Lovell, Robin

Robin Lovell is a PhD student in the Environmental Studies Department at University of California Santa Cruz. She studies agricultural adaptations to climate change in the Mekong River Delta. Ms. Lovell hopes to use the skills and information learned from the PDP program to develop a field-based agroecology course in Vietnam that fosters international knowledge exchange through experiential learning. Additionally, she hopes to teach at the university level following graduation, where she will employ inquiry-based lessons whenever possible.   lovellrobinj@gmail.com

Teaching Activity Summary

Name of Teaching Activity: Projecting outcomes of management solutions using population models in ecology

Teaching Venue & Date: Ecology WEST, Sept 2015

Learners: 16 transfer students undergrads

Reflection on how learners engaged with a STEM practice during the inquiry:

Our practice goal was to use a model to support proposed solutions. Specically, we wanted learners to use excel to translate real world variables into the logistic growth model values, project population into the future, and interpret projections to demonstrate how their proposed management strategies performed. The excel tutorials seemed to be a big hit with the students, and really improved their condence in using it as a tool. I would absolutely keep the excel tutorials and using excel as basic building block of this exercise. The students seemed not to grasp all the practice goals at once. For example, they would successfully translate variables into the model, but would not project population growth. I think that we could have more structure in the inquiry time in order to hit each element of the practice goal rubric successfully.