Innovations in Pedagogy, Course Design

Teaching Critical Thinking in Statistics for Natural Resource Education

Lisa M. Ganio — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 13:30:00 PDT

Graduate education in natural resource fields requires high level critical thinking in specialized areas of interest to the student. This challenge is typically embraced by graduate students who are excited to be learning in the areas of their choice. Most graduate programs in natural resources require students to take a course in statistics or data analysis and natural resources research relies heavily on these tools. But many students have limited experience with quantitative science and that experience may not have been recent. This poses a challenge when teaching courses in statistics. In this presentation I will outline the challenges to teaching and the barriers to learning that can be present for some students in natural resources. I will suggest some approaches to teaching statistics that have been successful in the classroom and outline how different kinds of learning activities can be used together to improve student learning of statistics.

Peer Reviewed Publications From Class Projects

Carolyn A. Copenheaver — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 14:00:00 PDT

From 2001 to 2008, I coordinated the publication of 13 peer‐reviewed manuscripts stemming from group projects in a graduate‐level Advanced Forest Ecology class. The intention of the group projects was to immerse the students in actual forest ecology research and increase their professional development by personally involving them in the publication process. The student publications appeared in 11 different journals (American Midland Naturalist, Castanea, Dendrochronologia, Forest Ecology and Management, Journal of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Education, Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society, Natural Areas Journal, Northeastern Naturalist, Southeastern Geographer, and Tree‐Ring Research) and each group project had a unique publication history that varied depending upon the skill levels of the students (M.S. vs. Ph.D. students), discipline of the students, and motivation level of the students. Throughout this period, we only had two class projects that were never published and one manuscript that remains in review.

Building a Learning Community and Authentic Assessment into a Hybrid Course

Dennis B. Propst — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 14:30:00 PDT

A review of the literature on blended learning, called hybrid courses at the author’s university, reveals that such learning “can be as successful as either online or face to face instruction” (Vignare, 2007). Blended learning has been defined as 1. “Courses that integrate online with traditional face‐to‐face class activities in a planned, pedagogically valuable manner; and 2. Where a portion of face‐to‐face time is replaced by online activity” (Laster et al., 2005). Learning communities arise as people address recurring sets of problems together and engage with each other in a collective learning process. In a classroom setting, this process typically involves active and collaborative learning activities that may extend beyond the classroom (Palloff and Pratt, 2005). Learning community participation has been found to be positively linked to engagement, student self‐reported outcomes and overall college satisfaction (Zhao & Kuh, 2004). Authentic assessments of student outcomes are based on real life situations in classroom settings (Smith, 2008). In this presentation, the author demonstrates how the technology that supports a hybrid course (senior level outdoor recreation management class) can be used to create both a learning community and authentic assessment, with the added twist that the learning community assists the instructor in the development of the assessment tools and the evaluation of student efforts. The author also supplies data from four years of student surveys regarding satisfaction with a hybrid course and the optimum number of in‐class versus online sessions. Palloff, R. & Pratt, K. (2005). Collaborating online: learning together in community. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass. Smith, R. (2008). Conquering the content: a step‐by‐step guide to online course design. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass. Vignare, K. (2007). Review of literature blended learning: using ALN to change the classroom—will it work? Pp. 37‐63 in A. Picciano & C. Dziuban (eds.). Blended learning: research perspectives. Needham, MA: Sloan‐C. Zhao, C. & Kuh, D. (2004). Adding value: learning communities and student engagement. Research in Higher Education, 45, 115‐138.

Human Dimensions and Civic Engagement in the Natural Resources Classroom

Pat Stephens Williams et al. — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 11:00:00 PDT

The role of the natural resources professional continues to expand into the world of communications, politics, and civic responsibility. How do we prepare our students to engage with that world as leaders? Using human dimensions issues associated with the American Democracy Project in the classroom to build civic engagement and communication skills in our future natural resource professionals is one approach. This presentation provides the opportunity for the audience to learn how to use particular strong issue sites (in this case the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem) as a way to help students learn how to identify issues, explore public sentiment, plan a public information strategy, conduct themselves in a professional manner, communicate in an effective manner, and evaluate their effectiveness. The audience will have a model and supporting handouts to take back for adaptation to their own classrooms.

Congress in the Classroom

Janaki Alavalapati et al. — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 10:30:00 PDT

Policies play central role in natural resource conservation and management. It is imperative for students to gain an in‐depth understanding and hands‐on experience of policy development. However, unlike field or lab oriented classes, it is somewhat challenging for educators to provide this experience for students in classrooms. Several structural (multiple goals, diverse stakeholders, and multiple disciplines), spatial (local, state, and national), and temporal (months, years, and decades) features of policy development would make it even more challenging. Here we share our experience of a technique, Congress in the Classroom, which was tried in Natural Resource Policy and Administration class for a decade at the University of Florida. Students’ feedback suggests that it is not only an entertaining and practical event but also a memorable learning tool of the course.

Teaching Ecological Ethics

Mark C. Wallace et al. — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 11:30:00 PDT

Wildlife researchers and managers frequently have to contend with difficult ethical questions during the course of their work, but currently lack an explicit scholarly forum to help them analyze the complicated ethical situations they encounter in the field, the laboratory, or conservation area. Since neither environmental ethics, nor animal ethics, nor research ethics currently addresses the tradeoff problems peculiar to wildlife research and management, a new field is needed. It must be the interdisciplinary product of organized and on‐going discussions across the natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities, and the conservation professions. Minteer and Collins (2005) proposed the creation of an extensive case database, a tool that can help students, scientists, and managers learn from the problems and solutions of others and improve their critical thinking and moral reasoning abilities within a research or management setting. We are contributing to this database. We are also working on the next logical step, the development of a framework for this new “ecological ethics”. Additionally, we are experimenting with novel pedagogical methods for delivering this framework to graduate students, and giving them practice applying ecological ethics to particular cases. We also provide opportunities for students shadow members of our Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee in order to discuss actual cases with the committee members. In the current paper we illustrate the need for ecological ethics, demonstrate example cases, describe our pedagogical methods, and present initial assessments of the effectiveness of our methods.

Cooperative Learning in Natural Resources Education

Rich Etchberger — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 09:00:00 PDT

I will present my use of cooperative learning techniques in a general education course at Utah State University (USU). I developed an undergraduate, junior‐level course called BIOL 3000 ‐ Biodiversity of Utah that is part of the general education requirements at Utah State University. From the beginning, a major challenge surfaced for this course in that the enrollment includes students who are science and also students who are non‐science majors. Science majors are biology and wildlife science majors. Non‐science majors are typically from outside the agricultural and natural resource fields. Non‐science students were underprepared for the course as they did not have any introductory courses in biology. I discuss ways to meet this challenge using cooperative learning techniques. The Cooperative Learning Center at The University of Minnesota defines cooperative learning as: the relationship in a group of students that requires positive interdependence (a sense of sink or swim together), individual accountability (each of us has to contribute and learn), interpersonal skills (communication, trust, leadership, decision making, and conflict resolution), face‐to‐face promotive interaction, and processing (reflecting on how well the team is functioning and how to function even better). Student achievement in the class improved markedly after I started organizing the class with cooperative learning techniques. I will offer some examples of the positive and negative aspects of cooperative learning in this class.

What Should an Introduction to Natural Resources Course Do?

Gary B. Blank — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 08:30:00 PDT

I would like to conduct a facilitated forum, with participation from various NR programs to address the question of the title. The premise is that first year and transfer students entering natural resources curricula do so because they are hands‐on learners, are attracted to activities occurring in the outdoors, and have limited patience with typical lecture formats for learning. The issue is how we engage and retain NR students so they prosper in our programs. In this forum, I would like to pose a variety of scenarios and elicit responses from participants concerning their experiences about varied formats for conducting an introductory course in natural resources. I have an experimental model to propose but welcome insights to improve its potential impact. At North Carolina State University, the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources decided to experiment with this model, tossing out any introductory textbook and ditching standard talking heads lectures in favor of sending students out weekly to explore the campus environment and their latent understanding of some key issues. We instituted a structure for each topical segment that included three components:  Definition: making explicit how each problem can be understood through questions that spur inquiry into identifiable realms of knowledge  Discovery: examining assumptions upon which the questions are based, identifying which subjects could yield answers and which methods of inquiry should be relevant for answering the questions  Documentation: communicating findings of the team’s investigative processes in appropriate forms for the variety of audiences likely to be concerned and engaged with each environmental challenge. We worried less about content retention than student retention at this stage, but test results suggest students retained salient content. Course evaluations are not yet in, nearing semesters’ end, but anecdotal results are encouraging and bear further examination to see if we really have whetted our students’ appetites for persisting our subject areas of study: forest management, fisheries and wildlife, natural resources and environmental technology. Structurally, the forum would (1) briefly present several potential scenarios for introductory courses, (2) break participants into groups to discuss pros and cons of approaches, and (3) facilitate a cumulative assessment of potential impacts of the approaches. Probable time commitment: 1.5 hours.

Wildlife Management Education Needs to Go Urban

Clark E. Adams et al. — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 09:30:00 PDT

One of the common problems associated with introducing urban wildlife management (UWM) as part of the curriculum in the wildlife sciences has been the simplistic notions our colleagues, students, and others have regarding its conceptual framework. For example, the “raccoon in a garbage can” always seems to become the summative explanation of urban wildlife management. Other reductionist definitions include animal damage control, or that UWM is a particular suite of techniques peculiar only to urban areas. The latter problem is of our own making given the inclusion of UWM in the Wildlife Management Techniques Manual published by The Wildlife Society. Truth be known, wildlife management techniques primarily consist of catching, identifying, marking, and counting wild animals flavored with a healthy dose of formulae and statistics to add scientific rigor to the first four activities. UWM is another expression of the depth and breadth of human involvement with wild things. This presentation will explore several similarities and differences that differentiate wildlife management in human‐altered and natural rural landscapes. This analysis is required to provide a more complete and accurate presentation about UWM to colleagues, students, and the general public. As such, it will help to articulate and summarize the critical curriculum components for courses on UWM. Finally, this exercise will provide a unique identity to the UWM profession which goes far beyond raccoons and techniques.