Peggy Brickman

Developing a Test of Scientific Literacy Skills (TOSLS): Measuring Undergraduates’ Evaluation of Scientific Information and Arguments

Life sciences faculty agree that developing scientific literacy is an integral part of undergraduate education and report that they teach these skills. However, few measures of scientific literacy are available to assess students’ proficiency in using scientific literacy skills to solve scenarios in and beyond the undergraduate biology classroom. In this paper, we describe the development, validation, and testing of the Test of Scientific Literacy Skills (TOSLS) in five general education biology classes at three undergraduate institutions. The test measures skills related to major aspects of scientific literacy: recognizing and analyzing the use of methods of inquiry that lead to scientific knowledge and the ability to organize, analyze, and interpret quantitative data and scientific information. Measures of validity included correspondence between items and scientific literacy goals of the National Research Council and Project 2061, findings from a survey of biology faculty, expert biology educator reviews, student interviews, and statistical analyses. Classroom testing contexts varied both in terms of student demographics and pedagogical approaches. We propose that biology instructors can use the TOSLS to evaluate their students’ proficiencies in using scientific literacy skills and to document the impacts of curricular reform on students’ scientific literacy.

Feedback about Teaching in Higher Ed: Neglected Opportunities to Promote Change.

Most college science, technology, engineering, and mathematics faculty members could benefit from more feedback about implementing evidence-based teaching strategies. The goals of this essay are to summarize best practices for providing feedback, to describe the current state of instructional feedback, to recommend strategies for providing feedback, and to highlight areas for research.

Media-Savvy Scientific Literacy: Developing Critical Evaluation Skills by Investigating Scientific Claims

ABSTRACT Students must learn content knowledge and develop scientific literacy skills to evaluate and use scientific information in real-world situations. Recognizing the accessibility of scientific information to the average citizen, we developed an instructional approach to help students learn how to judge the quality of claims. We describe a project-based applied learning (PAL) approach that utilizes engaging questions about biological issues relevant to students. Working through these projects, students are challenged to evaluate sources of information and communicate their understanding of scientific claims. We discuss challenges that students encounter and offer suggestions for enacting this approach in a generaleducation college classroom.

Teacher Knowledge for Active-Learning Instruction: Expert–Novice Comparison Reveals Differences

This study examined teacher knowledge important to effective active-learning instruction in large college biology courses by comparing expert and novice thinking. Experts paid attention to particular aspects of instruction more frequently than novices and reasoned more deeply as they evaluated and made suggestions about how to improve lessons.

When Group Work Doesn’t Work: Insights from Students

Introducing group work in college science classrooms can lead to noticeable gains in student achievement, reasoning ability, and motivation. To realize these gains, students must all contribute. Strategies like assigning roles, group contracts, anonymous peer evaluations, and peer ratings all encourage student participation. In a class using these strategies, we conducted in-depth interviews to uncover student perceptions of group work in general and the utility of these support strategies. Students in both high- and low-performance groups still complained of unequal contributions while praising the social support provided by groups. Students who scored highly on tests were more likely to recognize the benefits of group work, regardless of their groups’ overall performance levels, while lower-scoring students perceived group work as time-consuming “busy work” with little cognitive benefit. Comments from anonymous peer evaluations differed only subtly between high- and low-performance groups. Numerical ratings on these evaluations did correlate with overall group performance. However, students in lower-performance groups assigned harsh ratings to their low-scoring members, while students in higher-performance groups were more generous in their ratings for low-scoring members. We discuss implications of relying on support strategies for promoting productive group work.

Promoting Collaborative Classrooms: The Impacts of Interdependent Cooperative Learning on Undergraduate Interactions and Achievement.

Collaboration is an important career skill and vital to student understanding of the social aspects of science, but less is known about relationships among collaborative-learning strategies, classroom climate, and student learning. We sought to increase the collaborative character of introductory undergraduate laboratory classrooms by analyzing a 9-week intervention in 10 classrooms (n = 251) that participated in cooperative-learning modules (promoting interdependence via a modified jigsaw technique). Students in an additional 10 classrooms (n = 232) completed the same material in an unstructured format representative of common educational practice. Results showed that, when between-class variance was controlled for, intervention students did not score higher on weekly quizzes, but science interest and prior science experience had a reduced relationship to quiz performance in intervention classrooms. Also, intervention classrooms showed increased collaborative engagement at both whole-class and individual levels (24 students at three time points), but the intervention was only one of several factors found to account for late-intervention classroom collaborative engagement (prosocial behavior and discussion practices). Taken together, findings suggest that integrating interdependence-based tasks may foster collaborative engagement at both small-group and whole-classroom levels, but by itself may not be enough to promote increased student achievement.