What's next for the Pathways series?

I n the spirit of the New Year, we have taken this opportunity to reflect upon the past and to provide a preview of the future of the Pathways to Scientific Teaching series. In August 2004, we initiated this feature to offer readers a variety of instructional designs and assessments to use with the content of a scientific article published in the same issue of Frontiers. Each Pathways article includes learning goals for students, teaching goals for faculty, and instructional strategies that actively engage students in the processes of science. The assessments are designed to evaluate students' achievements of the goals, such as understanding the scientific principles and skills discussed in the scientific paper. We designed the Pathways articles to address the challenges of large enrollment courses, confident that scaling down to smaller-size classes is easily accomplished. Panel 1 summarizes the instructional strategies and assessments associated with each article. Twice since the Pathways series began, we asked the membership of ESA to comment on the articles. In November 2004, a general readership survey about Frontiers was conducted, and of those who responded (n=1559), 81% found the Pathways articles interesting to extremely interesting. Of all the sections/features in Frontiers, 15% said the education section was the most useful. In a recent survey via Ecolog (December 2005), we asked the membership more specific questions about the Pathways articles, including how often they were used in courses and how well students achieved the learning goals. Although the sample size was small (n=14), the majority of respondents used most or some of the articles and reported that their students achieved the associated learning goals. Based on generally positive responses to the series, we plan to continue the articles with the intent of further advancing the concept of " scientific teaching " (Handelsman et al. 2004), where teaching is approached with the same rigor as science. The current collection of Pathways articles are part of the broader collection of course and curricular materials (eg TIEE 2006; BEN 2006) that offer many different models of how to implement active-learning instruction that engages students in the process of science. Missing from the majority of these materials is substantive evidence to back claims that the " new " teaching approaches promote student learning better than " traditional " approaches. Some faculty remain unconvinced of the need for change in instruction because they have not seen adequate assessment data …