Students will be able to collaborate effectively in a group setting within the discipline.
Throughout my undergraduate biology career, I have participated in 15+ group projects. One of the very first group project presentations that I worked on was in Biology 251: Introduction to Ecology. In this class, I worked on a bird count project with two other individuals in my class. As shown by the many comments on this slideshow, there was great room for improvements to be made on slide structure and content within this introductory course.
In my upper level biology courses, such as Biology 404: Immunology, collaborating on group projects has become much more effortless and the expectation for equal work and time put into the presentations has been more clearly communicated. In this class, I worked with other students to provide an analysis and diagnosis of an unidentified immunodeficiency for an example patient we were given. This project was relatively easy to complete because we all understood the expectations for the assignment.
Currently, in Biology 488: Senior Seminar course, our class is working to complete a research proposal for community engagement in a scientific issue. This project has been easy to work on because we have learned how to address our individual strengths and weaknesses at the forefront of the project in order to make the collaboration effort flow more smoothly. I will update this page with a link once the project is complete.