Achievement

The proposal writing assignment in the Nitrogen Cycle course was particularly successful in promoting the learning objectives. In interviews, all students made frequent references to not only their own projects, but those of their peers as well. In two cases this assignment directly contributed to a student's research design. It appears that key features contributing to this assignments success were: (1) the multiple levels of engagement with other students, and (2) the student-directed interactions with multiple faculty. During the course of this project students had to communicate core nitrogen cycle concepts to each other frequently, both to team-members and reviewers. These iterations of explanation, combined with similar experiences trying to understand others' explanations, seemed to cement concepts in student's minds.