Sara is a Co-PI on a recently funded National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM education (IUSE) grant entitled "Learning from Dialog versus Monolog Videos." Using her Bio360 Animal Physiology classroom, Sara will be teaming up with cognitive scientist Micki Chi to look at the impact of different types of instructional videos on students in the class.
For more information, click here to access the NSF link about the grant or see below for the project abstract:
"Knowing the benefit of active learning is a major issue for faculty teaching undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The importance of increasing student knowledge, retention, and graduation in STEM has become a national concern in regards to maintaining global competitiveness in the STEM workforce. By examining the use of monolog and dialog based videos for instruction in STEM, this mixed-methods (quantitative and qualitative data collection) research study investigates student achievement in relation to students' interest/enjoyment and effort/importance and provides a more complex understanding of active learning. Such inquiries that move beyond laboratory settings and extend to real classroom contexts are particularly warranted. The results from this project could have compelling implications for developing digital materials to facilitate STEM learning. Moreover, as faculty seek new ways to deliver content to students, this study informs the ways in which that content can be delivered. The goals of the project are (1) to test these novel instructional video formats that merge out-of-classroom assignments with active learning in an authentic college science classroom and (2) to seek an explanation for the influence of monolog and dialog conditions on learning and how these formats mediate student achievement."