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Using Pathway Modeling to Evaluate and Improve Student-Centered Teaching Practices in Co-Taught College Science Courses.

ABSTRACT: Student-centered teaching practices such as active learning continue to gain momentum in college science education. Many instructors committed to these innovative practices transform their classrooms beyond the standard lecture. Nevertheless, widespread implementation of these practices is limited, because the learning benefits for students are often attained through increased instructional complexity to which many instructors cannot commit. When co-instructors are teaching the course, the level of commitment to building a student-centered classroom may be even more profound. For these reasons, new tools are needed to help instructors and co-instructors plan, organize, evaluate, and communicate their classroom innovations. Pathway modeling is a tool with the potential to fill this gap. Unlike curriculum mapping-which identifies academic content gaps, redundancies, and misalignments by examining a series of courses within a plan of study-course pathway modeling creates a visual map of a single course and reveals how teaching practices influence short-, mid-, and long-term student learning outcomes. This essay demonstrates how course pathway modeling can help co-instructors better represent the complexity of student-centered teaching practices. We include guides for creating course pathway models and discuss how this approach offers the potential to improve curricular design, course evaluation, student assessment, and communication between co-instructors.

SUBMITTER: Chen X

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8734389 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:For over 50 years instructor humor has been recognized as a way to positively impact student cognitive and affective learning. However, no study has explored humor exclusively in the context of college science courses, which have the reputation of being difficult and boring. The majority of studies that explore humor have assumed that students perceive instructor humor to be funny, yet students likely perceive some instructor humor as unfunny or offensive. Further, evidence suggests that women perceive certain subjects to be more offensive than men, yet we do not know what impact this may have on the experience of women in the classroom. To address these gaps in the literature, we surveyed students across 25 different college science courses about their perceptions of instructor humor in college science classes, which yielded 1637 student responses. Open-coding methods were used to analyze student responses to a question about why students appreciate humor. Multinomial regression was used to identify whether there are gender differences in the extent to which funny, unfunny, and offensive humor influenced student attention to course content, instructor relatability, and student sense of belonging. Logistic regression was used to examine gender differences in what subjects students find funny and offensive when joked about by college science instructors. Nearly 99% of students reported that they appreciate instructor humor and reported that it positively changes the classroom atmosphere, improves student experiences during class, and enhances the student-instructor relationship. We found that funny humor tends to increase student attention to course content, instructor relatability, and student sense of belonging. Conversely, offensive humor tends to decrease instructor relatability and student sense of belonging. Lastly, we identified subjects that males were more likely to find funny and females were more likely to find offensive if a college science instructor were to joke about them.

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Using Pathway Modeling to Evaluate and Improve Student-Centered Teaching Practices in Co-Taught College Science Courses.

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