“Do I Need to Know This for the Exam?” Using Popular Media, Inquiry-based Laboratories, and a Community of Scientific Practice to Motivate Students to Learn Developmental Biology
One of the greatest challenges instructors face is getting students to connect with the subject in a manner that encourages them to learn. In this essay, we describe the redesign of our Developmental Biology course to foster a deeper connection between students and the field of developmental biology. In our approach, we created a community of scientific practice focused on the investigation of environmental impacts on embryonic development and informed by popular and scientific media, the students' own questions, and the instructor. Our goals were to engage students in meaningful ways with the material, to develop students' science process skills, and to enhance students' understanding of broad principles of developmental biology. Though significant challenges arose during implementation, assessments indicate using this approach to teach undergraduate developmental biology was successful.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 28 December 2012.
All research outputs
#28,676,353
of 34,454,098 outputs
Outputs from CBELife Sciences Education
#1,064
of 1,243 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#126,962
of 135,810 outputs
Outputs of similar age from CBELife Sciences Education
#7
of 13 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,454,098 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 9th percentile – i.e., 9% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,243 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 12.3. This one is in the 2nd percentile – i.e., 2% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 135,810 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one is in the 4th percentile – i.e., 4% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
We're also able to compare this research output to 13 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 15th percentile – i.e., 15% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
