RiSE Colloquium – Sara Lindsay – Dec. 7
Maine Center for Research in STEM Education (RiSE Center)
Colloquia & Seminar Series
Presents
Sara Lindsay
School of Marine Sciences, University of Maine
Assessing Student Learning in Ocean Science: Charting a course
in the School of Marine Sciences
The oceans define our planet, supporting and shaping life on earth. Many challenges facing society involve the oceans, whether related to climate, fisheries, or human populations. Meeting these challenges will require citizens literate about the ocean and science, and training such citizens is a primary goal of the School of Marine Sciences Undergraduate program. Ocean Science is an interdisciplinary field that requires students to build content knowledge and apply quantitative and communication skills related to core disciplines including Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Oceanography and Physics. Relatively little educational research regarding teaching and learning of ocean science concepts exists in comparison to well-studied areas such as chemistry, physics and biology. In this talk I will share insights gained from several assessments of marine sciences undergraduate learning related to ocean primary productivity and scientific literacy skills. These internal program evaluations suggest that student difficulties with quantitative and data literacy skills may hinder their mastery of content and that these difficulties are persistent across grade levels. I will also discuss some of our ideas for addressing these student difficulties, and opportunities for discipline based educational research in marine sciences.
Bio:
Sara Lindsay is an Associate Professor in the School of Marine Sciences, and contributes to advising M.S.T. students. A broadly trained invertebrate biologist who teaches introductory courses in Marine Biology, she is particularly interested in how students develop quantitative literacy skills, how they solve complex problems in marine sciences, and what teaching practices best support that learning. She is a Fellow in the national Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education, working to reform undergraduate life sciences education. Before coming to UMaine, Sara was a postdoc at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, an NIH National Research Service Award postdoctoral fellow at the University of South Carolina, completed her PhD in Biology at the University of South Carolina, and her B.A at Smith College.
Monday, Dec. 7, 2015
3:00 -4:00 pm
Arthur St. John Hill Auditorium, 165 Barrows Hall