Assignments with benefits – materially rewarding student work

One of the banes (and there have been a few) of my life as an academic, has been the necessity (or is it?) of having to assess student achievement and attainment using exams, tests, essays, quizzes, talks, posters, whatever. I very early on in my academic career decided that students on my undergraduate and postgraduate modules, should not just be tested for memory, knowledge, analysis, evaluation and synthesis but in skills that at Imperial College, London, in the early 1990s were hardly, if ever, mentioned. Yes, you guessed it, posters, talks, debates and group working. These all being things that when I was an undergraduate we received absolutely no training in at all. My final year module in Applied Ecology ran for a solid five weeks in the run-up to the end of the Christmas term. I had a dedicated base room where we could store materials and was not used by anyone else during the module.  In other words, I could timetable independently of the central system – a great boon. As members of the British Ecological Society will know, the week before Christmas heralds the fantastic BES Annual General Meeting, so it was a no-brainer, I would build the coursework part of the assessment for my Applied Ecology module around a mini ‘BES Christmas Meeting’. Why not? It is all part of the scientific process anyway😊

The Mini Conference

I decided that for the actual conference, the students would produce a poster, based on a recently published real paper of their choice, and a talk, which could also be based on the same paper.  Their brief was to adopt the identity of the author and speak and present as that individual.  I also ran a poster making and how to give a talk workshop so that the students knew what was expected from them.  I was, as it turns out, the only module leader in the Department doing this!  I set aside specific slots in the timetable when a dedicated space was available for me and the students to be together for three hours a week where they could work on these and consult me if they came across any problems.

A couple of excerpts from the 1997 Applied Ecology mini-conference – some of you may recognise at least three names that aren’t mine 😊 You may also notice that their interests have changed since then.

The Research Syndicate

The other skill that final year students need to acquire, is how to write scientifically, both in terms of publishing and for their final year projects.

As I have mentioned before, I have huge amounts of unanalysed data which I am always trying to donate to people with more time and modern statistical expertise than me to knock into publication shape, e.g. aphid overwintering, effects of long term herbivory on bird cherry trees, and flowering patterns in sycamore.   For this I provided all the raw data files, the methods and materials so that the students could get a real feel for what it was all about and which data set they would like to analyse.  They had free choice of the data sets and could also choose how much of it to analyse to tell their stories. I then provided five training sessions about scientific paper writing; why we do it, what it is meant to achieve and how papers are structured and read, plus a little rant about the tyranny of impact factors! They were also given five afternoons of access to R training via my PhD students. These were group sessions and I encouraged the students to discuss their approaches between them – after all, as scientists we work in groups.  The output, which was independently done, was a ‘scientific paper’.  The best of which I would help knock into shape for publication to a real journal (see reference list for a few examples).

The Class Debate

Running alongside everything else was the class debate.  You might think that this was a busy module, but the whole point of this module was to get the students to interact – I was, and am not a great believer in the ‘jaw, jaw, jaw’ approach to teaching, especially to final year students.  This exercise involved me stetting a scenario, (my favourite is the one illustrated), and allocating named characters to each student. These ranged from local shop owners, RSPB Wardens, Wildlife Trust employees, Forestry Commission employees, Commercial foresters, Whisky distillery owners, Garden Centre Owners, university academics, ecologists, fishers, local residents (occupations chosen by the student) and, of course, the owner of the peat extraction company and their PR Officer.  I then let the students form alliances and come up with their strategies for the Public Inquiry, for which I allowed a whole day.  Each student produced a short essay as part of their coursework and I allocated extra marks for each contribution made during the debate which I added to their essay marks.

My last ever class debate at Imperial – a sad day, but all good things come to an end.

A few of the characters – anyone recognise the suave city gent in the centre?

The formal part of the course ended with the mini-conference where all the students spoke and some were involved as session chairs. Posters were judged by students and staff as were the talks.  At the end of the two-day conference it was prize giving time.  Top papers, talks, posters and essays were all given copies of books that I thought would be of interest, (Stephen Jay Gould featured a lot), runners up were given book tokens and third placers a bag of chocolate coins (Christmas you know).  Incidentally all winners were given a huge chocolate medal 😊 Plus the students had all their course work marks to take away with them for Christmas. Win-win all round.

Something a little bit different – Cash for assignments – The Antenna article

For our MSc students I thought that it would be nice, that as well as learning a new skill, writing for a general audience, they had the opportunity to be both published and earn a little bit of cash to help pay their way though the course.  Luckily, a solution was close to hand, the Royal Entomological Society, Student Essay Awards.  Even more fortuitously, the submission date for both the coursework and the essay award were very close together.  I provided students with past essay winners and a brief session on the different approaches one could take, from short pieces of fiction, to a ‘news item’, to a factual ‘did you know piece’.  The world was pretty much their oyster. So again, a nice way to make coursework fun.  You will, if you have clicked on the link, seen that we here at Harper Adams University have done quite well over the years.  I also recommend that you spend a few minutes reading some of the winning essays – they are truly wonderful.

Post script

The whole exercise was also very rewarding for me. I got to really know the students and felt that I had done some very useful mentoring. Decades later, I am still in touch with many of the students, including many who are no longer in academia. I was also privileged to win a couple of teaching awards (just certificates, no cash), on the back of this, so definitely worth the effort.

References

Butler, J., Garratt, M.P.D. & Leather, S.R. (2012) Fertilisers and insect herbivores: a meta-analysis. Annals of Applied Biology, 161, 223-233.

Goodwin, C., Keep, B. & Leather, S.R. (2017) Habitat selection and tree species richness of roundabouts: effects on site selection and the prevalence of arboreal caterpillars. Urban Ecosystems, 19, 889-895.

Leahy, M.J.A., Oliver, T.H. & Leather, S.R. (2007) Feeding behaviour of the black pine beetle, Hylastes ater (Coleoptera: Scolytidae). Agricultural and Forest Entomology, 9, 115-124.

Leather, S.R., Ahmed, S.I. & Hogan, L. (1994) Adult feeding preferences of the large pine weevil, Hylobius abietis (Coleoptera: Curculionidae). European Journal of Entomology, 91, 385-389.

Leather, S.R., Small, A.A. & Bogh, S. (1995) Seasonal variation in local abundance of adults of the large pine weevil, Hylobius abietis L. Journal of Applied Entomology, 119, 511-513.

Leather, S.R., Fellowes, M.D.E., Hayman, G.R.F. & Maxen, J.S. (1997) The influence of lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) provenance on the development and survival of larvae of the pine beauty moth Panolis flammea (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae). Bulletin of Entomological Research, 87, 75-80.

Leather, S.R., Beare, J.A., Cooke, R.C.A. & Fellowes, M.D.E. (1998) Are differences in life history parameters of the pine beauty moth Panolis flammea modified by host plant quality or gender? Entomologia experimentalis et applicata, 87, 237-243.

Natural History learning should be compulsory for all, not just an option for a niche few

One of the few benefits of the Covid-19 pandemic is that I have been able to spend a lot more time outdoors roaming the country lanes around my lockdown prison*.  Prior to my move to Harper Adams University, I had, from 1992-2012, spent two days a week doing fieldwork at Silwood Park. When I moved  from there to Harper Adams, I resisted the temptation to set up yet another long-term field study, and decided to concentrate (not very successfully) on analysing my data backlog and getting the MSc courses well and truly established at their new location. At the time I hadn’t realised how much I had benefited, physically and mentally, from my Silwood transects until I started my lunchtime lockdown treks. I have over the past eleven weeks, added four new aphid species to my personal list, plus a couple of beetles (including one notable species), counted butterflies, seen a hare, reacquainted myself with lots of grasses and herbaceous plants, talked to trees, fumbled a few fungal identifications, and even taken a passing interest in birds :-).  I mention all this because I am a great believer in fieldwork and the benefits that accrue in terms of ideas if you keep your eyes open to all the other things that are happening around your study organisms. Given the vast number of insect species and the close relationships most of them have with plants, it behoves a field entomologist to have more than a passing interest in natural history.

This past week has seen a flurry of interest in the study of natural history in the UK. One of the national exam boards (OCR), after a lot of lobbying from the author Mary Colwell and organisations such as the UK Plant Science Federation, has set out a consultation document about the launch of a new GCSE** qualification in Natural History. As someone who has been bemoaning the lack of natural history training at all levels for many years, this, on the face of it, seems a great idea.

Learning the basics

This is their proposed statement on the purpose of studying Natural History: (so lack of appropriate punctuation is not due to me)

“Natural history offers a unique opportunity to observe and engage with the natural world to develop a deeper understanding of the flora and fauna (life on Earth) within it. It is a study of how the natural world has been shaped and has evolved as well as how humans (as part of that natural world) influence, conserve and protect it. It is vital that we continue to develop our understanding of the natural world in order to safeguard the future.

To fully appreciate the complexities of the natural world it is important to study it closely and interact with it through field research and measurement. Natural history provides opportunities to develop skills out in the field as well as in a classroom and/or laboratory. Studying natural history makes an important contribution to understanding the relationship between the natural world and culture, policy decisions, scientific research and technology.

Study of science, geography, history and the arts at key stages 3 and 4 provides a variety of complementary skills and knowledge which support the study of Natural history. This subject supports the development of unique skills and knowledge which give a sharper focus and depth to the complexities of the natural world. The progression pathway for this subject at key stage 5 and beyond could be scientific, geographical, environmental, ecological or natural history itself.”

 

This is all very laudable and something I think that all of us interested in natural history would support wholeheartedly.  In the UK, the problem is particularly acute and is something that has been recognised for some time (Leather & Quicke, 2010).  Natural history training at all levels has been appalling over the last couple of decades, and has been aided and abetted by the way in which research councils have awarded funding over that period (Clark & May, 2002; Leather, 2009, 2013).  This, and the typical media coverage, see us living in a world where ecology and conservation, is largely perceived to be vertebrate biased, and insects, with the exception of honeybees, portrayed as the enemies of humankind.

Typical reporting of the biodiversity crisis in the UK

Vertebrate bias not just confined to the UK

A very natural (and to me fascinating) phenomenon provoking hysterical reactions on Twitter. Most of the replies were similar to these “Just RUN,  RUN, Ew, Look for a spaceship – it’s an alien, we’re doomed, we’re all doomed”

Yet another harmless insect vilified

This is a problem and something one would hope that a pre-university qualification in natural history would seek to address.  Now, although I very much like and support the idea of a secondary school qualification in Natural History, I can see a couple of problems looming ahead.  First,  I may be biased, but looking at how the macro-species are represented globally, one would justifiably expect the study of natural history to focus on plants, insects and other invertebrates.

Estimated number of species globally within the macro-world (invertebrates other than insects number approximately 300 000 species).

Where are the invertebrates? Surely rather than the rise of the mammals, it should be mammals gain a precarious claw hold?  The invertebrates were, and continue to be the dominant animal life from on Earth, but don’t get a mention.  Then in another part of the consultation document, under topics to be considered, we see yet another anti plant and insect bias creeping in and a pro-vertebrate slant.

• Effects of introducing non-native species (e.g. harlequin ladybirds, Rhododendron)
• Species reintroduction (e.g. wolves, beavers, red kites)

There are lots of vertebrate non-native species that could be named (Eatherley, 2019) and many notable insect reintroductions (e.g. Andersen, 2016)..but where are they?

Despite the fact that the much respected book series The New Naturalist,and the equally respected journal, The American Naturalist, proudly include the word naturalist in their titles, sometime in the last thirty years or so, natural history and naturalist became words that were regarded with some scorn and suspicion within the hallowed halls of academia. Whereas in the past, to be an ecologist necessitated an understanding and knowledge of the living world (Travis, 2020), the ability to produce mathematical models and run complex statistical analyses became the route to tenure and laboratories chock a block with postdocs and PhD students.  In universities, computers and molecular biology labs replaced plant and animal based practical classes. Ecology field courses based around insect, and plant identification disappeared, to reappear rebadged as conservation courses and moved to exotic climes with a focus on the large and easily seen furry, feathered and scaled vertebrates. (OK, I’m being a bit hyperbolic here but you know what I mean; and this is a true story, when I was at Imperial College and it was very obvious that we were running out of entomologists to teach the subject, my Head of Department on me drawing this to his attention, suggested that we could do more modelling).  At the same time, biology teaching in secondary schools was also changing in scope, moving away from the outdoors and whole organisms, to molecules, genetics and humans.  The age of plant blindness, entomyopia, entoalexia and nature deficit disorder (Louw, 2005) was well and truly established by the beginning of the 21^st Century.

This brings me to my biggest concern.  Insects and plants dominate the natural world, but, as we know, entomologists and botanists are in very short supply. In the UK, Botany and Zoology departments have mostly been subsumed into BioScience and Life Sciences departments to the detriment of whole organism teaching. There are no Botany Departments per se, and in the few remaining Zoology Departments, entomologists, make up at the most, half of the tenured staff, so where are the teachers going to come from?

Who will teach Natural History?

 

Finally, even if we find the teachers and the curriculum is appropriately balanced to reflect the natural world, unless we make it compulsory to all, as is the case with English and Mathematics, it will only ever remain a niche subject taken by relatively few students.  Consequently, elephant hawk moth caterpillars will continue to be beaten to death by suburban parents afraid of snakes, the press will continue to vilify harmless wood wasps, bumbling beautiful cockchafers will be swatted to death and hoverflies squashed by rolled up newspapers for no good reason.

 

References

Andersen, A. , Simcox, D.J., Thomas, J.A. & Nash, D.R. (2016) Assessing reintroduction schemes by comparing genetic diversity of reintroduced and source populations: A case study of the globally threatened large blue butterfly (Maculinea arion). Biological Conservation, 175, 34-41.

Clark, J.A. & May, R.M. (2002) Taxonomic bias in conservation research. Science, 297, 191-192.

Eatherley, D. (2019) Invasive Aliens, William Collins, London.

Leather, S.R. (2009) Taxonomic chauvinism threatens the future of entomology. Biologist, 56, 10-13.

Leather, S.R. (2013) Institutional vertebratism hampers insect conservation generally; not just saproxylic beetle conservation. Animal Conservation, 16, 379-380.

Leather, S.R. & Quicke, D.L.J. (2010) Do shifting baselines in natural history knowledge threaten the environment? Environmentalist, 30, 1-2.

Louw, R. (2005)  Last Child in the Woods, Atlantic Books, London.

Purvis, A. (2020) A single apex target for biodiversity would be bad news for both nature and people. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 4, 768-769.

Travis, J. (2020) Where is natural history in ecological, evolutionary and behavioral science?  The American Naturalist, 196,

 

*my wife and I managed to end up being lock-downed 250 km apart 😦

**Non UK residents see here for an explanation

Is there a place for humour in a scientific presentation?

Over at Ecological Rants, Charley Krebs recently wrote about and listed some very sensible and simple rules for giving a good lecture which are exactly the same things I tell my students when I give my lecture about basic presentation skills.  I do, however, also give some other hints and tips to help them give good talks and lectures.

Academics, with a few rare exceptions, are not, as a rule, stand-up comics; although, we are all, to some degree, performers. That said, there is, as I tell my students, definitely a place for humour in lectures and presentations.  The secret is making sure that it is appropriate and amusing. My first bit of advice, which I also take, is to avoid the supposedly, subtle scripted joke or play on words.  You have all sat in that lecture where the speaker very obviously works in a joke, and then the dead give-away, the expectant pause for the laugh, that is invariably either met by massed groans or a stony silence.  If you do feel the need to tell a joke per se, be upfront about it and say, “that reminds me about the…”.  It won’t be any funnier and you probably won’t get a round of applause, but hey, at least one person might laugh.

Far better is to go for the self-deprecating anecdote.  Your audience will be more sympathetic, and even if they are laughing at you, you will know that it is genuine 😊  I usually tell stories from  my working life and sometimes from my childhood. Something personal and shared, as long as it is in good taste, is always a good way to lighten a lecture and help your listeners remember a salient fact.

The thing to avoid at all costs is the careless, off the cuff comment, something that seems a great idea at the time and when without thinking, you let your mouth take over from your brain.  I speak, well write, from bitter experience.  In 1997, the 19^th Symposium of the Royal Entomological Society was held in Newcastle from the 10th-11th September.  The subject of the symposium was Insect Populations and I had been invited to give the plenary address on the less than exciting subject of how qualitative changes in individual insects affects their population dynamics (Leather & Awmack, 1998).  I had a 45-minute slot and I must confess that after thirty minutes I was struggling.  Even I was finding the subject matter a bit dry, and I was desperately thinking of something to add a bit of life and colour to the talk.  I had just reached the section about lifespan when in view of an event that had happened a few days earlier, August 31^st to be precise, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea, and these fatal words issued from my mouth “Death comes to us all as Princess Diana has just found out” There was a massed gasp from the audience, and then, if I had, had a pin to let go, you would have been able to hear it drop!

I use this story as an example of what not to do when I give my lecture on how to give a talk.  It always raises a laugh, albeit a shocked one 😊

My faux pas was certainly memorable.  Ten years later I was invited to give the plenary at Ento’07 in Edinburgh; the chair of the session on introducing me, pointedly made a reference to my infamous plenary of 1997 😊

Reference

Leather, S.R. & Awmack, C.S. (1998) The effects of qualitative changes of individuals in the population dynamics of insects. Pp 187-204 [In] Insect Populations in Theory and in Practice (eds. J.P. Dempster & I.F.G. McLean), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Boston, London.

 

All work and no play – not what a university education is all about

The university landscape in the UK has seen dramatic changes since 1992 when the former polytechnics were encouraged to apply for independent degree awarding powers and moved, from what had, until then, been an almost entirely teaching and training role, to invest more in their research capabilities.  At around the same time there was a push to massively increase the number of students receiving a university education; when I was an undergraduate in 1973 about 7% of us went to university, now it is closer to 50%.  As a result class size has risen as there has not been a proportional increase in the number of university teaching staff and there has, at least in the biological science areas that I am familiar with, been a tendency to replace whole organism practical classes with computer-based alternatives.

Another thing that has changed in the last few years has been the scrapping of maintenance grants and their replacement with student loans and the introduction of tuition fees.  Maintenance grants, which I was lucky enough to receive, were means tested, universally available and paid directly to students.  Tuition fees were paid by the respective Local Education Authorities and did not feature in a student’s world.  We had no idea how much they were and no need to know.  Now students take out loans for both their fees and maintenance, saddling them huge debts for a large proportion of their working life or forever.  My daughter who was lucky enough to only experience the £3000 tuition fees, is on course to pay her loan off next year at the age of 33.  Those who pay £9000 per annum are looking at much longer debt-ridden lives.  Now that universities compete for students, and students rightly or wrongly, see themselves as paying for their education, the culture of universities and their view of students has, and not very subtly, changed and probably not to their benefit.  The managerial staff now see students as customers and not learners and this puts pressure on the academics to deliver courses that students like and not courses that students need.  Academics will know exactly what I mean 🙂 More positively, it does mean that most academic staff who stand in front of students have at least some teaching training and many now have a formal teaching qualification.

A particularly cynical recent development has been the ploy of selling the idea that shortening the time that students spend at university will benefit the students financially without reducing the quality of the degrees awarded.

“The two-year degrees will cost the same as a three-year course, meaning annual fees for them will be higher. Ministers are expected to table a bill to lift the current £9,000-a-year cap on tuition costs so that universities can charge higher annual rates.

The Department for Education has stressed that the fast-track degree would carry the same weight as the current undergraduate model. Universities will be able to charge more than £13,000-a-year for a three-year degree cut down to two years. Annual fees for a four-year course trimmed to three years could rise to £12,000 a year. The proposals will apply to institutions in England.

The fee hike would be strictly limited to the accelerated courses and universities would have to prove they were investing the same resources in the fast-track students as in those studying for a conventional degree. Education ministers think that the reduced timeframe will appeal to those who are in a hurry to get into, or return to, the workplace.

Those who take up the new qualifications would forgo the traditional long summer and winter breaks in exchange for the faster pace of the degree. Although the fees for each year could increase, it is thought the system would appeal to students keen to cut down on living and accommodation costs.

The promotion of two-year degrees was a manifesto pledge from the Conservatives. Universities minister Jo Johnson is expected to tell a meeting of Universities UK, the vice-chancellors’ body, on Friday: “This bill gives us the chance to introduce new and flexible ways of learning.”

You can read the full article here.

The Conservative Party, whose MPs are largely Oxbridge educated non-scientists, are very much in favour of this.  They obviously remember their days as students with few lectures, long vacations and plenty of time to spend on the river or in their elite dining clubs, with careers in politics already assured, regardless of degree results.  Proponents of the two-year degree, and note, that we in the UK already have the shortest university degree system in the world, obviously have no idea of a) how universities work, b) how students learn and c) what a university education is all about and d) science.

To put it succinctly and in words that politicians may understand, although as many of them will have gone to ‘crammers’ to ensure their entry to their elite Public schools, they may not.  A university education is not just about learning facts and passing exams.  Students need time to listen, read, think, experiment, digest, learn, analyse, evaluate, criticise, synthesise and importantly, make contacts* and even more importantly, enjoy life.   When I interview students for a PhD position or a place on my MSc course, I am looking for well-rounded individuals with a zest for learning and life, the ability to think critically and to get on well with classmates and colleagues.  I would most definitely NOT consider taking on a two-year biology graduate to do a PhD or job and I think that this would go for the majority of my colleagues.

Many universities already have four-year degree courses on offer and many more are setting up and planning new four-year courses. They and employers, recognise the value of that extra year in education, be it in an industrial placement or an extended research project.  In my experience, graduates from four-year courses are much more rounded, both as people and as scientists and this is already apparent in their final year of study.

There is now some disquiet from a member of the House of Lords, Lord Adonis, that universities are planning on charging more per year for running two-year degrees than they currently charge for three-year courses. He sees this as a ‘rip-off’.  If, however, as the government claim, that the two-year degrees will be the equivalent of the current degrees then that implies the same amount of resource will be devoted to them, so why should they be less expensive?  You can’t have it both ways. Quality comes with a price.

Finally, it is not just the students, what about the staff involved with delivering the new degrees? One of the selling points of a university degree in the UK is that a significant proportion of the teaching is, or should be, delivered by research active academics.  If this does go ahead, and I cannot see a lot of the research intensive universities doing so, I suspect that the staffing will tend to fall upon teaching only faculty with the more research active staff contributing to the longer degree courses.  The ‘long vacations’ are when those faculty members with dual teaching-research roles, do their thinking, writing and research.  The new proposal would definitely result in a two-tier system to the detriment of both the students enrolled on them and the staff tasked with their delivery.

If we as a nation, want well-rounded and productive graduates, then we should seriously be looking at extending the length of degree courses, not shortening them

Perhaps MPs should take a look at their own ‘term’ times.  Think how much work they could get done if they gave up their long vacations 🙂

 

*

Something our public school Oxbridge educated MPs, don’t understand.  Their privileged public (private if you are a reader from outside the UK) school educations, mean that they already have a well-established ‘Old Boy’ network to tap into.

Malham in the Sun – introducing entomology to budding ecologists

Last year I wrote about my experience of being a tutor at the British Ecological Society’s Undergraduate Summer School at the Malham Tarn Field Studies Council site. I really enjoyed myself and also found it very refreshing to have the opportunity to interact with 50 bright young proto-ecologists. It appears that the students also enjoyed themselves as I was invited back this year to repeat my performance. I was very happy to accept the offer, after all, any chance to visit the county of my birth (Yorkshire) is not to be sneezed at and with the added bonus of being able to talk about entomology to a new audience thrown in I would have been made to turn it down. Thus it was that I headed up the dreaded M6 motorway on a sunny Monday afternoon (July 18th) with joy in my heart and a car boot full of entomological equipment and identification keys. The M6 did not disappoint and I spent an hour sweltering in the summer sunshine very slowly (very, very slowly) making my way through the inevitable road works. Luckily, being one of those people who likes to arrive early for appointments, I was only fifteen minutes late collecting my trusty assistant, Fran Sconce, from the very picturesque Settle Station and then heading up on to the FSC Malham Tarn site.

The weather on arrival was in marked contrast to last year.

We unloaded the car and just had time to set up 35 pitfall traps before heading in for the evening meal after which the students went on a long walk to Malham Cove.

The long walk

 I walked part of the way back with them but turned back in time to get to the bar 🙂  for a very welcome drink, before retiring to bed.

The next day was even hotter, and we spent the morning setting up the labs and teaching areas.

This year, as well as the fifty undergraduates we had ten sixth form students from several different schools in London.  Last year interacting with a class of fifty had posed certain difficulties, so this year we divided the students into two groups and ran the session twice, once on the Tuesday afternoon and then again on the Wednesday morning.  This worked extremely well and meant that Fran and I and the PhD mentors assigned to us, were able to spend much more time with each student and also meant that we were not as rushed off our feet as we would have been otherwise.  So a win/win outcome, although I did have to give the same lecture twice in 24 hours which was an interesting experience.  On the Tuesday afternoon, I started with my lecture on why entomology is important and an overview of the insects.

I seem to have done a lot of arm waving

We then went outside and I demonstrated sampling methods while the students baked under, a by now, extremely hot sun, before sending them off to empty and reset the pitfall traps and collect other insects using nets and beating trays.

Being cruel to trees

 

  

Some of the stars of the day

 

Then it was back to the labs to identify the catches before the evening meal and refreshing drink or two in the bar*.   After the bar closed we had the fluorescent beetle extravaganza.  Last year I demonstrated the use of fluorescent dust on one hapless carabid beetle.  This year I used ten, and two different coloured dusts.  The beetles were then released after dark in

Fluorescing carabids

the courtyard outside the teaching labs where they were photographed fluorescing colourfully under my UV flashlight, as I ‘chased’ them around the arena, much to the delight of the watching students.

As the weather forecast was not very good for the Wednesday morning, we did the insect sampling first, in case the forecast rain was as heavy as predicted.  As it turned out, apart from a short sharp shower, whilst I was demonstrating sampling methods, the sun came out and there were plenty of insects to collect before I did my lecture and we headed in to the labs for another ID session.  All too soon the session was over, and Fran and I, after a hasty lunch, drove back down to Shropshire.

I think that the BES summer school is a superb idea and that the students get a great deal from it.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope that I get the chance to be involved in any future summer schools.  I was also greatly impressed by the 6^th formers who certainly seemed to enjoy my entomology session, one of whom produced this excellent drawing.

Much better than anything I could draw

For those of you on Twitter #bestug16 will give you a flavour of the whole week.

Glorious Yorkshire

 

*staffed that evening by the son of my best friend from school!

 

Getting a buzz with science communication – Reflections on curating Realscientists for a week

My week on Realscientists was a direct result of National Insect Week, a biennial event organised by the Royal Entomological Society (RES) to bring the wonders of entomology to a wider audience*. I had never thought about being a curator for Realscientists although I have followed them for some time.  Back in February however, one of my PhD students who has been involved with National Insect Week on more than one occasion, suggested that I might apply to curate RealScientists during National Insect Week as the RES Director of Outreach, Luke Tilley, was hoping to be on Biotweeps during National Insect Week as well.  To make sure that I had no excuse to forget to do it, she very helpfully sent me the link to the Realscientists web site and instructions on how to apply 🙂

Duly briefed, I contacted Realscientists and to my surprise and slight apprehension, was given the slot I had asked for, the week beginning 19^th June.  As my curatorial stint drew closer I began to worry about what I was going to tweet about and how to fit it into my day-to-day activities.

I made a list of twenty pre-planned Tweets to give me an outline script to work from. I managed to include all but one into my week as curator, the one about why you should want to work in entomology.

The twenty tweet list

I felt that my whole week was addressing this point so there was no need to belabour the point any more.  I also received an email from Realscientists with a Vade Mecum of how and what to tweet.  I was somewhat concerned by the section on how to deal with trolling, but I needn’t have worried, as far as I could tell I received no overt abuse**.

The big day approached, which as my actual launch was at Sunday lunchtime caused some slight logistical problems, but easily solved by making lunch a bit later than usual. As it was a Sunday I basically kept it light, introduced myself and tweeted a few insect factoids and pictures, including some great images from van Bruyssels The Population of an Old Pear Tree.  I have my own hard copy of the 1868 translated edition, but if you want to read it on-line it is available here.

From van Bruyssel – The Population of an Old Pear Tree

It is definitely worth a read.

I also had to make a decision about how much time I was going to spend Tweeting. The previous curator had only done about 10-15 tweets a day, which is what I usually do.  The curator before her, however, had done considerably more.  As my stint as curator coincided with National Insect Week and as my contract with my university does actually specify that I do outreach***, I felt that I could justify several hours a day to it and that is what I did, and managing to fit quite a bit of the day job in between.

In between tweeting images and fantastic insect facts I tried to get some important messages across to my audience.  I started with what some might  term a “conservation rant”, basically bemoaning the fact that although insects make up the majority of the animal kingdom, conservation research and funding is very much biased toward the vertebrates, largely those with fur and feathers.  I also pointed out that most statements about how we should go about conservation in general is based on this unbalanced and not very representative research.  Taxonomic chauvinism has annoyed my for a long time 🙂

That rant over I introduced my audience to the work our research group does, biological control, chemical ecology, integrated pest management, agro-ecology and urban ecology and conservation. Our use of fluorescent dust and radio tagging to understand insect behaviour aroused a lot of interest and comment.

 

Using alternative technology to understand vine weevil behaviour.

The glow in the dark sycamore aphid was also very popular

 

Midweek I translated one of my outreach talks to Twitter and in a frenzy of Tweets introduced the world to Bracknell and the biodiversity to be found on its roundabouts and how an idea of how to teach locally relevant island biogeography and conservation, turned into a 12 year research project.

How teaching led research – the Bracknell roundabout story.

In between these two main endeavours, I tweeted about the influences that entomology has had on art, literature, popular culture, religion, medicine, engineering, advertising, economics, medicine , fashion and even advertising, using a variety of images.

Our new insect-inspired smoke detector attracted a lot of love and envy.

I even composed a haiku for the occasion

Six-legged creatures;

Fascinating and diverse,

Beautiful insects

 

I have been an entomologist for a long time.

and told the story of my life-long love of insects, incidentally revealing some of my past hair-styles and exposing my lack of interest in sartorial elegance 🙂

My overall message for the week was, and hopefully I got this across, is that we should be much

more aware of what is under our feet and surrounding us and of course, that aphids are not just fantastic insects

My final tweet

but also beautiful animals.

Model Myzus persicae that I recently met in the Natural History Museum

And finally, would I do it again? Yes most definitely. I ‘met’ a lot of new and very interesting people and had some really good ‘conversations’.

 

References

Harrington, R. (1994) Aphid layer.  Antenna, 18, 50-51.

Huxley, T.H. (1858) On the agamic reproduction and morphology of Aphis – Part I. Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, 22, 193-219.

Leather, S. R. (2009). Taxonomic chauvinism threatens the future of entomology. Biologist 56, 10-13.

 

 

*I was one of the original ‘founders’ of National Insect Week so have always tried to be involved in some way with the event.

**or I am so thick-skinned I didn’t notice it 🙂

***or as Harper Adams University quaintly terms it, “reach out”

 

 

 

 

Are we too late to save Natural History? The demise of Natural History training in schools and universities

For some years now I have sounded off about my concerns over the loss of entomological expertise and teaching (Leather, 2007, 2009ab). My former colleague Donald Quicke and I have also written about the demise of natural history teaching in secondary and tertiary education (Leather & Quicke, 2009, 2010). More recently, I have been following a debate on Ecolog about the lack of field-based natural history teaching in the USA, with many contributors lamenting the decline of teaching in this area due to the over-emphasis placed on teaching molecular biology and allied subjects. Interestingly enough, at about the same time, Jeremy Fox addressed a similar issue about natural history knowledge in academic ecologists and concluded that there was not as much of a problem as many people thought  http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/01/28/stats-vs-scouts-polls-vs-pundits-and-ecology-vs-natural-history/

Terry McGlynn http://smallpondscience.com/2014/02/03/natural-history-is-important-but-not-perceived-as-an-academic-job-skill/ however, is much less sanguine and perceives a real problem with not just the teaching of the subject, but of the willingness of students to engage with those courses still available.

In the UK the decline in teaching whole organism biology in general at secondary school and undergraduate level has become ever more pronounced. Biology teaching at research intensive university has become increasingly cell and molecular biased as whole organism biologists retire and are replaced by cell and molecular biologists publishing in ‘high impact’ journals; the needs of teaching are perceived as secondary, research profiles are seen as more important. As a consequence, many biology degrees in the UK lack balance, and content is largely dependent on what those staff still willing to teach, are able to offer. We thus have zoology degrees where whole organisms are largely absent and the invertebrates are covered in perhaps as few as twelve lectures. We also see ecology degrees lacking physiology; how can you understand an ecosystem if you don’t know how the constituent parts work?

I have not been alone in bemoaning the status of natural history knowledge and training; in 2005, Anne Bebbington of the Field Studies Council wrote

“At secondary level the decrease in the importance of whole organism biology in the curriculum, declining opportunities for fieldwork and the concentration of A-level fieldwork on techniques and course assessment allow little time for training in identification skills. Many A-level students feel that being able to recognise and name organisms is not important. In teaching students to be responsible citizens and to care about their environment, a knowledge of at least the common organisms around them is vital. Initiatives are needed to engage the interest of primary school children and to provide more opportunities for fieldwork at secondary level, including time to teach students to recognise organisms. Training for teachers would be valuable and the role of organisations outside formal education in educating the wider public is also recognised.”

Five years later, Donald Quicke and I (Leather & Quicke, 2010) wrote “The great majority of those now studying for degrees in biology have had virtually no training or experience in identifying organisms, and sadly, the drive towards ever more molecular and hands-off meta-analysis type study in universities is exacerbating the situation. Although students may be enthused on a two-week long field course and get to learn to recognise a few major groups or species, without back-up, just as with use of statistics, for example, this will have little, if any, long term retention in their skill set.”

We are now almost five years on from these words and worryingly, things, despite all the citizen science activities that seem to spring up every week and the popularity of natural history apps and programmes like Springwatch, have actually got worse and not just in the UK (Tewksbury et al., 2014)^*.

The problem we face is that although there are still many people interested in natural history per se, there is a declining number of opportunities for people to be academically trained in the disciplines associated with its study. Thus fewer biology teachers with these skills are employed and opportunities for enhancing (or subverting as some might see it) the rigid school curriculum at present enforced in secondary schools are becoming fewer too. The good work done in some primary schools by dedicated teachers and outreach specialists such as Minibeast Mayhem are not reinforced at secondary school and thus fewer students want to go on to pursue such studies, or are even aware that such study is possible. At undergraduate level, we find very little whole organism teaching in both the field and laboratory. How many zoology degrees in the UK now expose their students to functional morphology; for example, examining and drawing skulls in able to understand the evolution of reptilian jaw bones to mammalian auditory bones; something that even I, as an invertebrate zoologist, was ‘forced’ to do? I was pleasantly surprised during my recent visit to University College Dublin as the external examiner for their BSc Zoology degree, to find that at least some zoology courses do still retain many of the essential whole organism elements required to fully understand animal form and function.

What are we doing about these lost skills? The UK Plant Sciences Federation recently (January 2014) released a detailed report where they highlighted areas where the UK is desperately short of expertise and training; much to my gratification this included entomology as a key subject area 😉 They have, since the release of this report, set up a number of working groups, one of which, Training and Skills, I have agreed to chair. Our first meeting is in July and we will report back at the end of September, hopefully with some concrete and workable suggestions. The Field Studies Council, as you might expect, are also very much concerned about the situation and thanks to a recent grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation have been able to initiate a programme called Tomorrow’s Biodiversity which has the aim of facilitating the recording of biodiversity by getting more people trained in identification skills, particularly in the less well-known taxa.

The problem as I see it, lies in the lack of formal natural history training and teaching at undergraduate level. This has been brought about by the failure of university departments to understand the importance of whole organism biology and a tendency to recruit staff according to the funding fashion of the moment, rather than considering the big picture and recruiting across the specialities. We need to balance the teaching and research staff within our university departments so that we produce a viable population of graduate whole organism biologists, be they zoologists, botanists, or ecologists, who are able to recognise the plants and animals that surround them and not just a few ‘model organisms’ and also to understand how they function within that environment. We also need to look seriously at our pre-university biology teaching and increase the amount of whole organism and field content in both pre- and post-16 teaching. There are many opportunities to do this even in genetics. For example in ‘O’ Level Biology our teacher took us outside to search for and collect the snail Cepea nemoralis, famous for its variation in shell colour which is genetically controlled and which is selected for by the degree of predation that populations in different environments suffer from thrushes (Cain & Sheppard, 1954).  There are many such opportunities but only if the teachers know about them and are willing and able to take them.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cepaea_nemoralis.jpg

 

      http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hain-B%C3%A4nderschnecke#mediaviewer/Datei:Cepaea_nemoralis_(Linnaeus_1758).jpg

An afternoon outside taught us genetics, ecology and plenty of natural history. I feel privileged and thankful that I was able to spend so much of my childhood outside in the natural

world and hope that we can at least give the current generation of young people the opportunity to enjoy and understand the importance of the natural world around them before it is too late.

References

Bebbington, A. (2005) The ability of A-level students to name plants. Journal of Biological Education 39: 63-67. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00219266.2005.9655963#.U5g5MFRwa70

Cain, A.J. & Sheppard, P.M. (1954) Natural selection in Cepaea. Genetics, 39, 89-116 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1209639/

Leather, S. R. (2007). British entomology in terminal decline? Antenna 31: 192-193.

Leather, S. R. (2009a). Taxonomic chauvinism threatens the future of entomology. Biologist 56: 10-13. http://cdn.harper-adams.ac.uk/document/profile/Leather_Biologist_2009.pdf

Leather, S. R. (2009b). Institutional vertebratism threatens UK food security. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 24: 413-414. http://cdn.harper-adams.ac.uk/document/profile/Leather_2009_Trends-in-Ecology-&-Evolution.pdf

Leather, S. R. & Quicke, D. L. J. (2009). Where would Darwin have been without taxonomy? Journal of Biological Education 43: 51-52. http://cdn.harper-adams.ac.uk/document/profile/Leather_&_Quicke_2009_JBE.pdf

Leather, S. R. & Quicke, D. L. J. (2010). Do shifting baselines in natural history knowledge threaten the environment? Environmentalist 30: 1-2. http://cdn.harper-adams.ac.uk/document/profile/Leather_&_Quicke_2010.pdf

Tewksbury, J.J. et al. (2014) Natural History’s place in science and society. Bioscience 64: 300-310 http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/64/4/300

^*Slightly tongue in cheek, I must point out that the authors failed to cite any of my papers concerning the decline of natural history teaching 😉

 

Look Back in Angers – Teaching in France but not in French

I have long been aware of the Erasmus Programme (European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students) having had many Erasmus students in my classes over the years whilst at Imperial College.  It was however, only after moving to Harper Adams University, that I found out that there was also a similar programme to enable academic staff to spend time teaching at sister institutions.  I was contacted earlier this year by Joséphine Pithon from the Ecole Supérieure d’Agriculture d’Angers who wondered if I would like to come across to Angers a city I am ashamed to admit that I had very little knowledge of.  The chance of spending a week in France, my favourite holiday destination, was too good to turn down and my wife Gill was also very keen to have a short break and refresh her French language skills.  To cut a long story short, on Monday 24^th March, we caught the Eurostar to Lille and then the TGV on to Angers, arriving mid-afternoon in, to our dismay, a very wet Angers.  We booked into our hotel, found somewhere not too far away to eat and then retired to deal with emails (sad to say we had both brought our laptops with us) and for me to double-check that my lectures were ready to deliver.
Tuesday dawned warm and sunny, much to Gill’s relief who had a day of sightseeing planned and I walked to ESA, which was only ten minutes away, collecting a roundabout on the way, albeit not as  spectacular as those in the south of France.

 I arrived at a very welcoming ESA and managed to  make myself understood at reception and was introduced to my first class, a group of third years getting their first introduction to

entomology.  It seemed to go well and despite me lecturing in English they asked a lot of pertinent questions. I then gave them two lectures on sampling and survey methods before going for lunch with my hosts.  I must give the staff canteen (cantine) a rave review – for less than €5 we got a three course lunch with coffee. Then it was back to lecture to a fourth year group about biological control and pest management, again to a very interactive group of students.  Then it was the short walk back to the hotel followed by an excellent meal in the city centre with my new French colleagues.  On the way we admired the bendy trams and marveled at the ingenuity of having ‘green’ tramways wherever possible.

   

The next day I gave a seminar and then we headed out into the field with the third year students to collect insects and other invertebrates using a mixture of methods, pitfall traps, yellow pan traps, pooters, beating trays (known as Japanese umbrellas in French), sweep nets and extendable butterfly nets.  French students in the field are very similar in

                            

                            

behaviour to their British counterparts 😉  Then it was the end of the day and time to relax and find somewhere nearby to eat and get ready for a morning in the laboratory on Thursday.

Thursday morning was spent with the students helping them identify the various organisms that they had brought back from our day in the field.  It appears that whilst students have to wear lab coats staff are exempt!  Our lab manager at Harper Adams would never allow that; I am frequently being told off for popping into the lab sans coat.

In the lab I had to use my French a bit more as some students were better than others at English and in a one to one situation I feel a little less hesitant about demonstrating my inept language skills.  I think we all had a fun morning and learnt a lot from each other.  After an excellent lunch it was time for a break; there is no teaching at ESA on a Thursday afternoon so I was free to join Gill for an afternoon of sightseeing around Angers.  Needless to say it began to rain!  Nevertheless we saw the magnificent Château d’Angers, once the home of René I a most impressive building even in the rain and with a nice entomological surprise on the ramparts; beehives..

                           

And of course a mini-vineyard complete with a rose bush at the end of the row to give early warning of mildew infections! Great to see pest management in action;-)

  

Thursday evening saw us at a great little restaurant in the city centre where we met up with Professor David Logan a plant physiologist at the University of Angers, and someone I had previously only met on Twitter.  He introduced us to a couple of very nice local wines and we had a superb (and very reasonably priced) meal. It was a great end to a fantastic and educational trip.  I think it is very impressive that the French students are willing and able to be lectured to in English.  I am ashamed to say that I think that very few of our own students would be able to cope with a week of teaching in French!

Given the chance I would definitely like to repeat the experience and spend more time there.

Post script
Whilst roaming the corridors of ESA I came across a departmental notice board where I saw this cutting from the February issue of the L’Éleveur laitier a French agricultural magazine, and was very amused to see how they portrayed British farmers!

 

 

 

Why I Joined the Twitterati: Blogs, Tweets & Talks – Making Entomology Visible

It is now thirteen months since I tweeted my first tweet and almost a year since my blog went public.  It is thus an opportune moment I feel to assess how this first year has gone and to see if I can convert other oldies and not so oldies to make that leap into the world of public social media.  For many years I had held the whole concept of social media in contempt – Facebook and Twitter for me, represented the very epitome of mindless gossip and tabloid extremism.  I saw them as entirely the domain of the chattering classes and the idle young.  Perhaps an extreme view, since some of my children, a number of my colleagues, my wife and even my mother-in-law were on Facebook. Still, as someone who did not get a mobile phone until March this year (and only because of the fact that during the week, I live alone, and my wife feels that it is a sensible thing to have in case of emergency), I guess I was just living up the image of the techno-refusenik.

That said, I have always felt that the job of a scientist is to communicate and having always had a desire to teach and pass on my enthusiasm for entomology to others, I have not been remiss in coming forward.  I did actually have a fling with public engagement way back in 1981 when I worked in Finland and developed their early warning system for cereal aphids.  My research actually appeared in the Finnish national farmer’s magazine almost simultaneously with my official scientific publication.

  

My subsequent career as first a forest entomologist with the Forestry Commission and then as a university teacher at Imperial College, was pretty much that of the typical academic, with the occasional appearance on the radio and the rare television interview, plus the odd reference to my work in the national or local newspapers.

Mainly however, I was, until about the turn of the century just communicating with my peers i.e. publishing scientific papers and facilitating communication between other entomologists; I seem to have spent the last twenty years or so editing journals, first cutting my teeth on the Royal Entomological Society’s house journal Antenna, and then moving on to Ecological Entomology and for the last seven years as Editor-in-Chief of Insect Conservation & Diversity.  So there I was facilitating the dissemination of entomological knowledge around the world and busy doing my own entomological research and training future entomologists by running the only entomology degree in the UK and also of course supervising lots of PhD students. All very commendable indeed, but perhaps a bit limited in scope…

Round about the turn of the century I started to get really fed up with the ignorance shown about entomology and the bias towards vertebrates by funding bodies and journals.   I started going into schools and giving talks to the public whenever possible trying to draw people’s attention to the importance of insects..

And getting more and more provocative..

And getting more and more irritated and desperate in print..

It was obvious that there was a problem; the misconception that the public tend to have in that all insects are either pests or things that sting or bite them and need to be stamped on (Leather & Quicke, 2009:  http://www.harper-adams.ac.uk/staff/profile/files/uploaded/Leather_&_Quicke_2009_JBE.pdf ).  Some of the entomological misconceptions were amusing but being entomologically pedantic still wrong..

others which were annoying but perhaps excusable..

  

and some which were just plain inexcusable..

The problem has been neatly summed up by others too..

One of my PhD students, Fran Sconce, whom I have known since she was an undergraduate…

had for some time been extolling the virtues of social media as a means of scientific communication,

finally convinced me that it was time to make a leap and to move into a different environment.

and thus was born @Entoprof

and Don’t Forget the Roundabouts

So like a fellow ex-Silwoodian, Natalie Cooper who recently reported on her first year as a blogger/tweeter http://www.ecoevoblog.com/2013/10/29/to-tweet-or-not-to-tweet-that-is-the-question/ I too feel the need to assess how this first year has gone.

Well, first I found that there were lots of old friends out there, and even my old school started following me….

A ton of ex-students, not all of whom are entomologists…

Increased opportunities for outreach and meeting people I didn’t even know existed..

And making new professional links….

And incidentally as an Editor I have found new people to ask to act as reviewers and I’ve had great fun continuing my fight against institutional vertebratism …

and got a great result which I am certain I wouldn’t have got without Twitter..

With my new friends I entered into public debate..

and got another result which again would not have happened without Twitter..

and found a new way to interact at conferences..

and been really inspired.  I have thoroughly embraced the concept of social media and have now set up a Twitter account for the Entomology MSc http://www.harper-adams.ac.uk/postgraduate/201004/entomology  I run..

and also a Blog for them to run http://aphidsrus.wordpress.com/

My latest venture with the aid of

is the A-Z of Entomology, the first letter of which you can view here if you want to learn about aphids  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liBt59teaGQ

So yes it has been a great year and a heartfelt thank you to all my Tweeps and to all of you that follow my blog.  I really have found this both useful and educational.  It has been a great eye-opener.  And of course a really big vote of thanks to Fran for finally convincing me that I should join the Twitterati.

Exams – the easy option?

Having spent a considerable amount of the last month or so invigilating and marking exams, not to mention doing my stint as external examiner for the MSc in Conservation Management at Writtle College I have started to think about what is that we expect to achieve by setting exams.  In fact, I have even begun to wonder if we need exams at all.  Do we just set exams because that it is the way it has always being or do they tell us something that other assessment methods can’t?

I have used the word easy in my title, which at first sight might seem a little contradictory.  After all, as an examiner, there is the annual slog of producing ‘novel’ questions, together with a model or indicative answer, against which to mark, and then there is the curse of marking X number of scripts in a very short time, making sure that you grade the answers according to whichever criteria your department or institution has opted for. Not exactly a stress-free occupation and made worse by the fact that inevitably there is an incredibly short turnaround time required so that the students don’t have to wait too long to hear their fate.  Marking is definitely one of my least favourite things.

We should also of course, not forget the stress and anguish that most students will have gone through to produce the scripts that you, with a strict time limit to observe, will inevitably spend less time on than they deserve.

Why do we use exams, and in this case I mean the traditional, sit down and answer questions in a room full of other aspirants, mostly all perspiring nervously and hoping against hope that the topics the revised will be on the face-down script in front of them.  The easy answer is that they tell us, the teachers, how much the student has understood of what they

have been taught and how good they are at retaining that information and  regurgitating it on to a piece of paper.  We would also argue that it tells us which students are also able to interpret and analyse what they have been taught and put it into context in a stressful situation.  From that, plus usually some coursework and a dissertation or research project, we can then assign (in the UK at least) an arcane grade (First, Upper Second, Lower Second, Third, Pass or Fail or at MSc level, Distinction, Merit, Pass or Fail) that then determines the future of that student.  On the student side, a written exam  favours those with good memories, the ability to shrug off stress and write quickly, legibly and coherently.  That said, after some 40-odd years of sitting and setting exams, I find that I can pretty much tell what final degree result a student will achieve just from teaching and interacting with them in class, without actually seeing any written work.

So why do we need exams, why not just go for a less stressful approach?  Well obviously that would not work, because occasionally, even I am surprised by a result and more importantly, how would you assess  if the student had attained the required learning outcomes?  So you definitely need some form of assessment.  In other words, some form of coursework testing, which arguably reflects the situations we face in real life.  Coursework gives students the chance to be analytical, synoptic and reflective, to read around their subject and to meet deadlines.  There are also arguments against this form of assessment.  These include, marking (coursework actually requires you to give some feedback), direct cheating by copying and pasting from sources; plagiarism software helps, but doesn’t tell you if there has been collusion.  In addition, it penalises the bright but lazy.  I revelled in exams; coursework, which luckily in my degree, didn’t count towards my final degree, was, sad to say, something I expended only the minimum of effort on.   It tended to get in the way of my social life.  What are the plus points for exams?  They are a good quick test that puts students on the spot, trains them to learn, to cope with stress and to time manage.  On the other hand you might argue that what it really tests is memory, stress resilience and the ability to write with a pen.  On the negative side, there is a great tendency for students, and I was no exception in my early years as an undergraduate, to analyse past exam papers and reduce the pressure on their memory centres, by question spotting and by avoiding revising any material from lecturers that they didn’t like or who are known to be hard markers.  Thus you end up with students who may have passed their exams but have gaping holes in their knowledge base.  You can argue that a written exam allows us to test synoptic and analytical thinking, but this could be tested just as effectively with coursework, as synoptic thinking is certainly not restricted to exams.  A huge downside is the marking element.  Do we do the students justice?  Almost certainly not.  A typical final year exam might require the student to answer three questions in three hours, so forty minutes per answer.  If you are lucky and have a relatively small class, of thirty students, that results in 90 scripts in less than perfect hand-writing.  You then probably have two weeks to turn the scripts around, including them being moderated, or second-marked by a colleague.  Practices differ between institutions, but, in my experience, there is always some element of moderation/quality review, either by marking a sample of the scripts or in some places looking at very single exam answer.  Suppose you allow a mere ten minute per script, that will take you 15 hours if you went at it non-stop.  Some of my colleagues have several hundred scripts to mark – how can they possibly do them justice?  How much rest do you give yourself between batches, how many scripts can you mark before your analytical ability is eroded? Should you go through and re-read every script after you have finished marking all the scripts?

So what alternatives are there?  Some course modules at other universities and here at Harper Adams are assessed entirely by coursework and that raises the collusion/cheating concerns mentioned earlier.  We can detect plagiarism using software such as Turnitin™, but how can we tell that someone else didn’t write the essay, prepare the presentation or write the report and of course you still have to mark the work!  What about on-line assessment?  On the entomology MSc that I run, some modules are tested entirely by Multiple Choice Questions on-line; administered and marked by the computer – how good is that 😉  It is also a good way of testing basic entomological factual knowledge but again it is a memory test and doesn’t really test application and synthesis.  We also use short answer questions in conjunction with some on-line testing; this lets us test across a range of the learning outcomes, but again does not really allow much synthesis and analytical thought, and generates piles of marking, albeit somewhat easier, as mainly checking against lists.  One of my colleagues is very much in favour of exams, as he has rather a jaundiced view of coursework, although it can give us an opportunity to assess different skill sets; oral presentation, team work, writing skills, analytical thought and in the case of entomology, identification skills.  Unfortunately it does produce piles of marking, but hopefully also is good for deep learning which is what I think we want as an end result.

Another interesting method of assessment which I quite like the idea of, is an open book exam, where students are presented with some reading material some days or even weeks before the exam without being told what the questions will be, are allowed to take their annotated document in with them and are then presented with an exam paper with three questions, all of which must be answered.  Having observed this in practice, I have now come up with an interesting variant which I hope to be able to get approved by our exam board.  Students arrive in a computer room, they are presented with an exam paper, with, say six questions of which they have to answer three, and then allowed to use the internet to bolster their knowledge.  They are only allowed to take notes using pen and paper.  Two hours later they then move to a secure computer, with no internet access and spend the next two hours writing their exam.  This is more akin to real life, where you solve problems that you know some basic background stuff about by checking sources, getting extra information and then synthesising that knowledge into an intelligible report.  Of course it doesn’t  around the marking problem.

My friend Professor Guy Poppy at The University of Southampton, has gone on record via Twitter, suggesting that we could test students at the end of their university course with a portfolio of work and a 15 minute oral examination to check that what is there is actually their own, work, basically a mini-PhD viva.

Is this a mad idea?  Actually the Italians do all their exams orally and the Germans use a mixture of  written and oral exams.

An oral exam could be a bit stressful for shy students and might be an advantage for extroverts.  You would of course need a panel of at least three people to ensure fair play.  A typical British university final year might have 150 students in it.  So at 15 minutes a viva, which I think is probably too short, that would be almost 37 hours.  So let’s assume that the Department has sixty academics, allocates three staff members per viva, so 20 vivas can be run at once.  If we allow five minutes for marking that gives us twenty minutes per student which equals sixty vivas every hour.  So even if we decide to let the students have a bit more time to impress the examiners, we can still easily examine the whole final year in a day and the academics will only need to take part in three or four oral exams.  We used a similar system as part of the final year research project assessment when I was in the Life Sciences Department at Imperial College and that worked reasonably well.  What about consistent standards and available expertise?  You need a balanced department and also some people who have to circulate between panels to ensure similar standards, but even so, this could be a viable option.  It does not however, do away with marking the portfolio of work during the preceding three or four years, but perhaps if modules are assessed with a mixture of on-line MCQ tests plus informal use of the usual assessment methods, so not requiring detailed marking, it might actually work and encourage deep learning.

So at the end of all this I don’t really have an answer.  I find marking really tedious, but students and staff need the feedback to know if learning outcomes are being achieved.  Exams are a pain for the students to do but even more of a pain for academic staff to mark!  What I do quite like though is the idea of the short, sharp open book exam, despite the fact that it would need marking.  I would welcome any ideas and also any examples of novel easy to administer and mark test/exams and alternative assessment methods that have worked for you.

Post script

Just as I was going to post this, Meg Dufy over at Dynamic Ecology posted a great post about teaching ideas and their possible assessment methods.