3. Student support

Supporting and empowering students as they navigate university is the basis of my teaching philosophy and practice. Here I highlight some of the mechanisms by which I support formal and informal student learning pathways.

Formal learning pathways: seeing the big picture

I describe elsewhere many of the strategies I use in my first-year subject to help students navigate formal learning in my classroom and at university by building their skills in self-regulation (managing their learning) and self-efficacy (having confidence in their ability to learn). Briefly, these include encouraging visits to consultation times (Guerrero and Rod, 2013), teaching with “desirable difficulties” to build resilience (Perselin and Daniels, 2015), designing curriculum to introduce core skills at first-year level, creating a supportive and connected learning environment (Cash et al., 2017), requiring out-of-class review and practice (Hodges, 2015), and scaffolding assessment tasks (Kang et al., 2014).

An important part of navigating the formal university pathway is understanding how the subjects within a degree connect to one another. Unfortunately, students often struggle to see and understand this “big picture” perspective. Although as instructors we think carefully about the way content and subjects fit together to shape students’ entry into a field of science (as embodied by their course), that information is not usually explicitly communicated to students in a manner that is easy for them to grasp. This gap compromises students’ abilities to make connections between material taught in different subjects (Rowland et al., 2011) and to choose appropriate follow-on subjects.

To address this gap, I led a 2016 Educational Resource Development Agreement (ERDA) project to create a visual roadmap of the earth and environmental sciences core curriculum. The roadmap provides a graphical representation of the Earth and its major component parts that can be highlighted to represent the focus of a given lecture or subject. Clickable graphical layers are used to zoom in from the big picture to specific content areas (Figure 1). I use this roadmap in every lecture of my first-year subject to show students how the specific content relates back to the bigger picture. At the end of the subject, I also explicitly show students a list of possible follow-on subjects to take to further build their knowledge of the earth system.

Formal learning pathways: understanding and navigating Honours

At the other end of the spectrum, I also help students navigate entry into and successful completion of Honours. I became the Earth & Environmental Science Honours Coordinator in 2018, a time at which enrolment in our Honours degrees was at an all-time low (only one student). After consulting with various current and former undergraduates, it became clear that most students had little idea what Honours is, what it entails, and how it might benefit them. I could find only one lecturer that explicitly discussed Honours during a subject. This is problematic from an equity standpoint as not all students were receiving equal encouragement to consider Honours. For example, research indicates that “women students were only half as likely as men to have had academic staff members suggest Honours to them” (Kiley et al., 2009).

To redress this imbalance, I recruited a group of “Honours promoters”: enthusiastic, former Honours students from our current cohort of PhD students. Together, we visit all third-year lectures in the school. We begin in autumn session, when the undergraduate students have plenty of time to consider their post-graduation plans, and return in spring as those plans are solidified. While I am there to provide logistical information, the Honours promoters are able to provide a student-centred perspective on why they chose Honours and what benefits they got from it. We have had only one year to trial this program but have already seen an uptick in enrolments (three new students in Autumn, along with several likely mid-year starters).

Of course, enrolment is only the beginning of Honours, and I am concerned with supporting students as they navigate what is usually one of the most challenging years of university. At our school planning day late last year, I introduced a set of changes to the Honours assessment weightings to better scaffold the Honours year. We now put less weight on the thesis submitted at the end of the year (formerly 100%, now 80%) and more on early and mid-year assessments that ensure the students are on track. I am also now piloting a mentoring program, pairing Honours students with Honours alumni (current PhD students) who can help provide perspective and support to enhance student well-being, a known challenge of the Honours year (Kiley et al., 2009).

Informal learning pathways: research experiences

Authentic research experiences, where students work alongside practicing scientists on real research, have been shown over and over again to provide significant learning gains on a variety of outcomes, including career aspirations, understanding of the nature of science, understanding primary literature, confidence and self-efficacy, communication skills, teamwork, independence, and ethics (Sadler et al., 2010). Many students are not aware that undergraduate research opportunities exist, and there are known inequities in which students access these opportunities (Kim and Sax, 2009; Bangera and Brownell, 2017).

In my first-year subject, I explicitly introduce students to the ideas of research careers and undergraduate research opportunities. In a lecture towards the end of the subject, I hold a “research panel” made up of UOW academics working in fields related to the subject matter. The students and I ask the panellists questions about their pathways to research, how their research relates to what the students have learned, and what a career in research looks like. I follow this with explaining to students the types of research experiences that they can get as undergraduates (volunteer, credit points, paid) and how to go about finding these largely informal and not advertised positions.

Personally, I also involve many undergraduate students in my research. I have supervised 6 undergraduate research students in short-term projects, two of whom have gone on to further researcher degrees (with three others still pursuing their undergraduate degrees). To ensure equitable access, I will only supervise undergraduate students if I have research funding to pay them or if they are earning credit points towards their degrees. I am also in the process of developing a long-term program (SURGE) to provide funded research opportunities for women in computational environmental sciences, a field that is traditionally male dominant. I have so far supervised one SURGE student and am currently working with the Advancement Division to secure longer-term funding.

The extent to which students benefit from research experiences depends on the quality of the research mentoring and in particular on the research being “an intentionally designed learning experience” (Hodges, 2015). To facilitate this learning experience for my own undergraduate researchers, I have now developed a set of guidelines that help set expectations for new student researchers as well as a wrap-up and reflection that provides feedback to me and gives the students an opportunity to think holistically about their experience. My guidelines were reviewed by Professor Clare Murphy as part of a Peer Review of Educational Practice, who stated:

As a result, an adapted version of my guidelines is now posted on the Centre for Atmospheric Chemistry wiki for all new students.

Feedback from the students themselves also shows that their research experiences under my mentorship are translating into transferrable skills and learning gains:

References

Cash, C. B., Letargo, J., Graether, S. P., & Jacobs, S. R. (2017). An analysis of the perceptions and resources of large university classes. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 16(2), ar19-rm2.

Guerrero, M., & Rod, A. B. (2013). Engaging in office hours: A study of student-faculty interaction and academic performance. Journal of Political Science Education, 9(4), 403-416.

Hodges, L. C. (2015). Teaching undergraduate science: A guide to overcoming obstacles to student learning. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Kang, H., Thompson, J., & Windschitl, M. (2014). Creating opportunities for students to show what they know: The role of scaffolding in assessment tasks. Science Education, 98(4), 674-704.

Kiley, M., Moyes, T., & Clayton, P. (2009). ‘To develop research skills’: Honours programmes for the changing research agenda in Australian universities. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 46(1), 15-25.

Persellin, D. C., & Daniels, M. B. (2015). A concise guide to improving student learning: Six evidence-based principles and how to apply them. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Rowland, S. L., Smith, C. A., Gillam, E. M., & Wright, T. (2011). The concept lens diagram: a new mechanism for presenting biochemistry content in terms of “big ideas”. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, 39(4), 267-279.

Sadler, T. D., Burgin, S., McKinney, L., & Ponjuan, L. (2010). Learning science through research apprenticeships: A critical review of the literature. Journal of Research in Science Teaching: The Official Journal of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, 47(3), 235-256.