A Systematic Approach to Promote Environmental Engineering Students' Learning in Environmental Molecular Microbiology

• Main Author: Shanquan Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Society for Microbiology 2021-03-01
• Series: Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education
• Online Access: https://jmbesubmissions.asm.org/index.php/jmbe/article/view/1917

Environmental Molecular Microbiology (EMM) is a core course cluster for students majoring in environmental engineering. To help students learn the EMM courses, we developed a three-stage teaching approach to deliver EMM courses in a systematic manner: prerequisite course and survey studies; course cluster teaching; and feedback and improvement. In the first stage, a prerequisite course "EMM - Case Studies" was established to introduce very basic concepts of molecular microbiology and textbook examples of environmental engineering applications, and survey studies were employed to identify students' major concerns when learning EMM. After finishing the prerequisite course, students showed improved interest and confidence in learning EMM. Then, we implemented and assessed EMM course cluster teaching. The final teaching assessment results showed that students taking EMM courses have a general idea of EMM fundamentals and can interpret the basic molecular mechanisms underlying environmental engineering bioprocesses. Based on students' feedback, major points of difficulty (e.g., respiratory electron transport chains) were identified for further teaching improvement. Our overall teaching experiences, together with students' feedback, showed that students' learning of EMM could be effectively supported by employing the three-stage teaching approach.