A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF TEACHING METHODOLOGY AND CONTENT LEARNING IN INTRODUCTORY BIOLOGY: DOES METHOD MATTER?

摘要: National initiatives to bring innovative teaching into introductory undergraduate biology courses are grounded in well-established empirical studies of methodology. The goals of innovative teaching are to increase retention in courses, increase persistence in the biology major, increase student engagement with content material, increase learning of content material, and decrease student dissatisfaction and" boredom" in foundational courses. Innovative, empirically validated teaching practices can include cooperative group learning, classroom flipping, using primary literature during lecture sessions, and hybrid models of combinations of lecture and these other methods. Despite the overwhelming breadth of literature supporting hypotheses that these methods increase student engagement, studies of student learning increases as a result of these approaches show unconvincing results. In this longitudinal three-year …