eSTEeM Seminar Series: Scholarship Showcase - March 2022

Location: Via MS Teams
Contact

eSTEeM continues its seminar series with presentations from project teams who have recently completed their eSTEeM projects.

AL induction: requirements, challenges and recommendations

Hannah Gauci and Janette Wallace

STEM ALs arrive at the OU with varying backgrounds, skills and HE teaching experience. Appropriate induction is important to ensure ALs are prepared and supported in their new role such that they are ready to teach and support students at module start. We surveyed three cohorts of new STEM ALs at the beginning and end of their first module presentation, and used our findings to develop a faculty AL induction programme. We will summarise our key findings and recommendations.

Improving student engagement with the study of Python in Level 1 Physics

Gemma Warriner and Andy Diament

SM123: Physics and Space is a Level 1 module aimed at preparing students to study physics, astronomy or planetary science at OU level 2. One issue students face is getting to grips with programming In Python, which can cause anxiety, evidenced in feedback from previous presentations. To delve deeper into the reasons that students had difficulty, we developed an eSTEeM project looking at student engagement with Python on SM123. We used two surveys to ask them about their experience in studying Python and how it compared with the rest of the module. This included students that felt unable to continue with the programming.

Students were generally positive about the support from tutors, especially in forums and tutorials, and typically enjoyed the science content. However, a sizeable proportion reported difficulties with Python, including lack of time and insufficient guidance from the module materials. Responses to the second questionnaire indicated that this was not isolated to the first Python week but continued in the later Python weeks, so that progressively more students gave up on Python throughout the module. Some students reported that they found the learning experience very stressful. We were able to identify which particular activities and content students struggled with, which other resources they were using and their own views on what might help.

One output from our project was that the in-house resource; Python for Physical Sciences website was updated in time for the 21J Presentation, to better support SM123 students before and during the module. The updated content was written by two ALs addressing the issues that students found particularly difficult in the Surveys. The site now has a new section aimed at SM123 students, with embedded pdfs of guidance and additional activities. The expanded website has been retitled as “Programming for Physical Sciences”. News about the updates were disseminated to colleagues and links were put on the SM123 website within the Python week information on the Study planner. An email was sent to all prospective 21J students highlighting the Python content. Links were given to the “Are You Ready For” activity and the updated “Programming for Physical Sciences”.

This seminar to open to OU staff, to register please visit the registration page by Monday 14th February.