The department of ecology and evolutionary biology (EBIO) at the university of colorado boulder has undertaken the process of sustained transformation in three arenas of undergraduate biology education.
- course design and execution (see Course Resources)
- assessments of teaching and learning
- faculty professional development.
To facilitate all these processes, we developed EBIO Majors’ Learning Goals to describe our expectations as a department. They are a set of 12 central goals in three areas: metacognitive, process, and content. The faculty developed unique hub-and-spoke diagrams to show the relationships between central goals and subgoals, and are in the process of visualizing how individual courses align to these diagrams.
In our professional development work, we have developed a teaching observation tool called SITAR (Student Interactivity and Teaching Activity Report). It includes measures of student engagement and interactivity, as well as common ways of describing what is happening in the classroom and providing qualitative feedback. It is intended for formative use, by a single rater, over multiple class sessions.
You can also find information about our work at our poster, "Student-Centered Active Learning Curriculum in Evolutionary Biology," Seiter, S.; Wise, S. B.; Kane, N.C.; Martin, A, presented at Evolution conference (2014).