How Getting Friendly with Bacteria Can Promote Student Appreciation of Microbial Diversity and Their Civic Scientific Literacy.

ePortfolios are digital repositories where students can curate papers, projects, and reflections from individual or multiple courses across the disciplines and in a variety of formats to showcase their learning. This transparent and portable medium, which enables students to document their knowledge and abilities for assessment and career development, has been recognized by the American Association of Colleges and Universities as one of 11 high-impact practices. Using tailored rubrics, student assessment of learning gain surveys, and end-of-course exam questions, this study demonstrates how an ePortfolio assignment can be used in microbiology courses taken by majors and nonmajors to measure student learning outcomes in several course and program learning goals. Additionally, it helps students reflect on their learning and place it in a real-world context by connecting science, microbiology, and microbes with issues of social importance like cholera, gender equity, and antibiotic resistance. Writing from a first-person perspective and drawing on resources obtained in class and from their own research, students generate profiles for a chosen microbe and document the microbe’s characteristics in creative ways. The ePortfolio assignment can also be partnered with creative work such as an art piece or a poem that highlights and showcases the microbe in a format that is accessible to the public to increase awareness of the role of microbes in our ecosystems. With careful design and construction of assignments, ePortfolios can also be leveraged to promote civic and scientific literacy by tying classroom content to real-world issues of civic importance.

电子档案袋是一种数字存储库，学生可以在其中整理来自不同学科的单门或多门课程的论文、项目以及反思内容，且格式多样，以此展示他们的学习成果。这种透明且便于携带的媒介能够让学生记录自身知识和能力，以用于评估和职业发展，它已被美国学院与大学协会认定为11种高影响力实践之一。通过使用定制的评分标准、学生学习收获评估调查以及课程结束时的考试题目，本研究展示了在微生物学课程（包括专业学生和非专业学生所修课程）中如何利用电子档案袋作业来衡量学生在若干课程和专业学习目标方面的学习成果。此外，它通过将科学、微生物学以及微生物与诸如霍乱、性别平等和抗生素耐药性等具有社会重要性的问题相联系，帮助学生反思自己的学习，并将其置于现实世界的背景中。学生从第一人称视角出发，利用课堂上获取的资源以及自己的研究成果，为选定的一种微生物撰写简介，并以创新的方式记录该微生物的特征。电子档案袋作业还可以与艺术作品或诗歌等创意作品相结合，以一种公众易于理解的形式突出和展示微生物，从而提高人们对微生物在我们生态系统中作用的认识。通过精心设计和布置作业，电子档案袋还可通过将课堂内容与具有公民重要性的现实世界问题相联系，来促进公民素养和科学素养的提升。