Su'ad Yoon, PhD

Pedagogy Example #3

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Implementation report: Reflective Learning 

 

Goals: For this implementation, I used the website “notesfromnature.org” to have my students practice transcription of museum specimens. This module was designed to highlight the importance of museum specimens in evolutionary research and help students make connections between museum specimens and real-life research questions. The specific project they worked on was “Terrestrial Parasite Tracker” and involved each student transcribing a minimum of 5 museum specimens on the website and then reflecting on their experience afterwards by completing a worksheet assignment. 

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Describe Plan: Each student started by registering an account on “notesfromnature.org” and then transcribing a minimum of 5 museum specimens. I showed them an example specimen at the beginning of class so that they could see the full process. After they finished their 5 specimens, we went over some reflective questions about the data collecting process. These questions included the following: 1.) What kinds of data were you asked for? 2.) What kinds of data quality challenges can you imagine? How would you solve them? 3.) What kind of research questions could you investigate with these data? 4.) What other kinds of data could you get?

 

Examine Implementation: Overall, I think the activity went well. Most students were able to get through their 5 specimens in 20-30 minutes which left enough time for reflection questions. Next week, the students will turn in their reflection questions and I will be able to further examine how their reflections went. 

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Offer Reflection: In the future, I will begin the workshop with a 10-minute mini-lecture about museum specimens using specific examples about how specimens have been incorporated into evolutionary biology research. I will also end the workshop with a short survey about what they learned about during the workshop.