Experiential Food Education
Posted: November 29, 2014 Filed under: food, fun, teaching & learning | Tags: education, food, science 1 CommentIn the last couple of days, my most popular tweets have involved science-y food items:

Pancakes and picture by Nathan Shields http://www.saipancakes.com/

Plant cell pizza! From: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/231794712045067230/ – Julie Newton
Both of these images were brought to my attention by a couple of the smart, young women I am lucky to know (Fatima and Renee), and judging from the number of favourites and re-tweets, the images seemed to be appreciated by many of the folks who follow me (and their followers). Food does seem to be a really good way to get people’s attention and engagement! Read the rest of this entry »
More evidence of benefits from increased course structure
Posted: November 27, 2014 Filed under: assessment, evidence-based teaching, higher ed, introductory science, Journal club, teaching & learning | Tags: Active learning, Biology education, Long read Leave a comment
image by motorhead – stockarch.com
Sarah L. Eddy and Kelly A. Hogan (2014) recently published a paper “Getting Under the Hood: How and for Whom Does Increasing Course Structure Work?”, a nice example of the next wave of discipline-based educational research (DBER) that goes beyond asking “Does active learning work?” to explore details of how active learning interventions actually work, and differential impacts on sub-populations of students. Here, Eddy and Hogan describe their results of a study based on the work led by Scott Freeman at the University of Washington (see Freeman et al. 2011, Haak et al. 2011).