Measuring Beyond-Biology Student Learning in a Biology Lab

 

Mark E. Walvoord

Tested Studies in Laboratory Teaching, 2018, Volume 39

Abstract

Although biology instructors’ goals include helping students learn biology content and general science skills, lab activities may also help students grow in other ways. By connecting these broader learning objectives to a college or university’s mission and making them more explicit, instructors and teaching assistants may help students, especially non-majors, find more relevancy and motivation to participate in lab, gain employable skills, and become life-long learners. Our campus’ Student Transformative Learning Record (STLR, http://stlr.uco.edu; Walvoord, 2017), seeks to encourage, measure, and record students’ transformative learning across 6 central tenets through their participation in curricular and co-curricular activities. This workshop explained how STLR connects student learning in biology lab to other classes, campus activities, and even non-university student experiences. Attendees brainstormed both the larger goals of student growth they could highlight in their labs and criteria to use on rubrics to measure these.

Keywords:  transformative learning, TL thoery, employable skills, life-long learners, digital badging, STLR

University of Wisconsin, Madison (2017)