Holly Dunsworth goes through an assessment of her curricular changes in an Introduction to Biological Anthropology course and her students’ learning experience:
Based on only two semesters of data, it’s hard to link my curricular changes to the improvement between Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 that is demonstrated here, but at least it’s clear that my changes haven’t harmed student performance. Why they improved on some of the questions but not others isn’t intuitively obvious. But because they did, I’ll continue on with this overall approach next semester, trying of course to lead them to improve further. I can’t help but assume that changing things up like I did (by teaching natural selection last, and not all tangled up with the basic evolutionary principles at the start of the semester) helped students see evolution and selection beyond just “survival of the fittest” and beyond ideas of progress, perfection, and agency.
Part of her experience this year was to teach creationism alongside evolution:
But what’s ironic about the creationist plea for getting creation into science classes to better “teach the controversy” and to cover “competing theories” (the only two being creation and evolution) is how my experience suggests that
teaching creation alongside evolution is a recipe for losing supporters of the supernatural.
Meanwhile, John Hawks comments on his efforts to provide more of his classroom experience online:
But even with the imperfect system of classroom lecture captures, I reached more than 3000 people with some of the lectures. The lectures’ average viewership has been more than ten times my in-class enrollment. I have been so happy to hear from several people who watched some of the online lectures this semester. They’re being used in lots of ways that I didn’t expect, by a surprising cross-section of viewers. To give a hint — my lectures are already being used to improve a documentary project.
