Science Pedagogy Research

I am conducting research on how best to teach science to non-scientists, specifically on how to develop and implement writing assignments to increase learning, and how best to help instructors incorporate active learning and higher order thinking in their teaching.  The research on writing assignments has provided some very interesting insights into how to control plagiarism (Houtman and Walker, in press) and how best to improve students’ writing (Houtman in preparation). I am conducting research with Casem and Hoese on embedded assessments for critical thinking, that will allow faculty to evaluate how well they are developing students’ higher order thinking skills both within individual classes and throughout a curriculum.

As the General Education Biology Program director, I have access to an ideal research population for testing the effect of various teaching strategies on student learning outcomes. Biology 101 serves 3,000 non-majors annually, with 15 sections per semester, and is taught almost exclusively by part-time faculty. Biology 101L serves 1,200 students per year, with 26 sections per semester.   Because of the large number of students served, their diversity (e.g. over 50% minority, mean age 23.3), and the consistency in course demographics (little variation in class size, drop-out and failure rates, and GPA between sections and years), we are able to design controlled tests of the efficacy of, for example, weekly vs. midterm assessment, or homework vs. traditional reading assignments.