Graham Scott’s research while affiliated with University of Hull and other places

University-based scientists hold the collective responsibility for educating the next generation of citizens, scientists and voters, but the degree to which they are individually trained and rewarded for this pursuit is variable. This F1000Research channel has its origin in a Society for Experimental Biology Conference held in Prague, 2015 and brings together researchers who excel at undergraduate education or the scholarship of teaching and learning to discuss challenges and best practices in contemporary higher science education.

We assume that digital literacy and access are common to all who teach and communicate their science and to their audiences. We also assume that our digital communication is effective and that by using digital technologies learning experiences are enhanced. But are these reasonable assumptions to make? This F1000Research channel brings together papers developed from presentations made at Teaching and Communicating Science in a Digital Age, a Society for Experimental Biology symposium involving Higher Education Professionals from across the globe to reflect upon the impact that digital technologies have and will have upon aspects of the communication of science. Here I share some thoughts on the discussion that took place and on the papers collated through this channel.

Graduate employability is a key issue for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), academic faculty and of course for students themselves. It is recognised that to be employable graduates require both discipline specific skills/knowledge and more generic skills for employment. A key step to the development of the latter is an understanding of their significance on the part of those designing courses and the students who take them. Here we compare the perceived importance of key skills from the perspective of teachers, current students and recent graduates. We find that the three groups differ in the relative importance they ascribe to several key skills. Staff rated all skills as being important and saw many as being more important than did their students. With hindsight, graduates prioritized skills that were not seen as being very important by current students. As a result of our synthesizing the views of current undergraduates, employed graduates and lecturing staff, we recommend that proper signposting of the significance of key skills to students is vital.

Biology teachers in a UK university expressed a majority view that student learning autonomy increases with progression through university. A minority suggested that pre-existing diversity in learning autonomy was more important and that individuals not cohorts differ in their learning autonomy. They suggested that personal experience prior to university and age were important and that mature students are more autonomous than 18-20 year olds. Our application of an autonomous learning scale (ALS) to four year-groups of biology students confirmed that the learning autonomy of students increases through their time at university but not that mature students are necessarily more autonomous than their younger peers. It was evident however that year of study explained relatively little (

We have used the experiences of teachers and their pupils to explore the impact of participation in a shared outdoor learning experience upon specific aspects of both the teacher/pupil and pupil/pupil relationship. Prior to their taking part in an out of classroom lesson the teachers involved in our project were relatively inexperienced in teaching out of doors. At that stage they expressed a view that the children in their class would respond to the novelty of being outside by misbehaving and that they would in effect “lose control” of some of them. They also shared anxieties about losing their expert status as a result of being asked to teach outside of their comfort zone. After taking part in an outdoor lesson the same teachers described their pupils as being more engaged with learning and better behaved whilst outdoors than when in the classroom. They also expressed the view that through learning together and to some extent blurring their expert/pupil roles teachers and pupils had shared a positive learning experience. The children themselves expressed the view that they had enjoyed working together (with one another and with their teacher), that they had engaged with the tasks at hand, and that they had communicated with one another more effectively whilst learning.

There is a need to evaluate the benefits to children of integrated classroom and field-based learning. In this article, we describe a case study that involves children in the production of a field guide: an authentic task which integrates learner autonomy and open enquiry with field work, information and communication technologies (ICT) and classroom-based activities. We consider the impact that this task has had upon aspects of the children's factual writing. Although we found no improvement in the ability of the children to write sentences and only a marginal improvement in their ability to write for composition and effect, we did find a significant improvement in their ability to write about the ecology of an animal that they had encountered firsthand when compared to an animal that they had not encountered in life.

This paper describes how second/third year undergraduates with little prior botanical knowledge, attending a one-week field course in Western Scotland, were enabled to complete within one day an intensive phytosociological exercise. They showed that two stands of heathland vegetation were objectively different through identification of plants, estimation of species abundance, and ordination analysis. This gave them the knowledge and confidence to design and undertake a subsequent project in field botany.