PARENT SESSION
Oral Session # 30: Ecology Education II: College.
Presiding: K Klemow
Tuesday, August 5. 1:30 PM to 5:00 PM, SITCC Meeting Room 104.
Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE): Its foundations in cognitive and learning theory.
Grant, Bruce*,1, D'Avanzo, Charlene2, Taylor, Jason3, Udovic, Dan4, 1 Department of Biology, Widener University, Chester, PA2 School of Natural Science, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA3 Ecological Society of America, Washington, DC4 Department of Biology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
ABSTRACT- Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE) is an NSF-funded collaborative project to create a new peer-reviewed on-line and CD ROM-based publication of innovative ecological educational materials published by the Ecological Society of America (www.ecoed.net/tiee). The principal goal of TIEE, beyond that of materials dissemination, is to help ecology faculty to improve their teaching and include more inquiry, active learning, scientific thinking, collaborative group work, authentic assessment, formative evaluation, alignment, and other pedagogical principles and innovations - all of which are based upon a solid foundation of research and theories about cognition and learning. This talk will explore this foundation and demonstrate how the site design embodies (1) key features of constructivism, cognitive processing, and metacognitive activities such as reflection and self-regulation of cognition, (2) the importance of building professional learning communities, and (3) the elevation of the science of teaching as scholarship. For example, a key idea in TIEE is that student activities (e.g. describe and then analyze data with a peer) should reflect the cognitive skills students should learn. Many "traditional" curricula present ideas like this linearly. In contrast, when actively navigating the TIEE resources, faculty are guided to construct their own understanding of ideas such as the link between student interaction and cognitive development. TIEE seeks to catalyze a transformation among undergraduate ecology teachers from materials adopters to scholarly curriculum developers. We believe that the ESA, through its digital library resources such as TIEE, is in an important position to affect "top-down" catalysis of systemic reform among ecological educators. Further, we enjoin that research and theories in learning and cognitive science must be central to the design of digital libraries and other web resources for science faculty.
Key words: cognition, ecological education, science education, digital library