Testing CREATE at Community Colleges: An Examination of Faculty Perspectives and Diverse Student Gains

Authors

Kristy L. Kenyon, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Morgan E. Onorato, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Alan J. Gottesman, CUNY City College
Jamila Hoque, CUNY City College
Sally G. HoskinsFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-1-2016

Abstract

CREATE (Consider, Read, Elucidate the hypotheses, Analyze and interpret the data, and Think of the next Experiment) is an innovative pedagogy for teaching science through the intensive analysis of scientific literature. Initiated at the City College of New York, a minority-serving institution, and regionally expanded in the New York/New Jersey/Pennsylvania area, this methodology has had multiple positive impacts on faculty and students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses. To determine whether the CREATE strategy is effective at the community college (2-yr) level, we prepared 2-yr faculty to use CREATE methodologies and investigated CREATE implementation at community colleges in seven regions of the United States. We used outside evaluation combined with pre/postcourse assessments of students to test related hypotheses: 1) workshop-trained 2-yr faculty teach effectively with the CREATE strategy in their first attempt, and 2) 2-yr students in CREATE courses make cognitive and affective gains during their CREATE quarter or semester. Community college students demonstrated positive shifts in experimental design and critical-thinking ability concurrent with gains in attitudes/self-rated learning and maturation of epistemological beliefs about science.

Comments

This article was originally published by CBE - Life Sciences Education, available at DOI: 10.1187/cbe.15-07-0146.

This work was distributed under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License.