Teaching the Teachers: Investigating the Impact of a Phylogenetic Biogeography Workshop Through SoTL
Sarah Swiston is a WashU graduate student in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. She recently completed the Scholar level of the Professional Development in Teaching Program, which required her to design and implement a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research project. Sarah describes her project below.
One of the most important responsibilities of researchers is to educate others on our work. For methods developers, this includes providing materials that will enable other researchers to implement our methods in their own study systems. Examples include software documentation, online tutorials, teaching modules, and workshops. Creating these tools requires pedagogical decision-making, similar to (but different from) classroom instruction. Teaching is an integral part of everything we do.
As part of an NSF grant studying Hawaiian plants led by some amazing researchers (Michael Landis, Felipe Zapata, Isaac Lichter-Marck, and Fábio Mendes among them), I had the opportunity to participate in designing and administering a workshop about phylogenetic biogeography. We hosted the workshop at WashU for a cohort of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the summer of 2024.
When designing the workshop, we wanted to take a principled approach, and used backward design to create a series of lessons that led to our most complex model. But the literature about the effectiveness of different instructional techniques in advanced-level workshops for researchers is far more scarce than similar literature on classroom instruction.
I have always been interested in pedagogy, and have been involved with the Center for Teaching and Learning during my entire time as a graduate student. Workshops and the EPIC Learning Community had introduced me to the idea of pedagogical research. I decided to attend the SoTL Seminar and design a project to investigate the efficacy of our computational workshop and the activities we did. The seminar highlighted the value of SoTL work, and introduced me to many different types and methods of education research. The instructor feedback and peer review process really helped me to identify my primary questions and craft a feasible study that would address them.
We used pre- and post-workshop surveys to ask participants about their levels of confidence, their perceptions of the workshop, the helpfulness of particular activities, and whether they planned to use the workshop tools and methods in the future. Results showed that the workshop met the goals of the instructor team and the workshop participants. It increased overall confidence in key content areas, and participants reported that they were more likely to use phylogenetic models of biogeography after attending the workshop. The participants generally preferred the lecture and discussion activities over participatory live coding, but provided useful feedback about the problems with the coding activity that will make future workshops better.
I learned so much through this project. I had never worked with human subjects before, but folks from the CTL walked me through the IRB process and helped develop an effective survey for addressing my research questions. They continue to provide valuable feedback as I learn to write about and present this research to others. This has made SoTL much more approachable for me. My career aspiration is to teach undergraduates about biology and its intersection with mathematics. I want to be an excellent instructor, and I also want to contribute to our broader knowledge about teaching and learning. Because of the SoTL program, I know that education research can fit into my future plans.
