eSTEeM Seminar Series: Scholarship Showcase - September 2022

Location: Via MS Teams
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eSTEeM continues its seminar series with presentations from project teams who have recently completed their eSTEeM projects. September’s seminar will explore the methodology and findings of the following two eSTEeM projects.

Virtual microscope and students: what support strategies work and why

Christothea Herodotou

We examined different forms of student support to identify how best to scaffold student’s learning and engagement with the virtual microscope (VM). We evaluated the new version of the VM and student support took three forms: a) a tutor providing help to students while they were using the VM (synchronously) (n=7), b) a detailed written activity guide designed to support the use of the new version of the VM (n=4), and c) basic activity instructions (n=7). Data were collected from a follow-up questionnaire assessing student experience of using the VM and the marking of answers to a set of activities. Findings revealed some of the difficulties student face when using the VM and pointed to support strategies that would help them use it more effectively.

Can an asynchronous student conference in Open Studio develop students’ higher-order academic skills?

Jenny Duckworth

The Level 3 module ‘Evaluating Contemporary Science’ (S350) has an asynchronous conference as a core component, whereby students present posters and give feedback on them. Whilst we were aware that students enjoy the conference, we were unsure to what extent they were demonstrating higher-order skills, particularly knowledge application and critical evaluation, which are particularly important for Level 3 study and beyond.

We assessed 100 posters from the 2019 conference for evidence of scientific understanding, application and critical evaluation. We then developed some simple interventions to help students focus on these higher-order skills before the 2020 conference. Following this we analysed 100 posters from the 2020 conference and compared the 2019 and 2020 results. Here we present the results of our analyses and consider their implications, together with a summary of student perceptions of their conference experience and skills developed.