New On-Line Resource “TIEE”s Together Experiments, Ecological Issues, and Pedagogical Reform (Website Review)

Kathy Winnett-Murray
Biology Department
Hope College
Holland, MI 49423
winnetmurray@hope.edu

Review of http://tiee.ecoed.net

TEACHING ISSUES AND EXPERIMENTS IN ECOLOGY

If you’re like me, you spend about 90% of your class preparation time piecing together a rag-tag, multiply-modified collection of last-year’s notes (hastily “updated” with a table from last month’s Ecology and perhaps a figure ripped from last week’s Science), a really cool case study that you earmarked months ago (intending to use it in class someday), along with a dataset from your 355 website “favorites” that might be a great example of what you want to teach that day…etc. etc. Later, as you walk into class, you still don’t know precisely what you’re going to DO with all these things to achieve the comprehensive task of “student learning”. Sound familiar?

TIEE (pronounced “tie”) is a new website launched in January 2004 that is intended to “TIEE” all of this together for you, by putting all of your relevant ecology teaching resources into one neat package so that you can focus on student active teaching.. TIEE (Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology) is sponsored by the Ecological Society of America. It has been funded since 2000 by a National Science Foundation grant awarded to editors Charlene D’Avanzo of Hampshire College and Bruce Grant of Widener University. TIEE’s main goal is to “improve ecology teaching by helping undergraduate faculty include more student-active teaching approaches in ecology courses, both the lecture and lab.” While TIEE labs and data sets are intended primarily for undergraduate ecology courses, the pervasive focus on “student-active teaching” (including a wealth of “how-to’s” in achieving it) is highly relevant for instructors desiring to improve their teaching, and the level of student engagement, in any science course.

The utility of TIEE lies in its unique integration of “Issues,” “Experiments,” and “Teaching,” and in how these components facilitate a complete active learning experience for both you and your students.

“Issues” for Volume I (January 2004) and 2 (August 2004) offers six Figure Sets (students interpret published figures and graphs) and 4 Data Sets (students work with published data) for real-world connections to your ecology lessons. Some “Issues” themes match those included in the Ecological Society of America’s Issues in Ecology report series for the general public. For example, in the figure set for teaching “The Ecology of Disturbance,” you will find original figures for the classic Hubbard Brook study by Bormann and Likens (1978) presented in the context of an ecological question. Likewise, “Data Sets” correspond to ecological questions, e.g. for the question “Does cowbird brood parasitism reduce songbird numbers?” students are provided with an actual data set (DeGroot and Smith 2001) for “The Impact of Cowbird Parasitism on Avian Communities.”

No cutting, pasting, or re-formatting is required. A click on the data set (you choose from 3 versions: instructor version.xls, student version.xls and original, unformatted version) gives an immediate Excel window to print, manipulate, and analyze. The main differences between instructor and student versions for the data files are that the former has data columns already sorted (e.g. by year and species) and shows completed scatter plots.

Most importantly, each figure and data set comes with suggestions for “How To Use This in Class,” assessable outcomes (e.g. graphing spreadsheet data from the cowbird study), student-active approaches (e.g. “The Ecology of Disturbance” uses “Citizen’s Argument”), and an entire suite of questions for discussion, downloads for all files, and assessments. Don’t know what a “Citizen’s Argument” is? Click on any highlighted assessment or student-active method on this website and you open a concise description in “Teaching” (see below), complete with “How-To’s,” an explanation of applicable cognitive levels, and further examples! In this way, instructors are coached in the art of selecting a teaching method or an assessment to match what we want to know about student learning.

Seven “Experiments” are included in Volume 1 & 2 (see Table). All TIEE experiments are contributed by instructors of college and university ecology courses and are peer-reviewed by other ESA faculty. Each “lab” contains a synopsis, description, notes to faculty, links to sample student data sets, and downloads. The experiment “Description” section, in turn, contains a menu that includes pertinent references and links (for example, the “Ecology of Habitat Contrasts” contains links to several websites on plant sampling techniques and to statistical tutorials such as Chi-squared and t-tests). The “Description” section also contains multiple tools for assessment of student learning objectives and for formative evaluation of the experiment. If you are like most biology profs and lack intimate familiarity with educational jargon such as “formative evaluation,” a click on the word takes you to definitions and examples in the “Teaching” portion of TIEE. As with ABLE “Proceedings” labs, TIEE experiments contain extensive help notes for instructors (“challenges to anticipate”), including suggested adaptations for different levels or locations, and most of the experiments include sample student data sets.

The third component of TIEE, “Teaching” is perhaps the most innovative, and should be of greatest interest to biology instructors in general since it is not specific to ecology. In “Teaching,” users will find FAQs on Student-Active Teaching (e.g. “I teach big classes. What methods in active teaching can I use?”), Tutorials (Vol. 1 contains how-to advice for conducting “Turn to Your Neighbor” and “Jigsaw” activities in your classes), Essays (e.g. “Help Your Students Understand Figures and Tables”), a Glossary (where you can find the meaning of terms like “authentic assessment”, “concept mapping,” “pyramid exam,” and “rubric” without publicly admitting that you are clueless!), and a “Links to Web Teaching Resources” section. The latter is rich with links to pedagogical topics such as “cooperative groupwork” and “assessment and evaluation” for a broad range of teaching interests. It also specifically contains links to two resources previously unavailable electronically: Ecology 101 Articles (published in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America) and downloadable pdf files for the original Experiments to Teach Ecology Vol. 1 (1993), edited by ABLE’s very own Jane Beiswenger, and containing six widely used ecology labs.

If you teach ecology, TIEE may prove to be one of your most valuable assets. And even if you don’t, you will want to visit TIEE for the diverse offering of methods in student active teaching. Volume 2 of TIEE, which will contain more experiments, data sets and figure sets, is expected to be available on the web later this year. A new feature in Volume 2 are “Issues” focusing on articles in ESA’s Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. These include a “Scientific Teaching” section showing faculty how to do research on their teaching via a four-step process including pre and post-tests.

TIEE is a community endeavor and depends on contributions from a variety of ecologists. Susan Musante, Managing Editor (smusante@aol.com) will be happy to answer questions about submissions, or simply visit the “Submit Work” section on the website.