Comparing Student Engagement to Previous Course Offerings
Anonymous end-of-course student evaluations indicate the course was on par with previous offerings in terms of student engagement (Table 2, Fig 4 ). While bias in student evaluations is well-documented (e.g., Stark and Freishtat 2014), many of the triggers of bias (such as those relating to instructor identity) were the same between the 2019 and 2020 cohorts; the most influential exceptions being response percentage (which was lower in 2020), and the slight change in wording of UCD campus evaluation questions.
Generally, student perspective on the course was highly positive and a transition to remote instruction resulted in minimal change in student overall ratings (Table 2 ). When asked on the evaluations to rank individual components of the course as most to least helpful, the 2020 cohort identified field trips and interacting with others in the class as the most beneficial components (Fig 4 ). Interestingly, these two components were ranked higher in the online 2020 course than the traditional in-person 2019 course. The survey results are consistent with anecdotal evidence from student-instructor conversations. Most commonly in these conversations, students appreciated synchronous lectures, as many of their classes were fully asynchronous and provided little opportunity for interaction. Additionally, students appreciated the opportunity, indeed the requirement, to leave their computer screen and go outside even only to their backyard for a short while. As previously mentioned, social relationships (Vygotsky, 1978) and a sense of place (Kudryavstev et al 2012) are important components of the educational environment, perhaps even more so during COVID when students were quarantined indoors and isolated from the majority of their interpersonal interactions. These results promisingly indicate that it is possible to develop engaging field components and interpersonal interaction under remote instruction and shelter-in-place directives.
The most diverging evaluation statistic between the two course offerings was the pre/post question on self-confidence (Table 2 ). The 2019 cohort entered with very low confidence and ended near the state average for participants in other CalNat courses, while the 2020 cohort entered with higher confidence and ended extremely high. It is difficult to interpret these numbers. The unusually high 2020 pre-course values may be a result of students self-selecting, if the course attracted students who were already aware of and educated in California environmental issues, though why this would be the case in 2020 and not 2019 is unclear. The unusually high 2020 post-course values, and the unusually high gain in self-confidence from pre- to post-course, may also be related to the higher emphasis on interacting with other user data in participatory science projects. As mentioned previously, interacting with the broader dataset in which their observations are ‘nested’ has been shown to have a positive impact on students’ perception of themselves as agents of environmental change (Harris et al 2020). Additionally, the 2020 values may have been disproportionately impacted by the low response rate to the CalNat survey and not reflective of the student body as a whole.
Another metric of student engagement relates to continued activity in the participatory science projects introduced in the course. iNaturalist provides the clearest picture of this metric, given its broad focus in terms of taxonomy and geography, its robust data access portal, and the fact that it is the most user friendly participatory science project in the course, and the one with which the students interact the most.Figure 3 shows the number of observations students in the 2019 and 2020 Wild Davis cohorts contributed to iNaturalist in the six weeks following the end of the CNC (when required activity on iNaturalist as part of the course was complete). In both years, students remained active in iNaturalist following the completion of the CNC. In both years, the majority of observations were contributed by a single ‘superuser’ student in the 2019 cohort whose interest in iNaturalist was unusually high. Interestingly, while activity on iNaturalist by 2020 Wild Davis students following the 2020 CNC was much lower than that of the 2019 cohort following the 2019 CNC, it was still non-zero and maintained for the full six-week window despite continued shelter-in-place directives. These results suggest that for some students, engagement with and enjoyment of participatory science continued beyond the class project and became a part of their regular recreational activities. These results are also consistent with a resurgence in interest in community and backyard gardening during COVID (while no formal data yet exist to our knowledge, see Walljasper and Polansek 2020).
In this section, we compared student engagement in and evaluation of the fully remote 2020 offering and the traditional in-person 2019 offering of the course. We recognize that, had the students experienced both versions of the course, the remote 2020 offering may not have rated so highly. It is worth noting, however, that the majority of students experience a course only once, and so, cannot compare it to previous or subsequent offerings (as instructors can). These results indicate that students respond positively to a remotely-instructed field course that is as engaging as possible, even if it may still be less engaging than the course could be in person.