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Integrating Primary Scientific Literature into a Graduate Course on Environmental Engineering — Belinda Sturm

Mouse-over a link for a summary; click a link for more details.

Background

The first time I taught CE 573/773, Biological Principles of Environmental Engineering, I found that when I assigned scientific articles, students either did not read them or did not feel comfortable discussing the science reported in the articles. It seemed as though most students had not been taught to question published research results or to analyze whether the methods and results properly supported the conclusions. Therefore, in Spring 2008, I integrated primary scientific literature into my teaching, to reinforce to students the fundamental scientific principles and to enable students to synthesize research question. | Implementation

Implementation

To achieve my goals, I made three key changes to the course:

I assigned scientific literature as reading assignments each week, which we discussed the next class period. I also had students incorporate literature in their laboratory reports right from the beginning of the semester.
I established clear standards and tried to better prepare students for incorporating literature as a context for their own laboratory experiment. Providing students with a rubric was a key component for setting their expectations and preparing them for lab write-ups.
Before the first lab write-up, I provided three examples of a lab report from a previous semester and asked students to evaluate them using our rubric. As a class, we then discussed the grades they had assigned each lab report.

| Student Performance

Student Performance

For many students, incorporation of literature improved over time. Specifically, students improved by citing literature within the text of their lab write-ups where it was appropriate. For the final project, students worked in self-selected groups and chose a topic, isolated questions and formulated hypotheses in a proposal, designed an experiment, then executed the project and write it up in a formal lab report. Student performance on the final project was very good. | Reflections

Reflections

Having students read scientific papers early in the course appeared to help them incorporate literature into their writing. Performance on the final projects improved for virtually all students, which I believe was the result of valuable interactions among group members. I used rubrics for the first time during this course, and I found that they provided explicit expectations and objective scoring criteria, and they equalized my grading effort. Even though I saw improvement in students’ writing, the quality of lab reports still needs to be improved, so I an considering additional changes to the course.

| Summary

Project Summary

To improve student learning with hands-on activities, a civil engineering professor overhauled the recitation component of CE 461 (Structural Analysis) by encouraging students to discuss problem-solving approaches even before they picked up a writing tool, to work on assignments structured as ill-defined problems, and to complete a model-building activity using innovative materials to simulate building structures.

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