The following essay appeared in the Spring 2022 edition of the Division on Women & Crime newsletter, available HERE.
You can find my guidelines for my science communication project HERE.
“So, you let students choose their own project and make their own grading rubric?”
I could hear the note of incredulity in my friend’s voice, even though they were inquiring in good faith. Phrased that way, I could see how my new approach would seem strange. Most of us are accustomed to teacher-centered, instructivist approaches where the professor bears responsibility for the selection and delivery of the content and for making sure students “learn” the material. In contrast, my approach was informed by student-centered constructivist frameworks (e.g., Weimer, 2002) that encourage students to explore the material, relate it to their own experience, and demonstrate their knowledge in authentic and meaningful ways. This approach facilitates ‘deep learning’ for students, provides an opportunity for them to show their best work, and moves beyond simple recall and repetition to higher levels of cognition (Duncan & Buskirk-Cohen, 2011).
The course I was discussing with my friend was a 100-level gender, science, and society course. The course is part of my college’s Women and Gender Studies (WGS) minor and also counts as a general education course for our core college requirements. This presents some interesting pedagogical challenges, as students in the class may be dedicated WGS students or students opting into what might be an “easy” elective, and it may be their first semester at the university or their senior year. My students come from programs in pre-law and pre-med, environmental science, art, history, language, social science, computer science, and a handful of other disciplines. My university serves a large number of first-generation college students, international students, and students from underrepresented or marginalized groups. As for the course itself, it is a seminar-style introduction to the construction of sex and gender and how it shapes our lives through social institutions, with a specific focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Meeting the needs of such a diverse class of students is a challenge. I decided early on that I would prioritize making the course meaningful for them, no matter their major or where they planned to take their careers. This meant a relatively open-ended semester project. I was inspired by two experiences. First, I had recently attended a workshop on “project-based learning” (PBL) taught by Rick Vaz of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). I receive a copy of Project-Based Learning in the First Year (Wobbe & Stoddard, 2019), which describes WPI’s excellent project-based approach. While I was not ready to create a fully project-based course, I wanted to borrow from PBL’s student-centered approach that positions the instructor as a facilitator who guides students’ self-directed learning. The second experience was my growing interest in science communication, especially through public engagement. I had recently met a colleague in our Chemistry department and teamed up with her to offer pre-conference science communication workshops at annual meetings for the aquatic sciences, so thinking about how to present scientific knowledge in engaging ways was at the forefront of my mind.
I decided to create a “creative science communication” project as the major semester assignment. My goal was to give students an opportunity to build on their preferences, interests, and prior knowledge to apply what they had learned in our course and produce something that could become part of their professional portfolio (Duncan & Buskirk-Cohen, 2020).I saw this as particularly important for increasing engagement with a course that some students may not see as personally relevant (Meyer & Roe, 2013), building confidence in my first-year students and students from marginalized backgrounds, and challenging students to take responsibility and control over their learning experiences. Students were tasked with developing a science communication product that would take the results of scientific research and explain the results to a non-scientist audience. In the assignment guidelines, I emphasized the importance of communicating the information in an entertaining and engaging way. Students could choose their own topic and science communication product, and I provided a list of ideas to encourage them, including photographic, graphic design, websites, game design, educational materials, public awareness materials, scripts, stories, films, and others.
To make sure that the science communication products actually communicated science, students had to find research literature on their topics. This literature was incorporated into a “project narrative” that had to accompany the final product. The narrative needed to explain the students’ goals, their chosen audience, their literature-finding process and what they learned, their decision-making process throughout the project, ideas they discarded, and challenges they had to overcome. This reflection essay encourages meta-cognition, or ‘thinking about thinking.’ Research suggests that engaging in metacognition helps to improve self-regulated learning and self-efficacy (Schraw et al., 2006; Tanner, 2012).
Of course, creativity often blossoms with structure, and I knew that students would need some support in choosing, planning, and completing their projects. First, students completed a project proposal worksheet that asked them to identify their topic, their chosen product, the tasks and timeline, and the research they would need to do. They also had to complete a project evaluation worksheet that guided them through creating their own grading rubric, with criteria for “A Range,” “B Range” and so on. Each student then had a one-on-one meeting with me to discuss their proposal and grading rubric, and to make sure we agreed that their proposal was feasible and would meet the course requirements. Surprisingly, students were more often over-ambitious than under-ambitious, and much of my work in these meetings was about scaling back their plans and expectations to be more reasonable! I also created several check-in points throughout the semester so that students had some external accountability and didn’t leave things until the last minute. For more suggestions, a very similar approach to mine is described in a recent article about a science communication project for molecular biology students (Wang, 2021).
To say that I was thrilled with the outcome of the assignment would be an understatement. Students brought a huge variety of skills, experiences, and reflections to their projects. A full overview would be too much for this brief note, but among some of my favorite projects: an amazing documentary about nonbinary students that I now use as a teaching resource; a full-scale oil painting mimicking Instagram filters accompanied by a project narrative about social media and body image; a book of extremely moving poetry about living as a young Black woman, presented slam poetry style in front of the class; a screenplay about a young woman seeking an abortion; a glossy report about the gendered impacts of climate change; a “Game of Life”-style board game about women in STEM careers; a book for young girls about the science of menstruation. Students were also realistic about assessing their own projects according to the grading rubrics they had designed, with some students deciding that they didn’t want to do as much as promised for the A and opting for a slightly lower grade. Again, to my surprise, most of my work here was to revise grades upwards in recognition of students’ impressive work.
Overall, this was an extremely rewarding experience. While the example I have presented here is for a ‘gen ed’ gender studies course, it would be perfectly suited to many criminal justice courses. A creative project like this helps students to engage more deeply with the material, think about how to share what they have learned with others, and lean into their assets: their personal experiences, their skills, and their passions for these topics. I would be happy to share my materials or answer any further questions you have, and if you choose to pursue a project like this in your courses, I would love to hear about it!
References:
Duncan, T. A., & Buskirk-Cohen, A. A. (2011). Exploring learner-centered assessment: A cross-disciplinary approach. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 23(2), 246–259.
Duncan, T. A., & Buskirk-Cohen, A. A. (2020). Cautiously Independent. In S. Hoidn & M. Klemenčič (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Student-Centered Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (1st ed., pp. 139–152). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429259371-11
Landry Meyer, L., & Roe, J. (2013). Linking Teaching Methods and Assessment to the Developmental Needs of Family Science Students. Family Science Review, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.26536/FSR.2013.18.01.07
Schraw, G., Crippen, K. J., & Hartley, K. (2006). Promoting Self-Regulation in Science Education: Metacognition as Part of a Broader Perspective on Learning. Research in Science Education, 36(1–2), 111–139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-005-3917-8
Tanner, K. D. (2012). Promoting student metacognition. CBE Life Sciences Education, 11(2), 113–120. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.12-03-0033
Wang, B. (2021). If They Build It: Student-Designed Assignments in a Molecular Biology Laboratory. Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.31719/pjaw.v5i2.85
Weimer, M. (2002). Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice. Jossey-Bass.
Wobbe, K., & Stoddard, E. A. (Eds.). (2019). Project-based learning in the first year: Beyond all expectations (First edition). Stylus Publishing, LLC.