Smyth Davida S, Chen Simon, Sompanya Geena, Metz Molly, Conefrey Theresa
Department of Life Sciences, Texas A&M University-San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, USA.
Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School, New York, New York, USA.
J Microbiol Biol Educ. 2022 Jul 5;23(2). doi: 10.1128/jmbe.00055-22. eCollection 2022 Aug.
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.
电子档案袋是数字资源库，学生可以在其中整理来自各学科单个或多门课程的论文、项目及反思，以多种格式展示自己的学习成果。这种透明且便于携带的媒介能让学生记录自己的知识和能力，用于评估和职业发展，已被美国学院与大学协会认定为11种高影响力实践之一。本研究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问题，展示了电子档案袋作业如何应用于微生物学课程（专业和非专业学生均可选修），以衡量学生在多个课程和项目学习目标方面的学习成果。此外，它还能帮助学生通过将科学、微生物学和微生物与霍乱、性别平等和抗生素耐药性等具有社会重要性的问题联系起来，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，利用课堂上获得的资源以及自己的研究成果，为选定的微生物创建简介，并以富有创意的方式记录该微生物的特征。电子档案袋作业还可以与创意作品（如一件艺术作品或一首诗）相结合，以公众易于理解的形式突出并展示该微生物，从而提高人们对微生物在我们生态系统中作用的认识。通过精心设计和构建作业，电子档案袋还可以通过将课堂内容与具有公民重要性的现实世界问题联系起来，用于提升公民素养和科学素养。
