samples.

Condensation and segregation of mitotic chromosomes are critical processes for cellular propagation and if compromised, can lead to genomic instability. Genomic instability is known to be an active contributor to tumorigenesis, rather than being a by-product of malignant progression. The retinoblastoma protein (pRB) is the prototypic tumor suppressor. Its tumor suppressive properties are linked to its ability to negatively regulate proliferation by inhibiting E2F target gene transcription. Using a gene targeted mouse model defective for interactions mediated by the pRB LXCXE binding cleft that is distinct from E2F binding (Rb1^ΔL/ΔL), I have demonstrated that LXCXE-interactions are an essential part of pRB-mediated tumor suppression. When these interactions are disrupted, cells exhibit chromosome condensation and mitotic defects that are unrelated to G1 to S-phase regulation by pRB. These defects contribute to earlier tumor formation and more aggressive pathology in Trp53^+/- and Trp53^-/- mouse models, revealing a new mechanism of tumor suppression, facilitated by pRB, whereby genome stability is maintained by the proper condensation of mitotic chromosomes. Subsequent study of the mechanism by which pRB facilitates genome stability suggests that a pRB-E2F1-Condensin II complex localizes to pericentromeric heterochromatin. In the absence of this complex, DNA double strand breaks are observed and persist into mitosis and the ensuing G1 phase of the cell division cycle. Moreover, haploinsufficiency of Rb1 was enough to compromise loading of Condensin II at pericentromeric DNA and elicit the same defects. Significantly, RB1^+/- fibroblasts from retinoblastoma patients also exhibit DNA damage and mitotic errors. And, in cancers of mesenchymal origin, RB1^+/- cells exhibit as much genomic instability as RB1^-/- cells. Finally, haploinsufficiency of the LXCXE binding cleft of pRB compromises pRB-mediated tumor suppression, resulting in tumors with increased chromosome gains and losses, comparable to Rb1^ΔL/ΔL mutant mice. The data presented in this thesis change our understanding of the importance of genome stability as a tumor suppressive mechanism of the retinoblastoma protein and contrary to traditional thought, suggests that haploinsufficiency of RB1 functionally contributes to tumorigenesis in humans.