Abstract:
Active-learning strategies are becoming more common in undergraduate wildlife management courses, but no quantified assessments were found for our discipline. We assessed active-learning strategies during three 50-minute class periods in a wildlife populations course during spring 2009. Our teaching objectives were to address general principles of wildlife harvest management and the learning objectives were primarily student application of principles to real management scenarios. We used active lectures to present our topic and a problembased group case study to examine a common yet controversial situation of high deer abundance with differing stakeholder attitudes toward deer harvest management. We administered identical pre and post-topic quizzes to quantify student learning. Mean student score (n=35) on the pre-topic quiz was lower (68%) than the post-topic quiz (79%). About 60% of the scores fell between 60% and 80% for the pre-topic quiz, while 57% of the scores were >80% for the posttopic quiz. Most (77%) student changes in scores between quizzes were positive, with almost half of the students showing >14% improvement. Overall, students ranked their confidence as slightly increased following implementation of activelearning strategies. Our assessment can be used for comparison to future studies, to improve course structure, and to identify and address our teaching deficiencies.
Keywords:
active learning strategies, wildlife ecology course
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