bioCEEDSters – on the inside of bioCEED

Biologists as lab rats!

My name is Lucas and I conduct experiments on biologists. My passion in life is motivation, specifically what motivates humans and how can we sustain motivation. I have been fortunate enough to be able to investigate these questions here at bioCEED. My main training is in education and in quantitative research. bioCEED has allowed me to use the students as lab rats to run experiments on different teaching methods and its impact on motivation and learning. My research activity has mostly been testing the effect of a species identification tool called “ArtsApp” and comparing it the traditional tool “Lids Flora”. However, I have also conducted studies on other teaching methods such as “Team-Based Learning” and videos, and on issues such as dropout, and how biology teacher motivate their students.

Working at bioCEED has been an extremely rewarding experience as it has allowed me to work on very different and interesting tasks, but also allowed me to work directly with faculty and students and helping them increase their motivation and understanding the importance of teaching and learning. As a pedagogic researcher, my job at bioCEED has been to facilitate the faculty and encourage them to pursue more learner-centered teaching. Moreover, I have been allowed to talk to students and help them find an optimal motivation for their studies. This is especially a topic that is important for me. I have also learned many interesting things while working for bioCEED, not only new approaches to learning and motivation, but also interesting biological facts.

I do field work as well. However, my field work is less exciting than the ones the biologists do. My field work consists of preparing questionnaires, setting up labs to conduct experiments, and trainings RA´s to run the experiments.