December 2015 Science Journal

College News
understand ways to apply them.
The LA students were a key component in the
sessions, providing a student perspective and offering
feedback on a student outlook of learning.
Because the four Penn State students were all
experienced LAs, they were well trained in new
pedagogical ideas and served as group facilitators.
As faculty discussed potential changes to
make to their courses, the students also acted as
sounding boards to consider how certain changes
ideas may be perceived in the classroom.
At the end of the workshop, each Chinese
faculty member left with a product and instructions;
they learned the skills necessary to
Every year, the Center for Excellence in
Science Education (CESE) selects three Tombros
Fellows. In addition, this year the Office
of Digital Learning also awarded a Tombros
Fellowship to a faculty member interested in
transforming online education. These Tombros
Fellows are interested in developing, transforming,
and creating new and innovative courses,
using new teaching methodologies, and finding
more effective ways to assess teaching success
change their way of teaching and committed to
incorporating it in a portion of their fall courses.
The resistance that the group had anticipated
never transpired; the Chinese faculty were very
accepting of the information and were excited
about making changes in their classrooms.
Due to the success and positive feedback
about the workshops, Yang hopes to host the
group again next summer to help influence
more faculty to embrace active learning and
other pedagogical activities to improve student
engagement and knowledge. —Tara Immel
Transforming Science Education with
Tombros Fellowships
Kari Lock Morgan Philip Bevilacqua Charles Anderson Louis Leblond
for classes in the Eberly College of Science.
The four Tombros Fellows for 2015 are Kari
Lock Morgan, Philip Bevilacqua, Charles
Anderson, and Louis Leblond.
Lock Morgan, an assistant professor of statistics,
is using her time as Tombros Fellow to
transform STAT 250, Introduction to Biostatistics.
The course satisfies the general education
quantification credits requirement, but generally
draws students from science majors. She is
changing the class to incorporate a simulation
methods approach to teaching, rather than using
a traditional approach that relied on heavy
background knowledge and can seem disconnected
from the concept being taught.
“This approach is visual, intuitive, intrinsically
linked to the main concepts, the same for
all statistics, generalizable to new situations,
and it requires less background knowledge,” she
said. “So it’s better for conceptual understanding
and allowing students to better focus on the
big picture.”
Bevilacqua is working to transform CHEM
110H, an honors section of the general chemistry
class CHEM 110, often a general education
requirement. Bevilacqua is infusing new technologies
like screen casting, YouTube, and the
interactive whiteboard app Doceri into the class
to better teach complex ideas.
“I am able to show a demonstration and talk
through it to my students,” he said. “It really
cuts down on time and is a good way to explain
difficult concepts.”
He is also able to assign lectures outside of
class because he has recorded them with the new
technology, allowing time to cover more content
in the class over a semester than he would have
without the use of this new technology.
Anderson is focusing on the development of
a new first-year research course titled “Fast
Farming.” Students in Anderson’s proposed
class will use real-time rainfall, temperature,
and soil data obtained from GIS platforms and
social media outlets, in particular Plant Village,
a community created by Penn State professors
David Hughes and Marcel Salathé.
Students will use this data to determine plant
tolerance for a variety of stresses that could
affect agricultural productivity and communicate
this information to agricultural producers
around the world through the Plant Village online
community.
“By empowering freshman undergraduates to
do real research, without pre-determined outcomes,
and to connect this research to tangible
challenges that they can read about in the news,
the class aims to clarify the connection between
basic scientific research and its application for
the benefit of human societies,” Anderson said.
“This connection can sometimes seem very abstract
for students who are in the early stages
of their college careers, but the connection is
always there, even if it is not immediately obvious.”
Leblond’s project is different than the other
three in that his World Campus physics students
are typically adult learners continuing their
education online from home while working and
raising a family instead of traditional-age resident
students. He is using a tool called IOLab,
which is a small portable Bluetooth-enabled device
with sensors that can measure physics data
such as force, acceleration, light, and sound.
“With the IOLab, you can do in the comfort of
your home almost all the experiments that we
currently do in our introductory physics course
sequence,” said Leblond. “The IOLab enables
quality hands-on physics labs for students taking
online courses. The quality of the data is often
even better with the IOLab and comes at a
fraction of the cost.”
All of these class transformations use real
data to show students a real-world application
for the skills being taught.
“My hope is that by using real data from the
students’ own fields, the students come to see
the class as a subject that is useful, important,
and relevant and applicable to their own lives
rather than just a requirement they have to get
through,” Lock Morgan said.
—Whittney Gould
30 Penn State Eberly College of Science SCIENCE JOURNAL December 2015
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