Co-creation in academe can take multiple forms. In this research, the co-creation focus is on collaboration between faculty and graduate students to develop educational modules. This activity is designed to improve graduate education and prepare students for conducting graduate research. In previous work presented at ASEE 2022, we discussed benefits and challenges of participating in the co-creation process. This current paper focuses on how we took lessons from our first year and transformed them into a structure to better support interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and community building.
We will discuss how we supported the process of co-creation by developing a series of workshops to scaffold student learning. Scaffolds are instructional methods and interventions that are designed to foster skill development by allowing for interactions between what students already know and what they have yet to learn. These workshops were designed using the tenets of the gold standard project-based learning (PjBL). The PjBL framework is itself a scaffold that is designed to build research competencies.
Specifically, to introduce a challenging problem or question, we created multiple technical overviews of the cyber-physical system theme of interest that would constitute the eventual educational modules. We scaffolded sustained inquiry by developing a workshop using techniques from the Right Question Institute, and also through a workshop about crafting your message for different audiences. To support the PjBL idea of authenticity, we developed a workshop about core values to help students connect personally to their project topics. To further support collaboration and community building, we developed a workshop to introduce ideas of interdisciplinary collaboration, including developing community agreements and recognizing and responding to microaggressions. Periodic reinforcements of these topics were incorporated as students progressed in their co-creation project. We assessed how students applied these topics through student reflections.
Scaffolding students’ learning helped to address co-creation challenges that were expressed by our pilot group, including not understanding the goals of the project and not feeling connected to the research. Observational data of the current groups suggests that students have better understanding of the co-creation process and are collaborating more effectively than our pilot group students, and focus group data confirmed these observations. We also collected feedback from students about the workshops to evaluate what is effective about them and what can be improved. Students felt skills taught in the workshops such as how to prioritize research questions, construct messages for specific audiences, and perform literature searches and reviews, were all effective and useful as they worked on their projects. For improvement, they suggested clearer objectives and more workshops that focus on technical aspects of the project work would be helpful.
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This content will become publicly available on May 9, 2024
A Guided-Inquiry Activity for Introducing Students to Figures from Primary Scientific Literature
Reading and understanding scientific literature is an essential skill for any scientist to learn. While students’ scientific literacy can be improved by reading research articles, an article’s technical language and structure can hinder students’ understanding of the scientific material. Furthermore, many students struggle with interpreting graphs and other models of data commonly found in scientific literature. To introduce students to scientific literature and promote improved understanding of data and graphs, we developed a guided-inquiry activity adapted from a research article on snow chemistry and implemented it in a general
chemistry laboratory course. Here, we describe how we adapted figures from the primary literature source and developed questions to scaffold the guided-inquiry activity. Results from semi-structured qualitative interviews suggest that students learn about snow chemistry processes and engage in scientific practices, including data analysis and interpretation, through this activity. This activity is applicable in other introductory science courses as educators can adapt most scientific articles into a guided-inquiry activity.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1821884
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10475521
- Editor(s):
- Holme, Thomas
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Chemical Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Chemical Education
- Volume:
- 100
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0021-9584
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1788 to 1795
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- ["First-Year Undergraduate, General, Environmental Chemistry, Collaborative, Cooperative Learning, Inquiry-Based, Discovery Learning"]
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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