The purpose of this text is to support student learning. Toward that goal the text proposes to provide help for the major stumbling blocks for student, course and faculty success.
This project is based on three major categories of assumptions:
A. Textbooks are an important resource in the continuum of resources for faculty and students.
A1. A text book is the most portable and durable artifact that students can be expected to have with them constantly. If you want learning to take place "any time, anywhere", a text book is the best way to support that objective.
A2. Given appropriate information literacy skills by students, students can access, analyze and evaluate a wide range of information that is relevant to environmental problems. This information does not need to be in a text but the information literacy skills, example problems and other support needs to be available in the text.
B. The experience of a university student should extend past primary exposure.
B1. Students in introductory and non-majors' courses should be exposed to a range of concepts and tools but the post-secondary experience needs to include abstraction (Lauillard ****)
B2. Beginning university students need to learn metacognitive skills that help them monitor their own learning and continue their learning outside the classroom and after college.
B3. The emphasis of environmental sciences should be to connect students values and self-motivated learning to appropriate content and tools. This union of motivation and opportunity will lead to a true understanding of the discipline that allows them to use the information they learn, make decisions and take actions. Having an understanding that leads to decisions and actions is important both in their roles as students and as citizens.
C. Faculty have strengths and weaknesses that can be supported by a textbook.
C1. Many faculty in environmental science do not have a broad background that includes all the disciplines that our field draws on. However, these faculty do have a high degree of enthusiasm and research knowledge that are irreplacible assets.
C2. Many faculty do not have a working knowledge of different teaching strategies that could be employed in various learning situations (introductory course or non-majors cousre for example). These faculty do not have time allocated to learn these strategies in a vacuum and could benefit from a course structure that uses these consistently.
C3. Few science faculty are well versed in course and program assessent techniques. Given that introductory courses usually play a key role in assessment plans, a course with embedded and persitant assessment would be valuable to the individual faculty (time saving), the department, and the school.
The goal of this project is to visualize a text that would create a shared resource for students and faculty that facilitates learning by relying on strengths and remedying inherent weaknesses. This text will be created around how the structure of the information in the discipline leads to particular learning strategies. This information structure approach will also be used to create embedded assessments that could be immediately useful for correcting aspects of the immediate course, but these assessment instruments would also collect data that would persist (with no extra work for the faculty) to the level of departmental program assessment.