Congratulations to Grace, who won an American Association for University Women (AAUW) American Fellow!
Links and citations to accompany this presentation.
- Know your bias https://implicit.harvard.edu/self-assessment
- http://stemteachingcourse.org/
- http://www.cirtl.net/
Astin, A. W. (1997). How “good” is your institution’s retention rate? Research in Higher Education, 38(6), 647-658
Bain, Ken. “What makes great teachers great.” Chronicle of Higher Education 50.31 (2004): B7-B9
Continue reading “Evidence on effective STEM teaching”There is a healthy tradition of making timelines of the history of life on earth as a a classroom activity, and I have been wanting to do this for a long time. There is also good evidence that active learning improves student learning outcomes in all STEM fields.
The Earth is 4.54 billion years old (Ga), and life on earth was microbial for almost all of this time. Viruses also had their origins in the RNA world that precluded the evolution of cellular life, meaning that even before “true” life was formed, microbes were the sole life forms.
Continue reading “Timeline of Life on Earth Activity”One of the activities that is very common for teaching diversity or microbial diversity is the candy activity. In this activity, a sample community of candy is explored and used (and later, eaten) to make measures of diversity in a simple (and delicious) form. I elected to use jellybeans, since the known diversity would help us do this quickly. In this case, our richness is 49 (if your species definition includes flavor).
The following is a reproduction of my article, entitled “Keep carbon in the ground: a scientific exploration of climate change and soil health,” which was published in the Ecological Landscape Alliance newsletter in October, 2018.
Soils rich in carbon are healthy soils, but climate change and poor management practices threaten to degrade soil carbon stores and in turn, degrade soils. In this article, I’ll present a brief overview of the current scientific understanding of why keeping carbon in the ground is important, and what factors are most critical in maintaining healthy soils.
Continue reading “Keep carbon in the ground: a scientific exploration of climate change and soil health”