Mastering Environmental Science Tour Video Transcript
Hi, I'm here to talk to you about some of the exciting features you'll find in Mastering Environmental Science.
This is an online homework, tutorial, and assessment program that improves results by helping students quickly master concepts. It offers self-paced tutorials that feature immediate wrong-answer feedback and hints that help students stay on track.
First off, many concepts in the environmental science course can best be experienced outside, in the environment, but field trips are difficult for instructors to coordinate because of costs and time limitations. Yet, with Video Field Trips...
Instructors can take their students on "virtual" field trips to experience and learn about environmental impacts up-close, but without all logistical demands of an actual trip.
Next, some of the basic material in environmental science requires the students to learn terminology and factual material outside of class. Some students have difficulty managing their study time. But with Dynamic Study Modules...
Students can study effectively on their own. They receive a manageable number of questions and must indicate how confident they are about the answers. They cycle through a dynamic process of test-learn-retest until mastery is achieved. This makes them accountable for learning outside of the classroom.
From there, many instructors are looking for ways to foster a more engaging classroom experience. Some want to flip their classroom while many others are just looking for ways to increase student participation.
Learning Catalytics is an interactive, student response tool that uses students' smartphones, tablets, or laptops to engage them in more sophisticated tasks and thinking. You can pose a variety of open-ended questions that help your students develop critical thinking skills, while monitoring responses to find out where they're struggling, allowing you to adjust your instructional strategy in real-time. You can also use Learning Catalytics to automatically group students for peer-to-peer learning. Plus their work in Learning Catalytics feeds into the Mastering gradebook.
Now, let's look at how students taking environmental science often enter the course with a less-than-ideal understanding of how to interpret scientific data in a graph, a table, or in other formats. Though students might perform adequately on lower-level test questions that require memorization, they sometimes struggle with questions that require basic data analysis skills. Through the Interpreting Graphs and Data activities.
Instructors can give assignments that help students build, practice, and assess their science literacy skills. The assessment questions hold students accountable for learning these skills and applying them in class and on tests.
Finally, some students enter the environmental science course questioning the validity of environmental science research on climate change and other topics. Instructors are tasked with overcoming this skepticism while trying to improve upon students' understanding of the scientific method. With the Process of Science coaching activities...
Students can engage in the scientific process and learn about basic experimental design and how to interpret research data. The assessment questions hold students accountable for learning these skills outside of the classroom so that instructors can use class time to further build on this foundation.
And there you have it. That was a quick look at just a handful of the valuable features in Mastering Environmental Science. If you want to learn more about Mastering Environmental Science, go to Mastering Environmental Science.com. And if you want to find out about all of Pearson's MyLab and Mastering products, be sure to check out Pearsonmylabandmastering.com. Thanks for watching.