The annual National Collegiate Soils Contest (NCSC) has long been anecdotally recognized as a beneficial event for participating students to practice soil profile descriptions and landscape interpretations. The objective of this study was to quantify student learning outcomes and to identify how students’ perspectives shifted over the course of the week‐long 2019 NCSC, which was hosted by California Polytechnic State University in the San Luis Obispo, CA, area. Participants were asked to complete voluntary pre‐ and post‐contest surveys related to attitudes toward soil science and their knowledge of soil profile description and landscape interpretation, measured using a five‐point Likert scale. Open‐ended questions, which allowed free responses, were also included. Eighty‐three participants completed the pre‐contest survey, and 62 students completed the post‐contest survey. Student understanding increased significantly for five of the seven topics pertaining to soil‐judging‐related skills. Most participants had very positive attitudes toward soil science and soil judging, both pre‐ and post‐contest. Very few significant differences occurred between genders and majors. The most common positive comments were related to location‐based learning, whereas negative comments included environmental factors, such as sun and heat, and long days. Overall, participants indicated the contest was a positive and meaningful educational event, especially for location‐based learning.
Having the ability to make an effective presentation in English is becoming more essential in the modern, global economy. In response to this need, many Japanese universities are introducing presentation skills-type courses into the English curriculum. However, shy students can be a challenge for EFL teachers who must teach courses that emphasize public speaking, resulting in students reading directly from their script, failing to make eye contact with the audience, and speaking in a barely audible, monotone voice. Apprehensive students often fail to engage the audience and their speeches are uninteresting and lack energy. This paper introduces Reader’s Theatre, a collaborative group drama activity, and discusses how the author implemented it into large English communication classes in an attempt to build student confidence, teach basic presentation skills, and encourage students to speak and read English with more expression.
Studio‐style course delivery involves the integration of laboratory activities with lecture elements of the course, with the goal of increasing student learning and satisfaction through directly linking laboratory and lecture concepts while focusing on active learning. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of studio delivery of an introductory soil science class at California Polytechnic State University, we first redesigned the course to integrate appropriate technology and to align lectures with laboratory activities. We then offered multiple test sections of the course, including concurrent studio and traditional lecture/laboratory sections taught by the same instructor using the same materials and activities. Student learning was measured at the end of the course with exam questions, including sets with or without direct connection to laboratory activities. Student attitudes were evaluated with a survey. Few significant differences were found between studio and traditional sections, gender, grade point average, or major. Some students seemed to struggle with the extended time commitment for each meeting of the studio‐style section, but overall, results were very positive for both styles of delivery. Careful design and delivery of the course, including aligning lecture and laboratory materials and incorporating active‐learning strategies, resulted in a high degree of satisfaction with the course, with or without integration of the laboratory and lecture components.
The COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 led to university closures and little time to convert all face-to-face courses online. We investigated how students in the College of Agriculture, Food, and Environmental Sciences at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA perceived emergency remote teaching during the early stages of the pandemic. The college maintains a hands-on pedagogy and "Learn by Doing" approach that is challenging to replicate in a remote setting. We conducted a survey of student experiences (n = 304) during the spring of 2020. We found that most students had a negative experience with aspects of emergency remote teaching during the study period. Approximately two-thirds perceived courses to be less effective at increasing knowledge and career-related skills; approximately three-quarters stated group problem solving was less effective; and approximately two-thirds were dissatisfied with the quantity and quality of course content. Around 10% of students felt courses were more effective in these areas. Familiar instructional modes (synchronous and pre-recorded lectures) were the most common and preferred by students (with 70 to 85% finding them useful vs 7 to 15% finding them useless), even though other instructional modes can be more effective strategies for online teaching. Our results highlight the need for concrete experiences in agriculture and natural resources courses. We suggest strategies for faculty and students to improve remote teaching outcomes in agriculture and natural resources disciplines.
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