We are in annual report time for the grant. Having a hard deadline to look at accomplishments and shortcomings once per year does wonders for a better understanding of where we are. But this year I was not looking forward it. Last year we had lots of material to show, from developing curriculum to the system of deploying and collecting surveys to new research sprouting up as undergraduate researchers embarked on their projects.
But the pandemic brought a screeching halt to our projects, laboratories were closed making side projects impossible, and we suffered a few setbacks including the thawing of a -80 oC freezer holding samples. Most people doing research has been affected, and there is an understanding that NSF understands it. That did not make the report writing a task I was looking forward to. And yet.
Summer and Fall of 2019 was full of field trips and data collections, and we had one more field trip February 2020, after which everything stopped. With the craziness of moving classes online and all other disruptions, we did not really look closely at the data until recently. And they look really interesting.
Last year, most of our students were non majors. This year, we have enough majors’ data that we could look at them separately.
This graph (from our external evaluator, dr. Steuck’s report) shows the impact the field trip had on our non majors. The gain is much higher for them compared to the majors. This is not completely unexpected- students in the biology major are probably more invested/committed already to science than non majors. But it was still cool to see. If one half day field trip and an extra week of discussions around it could make this change, what could be done with more regular activities and a curriculum incorporating research from the early Gen Ed courses?
So right now we are focusing on three aspects:
- We got started on a new sampling set (blog post coming soon!)
- We are developing a “virtual field trip” alternative (which besides allowing as to keep collecting data will also reach many more students)
- Writing! It is time to really crunch the data (both in education and biology) and get manuscripts out. There must be a silver lining to no travel and lots of computer hours!
Stay tuned 🙂
