Curriculum Problems in Science
Code
SCE 718
Greatest Course Takeaways
My greatest takeaway from this course was how curriculum and standards differ, and how legislation over time impacted what is emphasized. This was my first introduction to the NGSS standards for K-12 science learning. It focused on goals that students can achieve and suggested three-dimensional ways of teaching to help achieve this. However, similar to the struggles and opportunities in collegiate science teaching, the focus on goals allows the instructor to decide how to teach the material. I describe this as a struggle and an opportunity because you can have a teacher who implements a curriculum that is not very engaging or student focused (struggle) or you can have a teacher who implements a curriculum with lots of activities, student focused learning, and inquiry-based lessons that help students become owners of knowledge creation (opportunity). Leaving this open gives educators flexibility in their delivery. However, often in the college classroom, we see faculty use methods that feel outdated for the needs of the current student population because they "worked for them" back when they were at university. They more often than not are read/write consumers of information as academic scholars and researchers. They then present that information to their students in the same read/write fashion. However, their students may tend to be more kinesthetic/visual learners at the undergraduate engineering level of academia. This can and has lead to strife in the classroom between collegiate students and academic scholars sharing the materials.
This course reiterated to me that it is important to continually review what we are teaching, how we are teaching it, and what we are emphasizing to students in the classroom as valuable when it comes to learning (such as the "why" compared to the "what"). It built upon the ideas I learned in other courses that supported teaching techniques and activities that promoted student engagement in the material and thinking about how information supports their ideas instead of just memorizing and repeating what it is the teacher told them in class.
Course Product Description
The course product for this portfolio was the final project for the course. In this project, we were required to critique some form of curriculum material in our respective disciplines. The purpose of this critique was to demonstrate an understanding of how current researchers understand science teaching and learning, how these understandings are transferred to curriculum materials, and how the curriculum could potentially improve. This could include reviews of a course textbook, a dominant or popular laboratory exercise, or similar topics.
For my project, I reflected upon my own undergraduate engineering education as a graduate student as well as someone training in Teaching and Curriculum. I incorporated ideas of teaching that I knew at the time as well as suggested ways the teaching process could improve in the engineering curriculum. Additionally, I compared the undergraduate paper engineering curriculum of my home institution (SUNY-ESF) with other colleges in the United States that offered similar paper engineering degrees/programs.
Click Here to See the Course Product for this Course and Others in the Portfolio.
Selection of Product for Portfolio
I selected this course product for my portfolio because it gave me the opportunity to look closely at how a collegiate science and engineering curriculum is conceived by different universities based upon the same accreditation criteria (ABET [Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology] General or Chemical Engineering). It also gave me an opportunity to reflect upon my own learning as an undergraduate engineering student and where this could be improved from the perspective of an educator and a student. This course product allowed me to evaluate the curriculum and reflect upon my experiences with evidence-based teaching techniques and ideas in mind, such as the student-centered learning focus, inquiry-based learning activities, distributed learning, and the emphasis on "why" instead of just the "what". In this course product, I was able to make recommendations for improving the paper engineering curriculum at my own college based upon the concepts I learned in this course and other courses prior (such as Teaching of College Science (SCI 544) and the "broken" or interrupted lecture format demonstrated in that class).
This course product gave me experience in evaluating curriculum not just based upon accreditation standards, but how each course relates to the next (especially those in a prerequisite sequence) and speculate on how this process could be improved for students. This was an important first step of analysis and evaluation that later developed into the knowledge and skills demonstrated in other courses in this program, such as the Instructional Design and Development (IDE 631 and 632) courses. It also gave me perspective on how other universities operate their programs, what they deem important, and how they incorporate the same engineering concepts into their curriculum, such as general vs. specialized engineering courses. It was evident which programs had more of a paper engineering focus with support from educational ideas than those that were more general in chemical engineering and seemingly disjointed.
Contribution of Product to Overall Program
This course and course product contributes to my overall program of study because it allowed me to delve into the structure and design of collegiate science and engineering programs. My Teaching and Curriculum program was structured with an emphasis on the college science classroom as opposed to K-12 studies. This course product provided a space for me to openly and honestly reflect upon the quality of my undergraduate engineering education and how I could improve it based on the actual evidence-based teaching techniques that I learned about in this course and throughout the program up to that point. It provided perspective about my institution and how it tried to meet its accreditation standards compared to other universities addressing the same requirements. It also showed me the importance of how each piece of curriculum - how each course - related to one another and can be improved as individual courses and as a program sequence. This ended up influencing one of the final course products made for my Teaching and Curriculum program (the course product for IDE 632), which felt like a culmination of many of the classes I completed for this degree.