The UBC team of instructors and science educators that developed the First-Year Seminar in Science (SCIE 113) has received this year’s Alan Blizzard Award, the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) announced recently.
The award, which honours Dr. Alan Blizzard, president of STLHE from 1987 to 1995, is given to recognize exemplary collaborations in university teaching which have enhanced student learning. The award was created upon Blizzard’s retirement from the society to recognize his contributions to university teaching and learning.
Instructors began to develop SCIE 113 in 2009 to provide a small class format where first-year science students could learn how to think like a scientist and communicate science through writing. The collaboration began with eight faculty members from five different departments and now includes 14 departments across four faculties that are involved in the teaching and development of SCIE 113.
The course is designed to actively engage students and introduce them to skills which transcend disciplinary boundaries, namely how to constructively build an evidence-based argument and how to communicate effectively. Case studies, targeted readings, and examinations of media and scientific articles allow students to evaluate the validity of scientific claims and to construct a scientific argument. Activities such as reflections, in-class writing, peer review, and discussions on the fundamentals of writing help students to improve their writing skills, which are assessed by three short essays and a term project. Students are frequently encouraged to discuss, debate, and defend their views on science both during in-class and out-of-class activities.
While many first-year courses at UBC number in the hundreds of students, sections of SCIE 113 are limited to between 24 to 27 students. This helps achieve one of the goals of the course, which is to facilitate students’ transition from high school to university. Though sections of the course are small, the course reaches about a quarter of first-year students in the science faculty. The course design has also been adapted for other UBC courses and has garnered interest from universities in British Columbia and as far away as South Africa and Hong Kong.
Dongho Lee, a third-year honours physiology student who took the course, said that as a result of lively group discussions and the small class size, “I felt we had started our own diverse community, one that had an interactive dialogue discussing facts and ideas similar to that of the larger scientific community. From this, I learned what it meant and how it felt to be a part of a scientific community, which helped motivate my passion to pursue research at various labs on campus because I wanted to be a part of the global ‘group’ discussion that the SCIE 113 class mimicked.”