PARENT SESSION
Poster Session #21: Education.
Wednesday, August 8, 2001. Presentation from 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM. Exhibition Hall
15
Course development in the natural sciences: A novel approach to teacher training for graduate students.
Feliciano, Joaquin1, Davis, William1, 1
ABSTRACT- Experience with course development is essential for all graduate students who aspire to a career in academia. Unfortunately, opportunities for such experiences are usually very rare and unstructured, especially for graduate students in the natural sciences. To address this shortcoming, we created a ten-week graduate seminar on developing undergraduate natural science courses. We utilized the current literature on science teaching as well as the participants' collective educational experiences to identify the main elements of effective college science teaching. Each participant used these elements as guidelines to create an original, or update an existing, undergraduate natural science course. We focused on five aspects of course development: 1) defining course scope and objectives, 2) determining course content, 3) identifying relevant teaching strategies, 4) evaluating student learning, and 5) evaluating course effectiveness. Each student finished the seminar with a syllabus and initial lesson plans for a course in his or her discipline. Many of the students who finished the seminar have arranged to teach the courses they designed or plan to submit their syllabi with their teaching portfolios when applying for faculty positions. Thus, by utilizing the experiences, energy, and ideas of graduate students in such a manner we created a simple and inexpensive way of improving graduate student training and potentially enriching existing natural science curricula.
KEY WORDS: education, teacher training