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BioMolViz is a community of practice dedicated to improving biomolecular visualization instruction. Guided by a framework of learning objectives for biomolecular visualization skills, our initial project goal was to create a repository of validated assessments to evaluate students’ visual literacy. In 2018, the team was awarded one year of seed funding, which led to a four-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. This support allowed BioMolViz to flourish into a community of educators in professional development workshops and working groups, where teams of participants aimed to design effective and accessible assessments to evaluate students’ biomolecular visual literacy. As the project advanced, we piloted these items in classrooms across the United States. Through a small-scale classroom testing study, we compared student and instructor perceptions of assessment difficulty, while large-scale testing revealed performance patterns that reinforced the need to understand distinct student perspectives. This led us to evaluate students’ problem-solving strategies through surveys and semi-structured interviews. Based on this work, we argue that a reimagining of the curriculum can begin with faculty, but must include productive student partnerships to enact effective change. We offer our repository of visual literacy assessments, the BioMolViz Library, as an instructor resource shaped by the student perspective, and present a new instructor training resource recently produced by our working group. As we approach the close of our funding cycle, we offer our ideas and invite conversations on fostering long-term sustainability for our robust community of practice, under all future resource models.
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Effect of Evolving Design Requirements on Students' Motivation
In 2008, Gannon University was awarded a National Science Foundation S-STEM grant, known as SEECS (Scholars of Excellence in Engineering and Computer Science) which provided scholarship funding for academically talented students having financial need. Since then, the grant has been funded twice more; the current award period started in 2017 and will run until 2021. As a requirement for the SEECS program, all students must participate in a community-based design project, undertaken for a non-profit entity in the local region. This project is nominally a two-year effort, though some projects have taken longer to complete. Recently, a project has experienced several significant setbacks: 1) the original project sponsor decommitted at the end of the first year due to funding concerns; 2) the project location changed four times due to uncertain sponsor requirement and city regulations; 3) the design itself has required substantial alteration several times due to unexpected circumstances (largely due to sponsor issues.) After two and a half years, the project remains only about 50% complete, still requiring additional system level design, installation and testing. This team of SEECS students has been coping with each “sharp turn” of the project as well as may be expected. They have produced design sketches, prototypes, and conference presentations. Yet signs of confusion, frustration, and low motivation level have been observed among students and have been evidenced through student satisfaction surveys, which are administered to all SEECS students each semester. This work-in progress paper details the evolution of student perceptions of the validity of the project, compares that evolution to historic data obtained from previous design groups, and speculates about the cause/effect relationship between externally-imposed design changes and student perceptions. In particular, the effect of design changes on student enthusiasm and sense of purpose is to be examined. Preliminary conclusions and trends will be drawn from the study. The periodic evaluation, adjustment and intervention of advising will be suggested to guide students to fully benefit from such real-life project experience.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1643869
- PAR ID:
- 10139536
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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